I was flabbergasted to read that David Foster Wallace killed himself Friday. I was not his biggest fan, though I had read his biggest book, Infinite Jest, when it came out twelve years ago and argued passionately for it and its characters at the time. It wasn’t just that it was a Big Ambitious American novel, written at a time when people seemed to no longer believe in the importance of writing a BAAN: it took life seriously by making fun of it (and vice versa). 

The jokers and jesters of IJ suffered terribly; one of the book’s heroes, Hal Incandenza, was a big-hearted recovering alcoholic and drug addict who, as Laura Miller says in her fine appreciation of DFW in Salon, “[fought] to stay on the road through the desert.” What more are any of us trying to do? As lesser writers copied his tricks and tropes (the endless footnotes, especially) as a means of distancing themselves from the reader, Wallace seemed to always be trying to get closer to both his subjects and you. 

The same was true of his nonfiction. I still teach his profile of David Lynch to my journalism students as a brilliant example of what a great profile you can do of someone without talking to them. I asked Jim Meigs, the editor of Premiere who assigned the piece how much editing was involved. “It came in just the way you read it,” Jim said. Suffice to say it made me go back and watch Lost Highway, and almost made me understand it. 

Many of the people who didn’t like Wallace hadn’t read him. They assumed he was a show-off, hiding behind irony and verbosity. I thought he was throwing everything he could into the mix, trying to make a case for living, for continuing. The fact that he couldn’t make that case for himself is devastating.