An American suicide

There was no subject about which David Foster Wallace could not write brilliantly, from politics to

On the evening of 20 October this year a memorial service was held at Amherst College, Massachusetts, for the writer David Foster Wallace. Wallace, who graduated from Amherst in 1985, had hanged himself the previous month at his home in California. He was 46.

Since the publication of his voluminous and extravagantly ambitious second novel, Infinite Jest, Wallace had been widely acknowledged as the finest American writer of his generation. When Infinite Jest came out, in 1996, New York magazine's Walter Kirn declared that the competition had been "obliterated". It was, he wrote, "as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL, or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy!". More or less instantly, Infinite Jest became the benchmark against which any ambitious and intellectually curious young novelist would measure himself. And so, when Wallace died, American fiction lost its lodestar. His suicide was a kind of Kurt Cobain moment, a profound generational shock. (Cobain, frontman of the rock band Nirvana, shot himself at home in Seattle in 1994. He was 27.)

Wallace had begun to write fiction while at Amherst, and his first novel, the antic and exuberant The Broom of the System, published when he was 24, was based on his senior English thesis. One of his professors, Andrew Parker, told the congregation at the Amherst service at Johnson Chapel how Wallace had insisted on writing a thesis in the philosophy department at the same time, and had still managed to graduate summa cum laude in both subjects. Sue Dickman, an Amherst alumna, remembered the year Wallace spent there as an instructor after an abortive attempt to start a PhD at Harvard; she recalled how he would come to class with a tennis racket and let his students take breaks so he could smoke.

The mourners also heard from Mark Costello, Wallace's college room-mate in the early 1980s, who implored them not to forget "how painful Dave's day-to-day life was". Wallace had suffered from depression since adolescence, and was hospitalised during his sophomore year at Amherst. Later, he briefly shared an apartment with Costello in Somerville, near Boston. Wallace was drinking heavily and experimenting enthusiastically with drugs, and eventually ended up in McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution that had previously counted the poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell among its patients. The "power of death", Costello said, was his constant companion, and "eventually it cornered him and killed him".

While he was at McLean, Wallace was prescribed Nardil, a powerful antidepressant that he would take for most of the next 20 years. By the summer of 2007, however, the drug had begun to have unpleasant side effects, and it was decided that he would come off it. Doing so had catastrophic results. "Severe depression came back," Wallace's father, James, told the online magazine Salon. "They tried all kinds of things. He was hospitalised twice . . . and had a series of electroconvulsive therapy treatments, which just really left him very shaky and very fragile and unable to sleep."

By this summer, Wallace hadn't written anything for more than a year. He had been granted medical leave from his teaching job at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and had stopped going to the gym with his friend and colleague John Seery, where they had been the only "skinny-ass egghead types" in the place.

When, in mid-August, his wife, Karen Green, had to go away on family business, Wallace's parents came to stay with him in Claremont. "He was very emotional," his mother, Sally, said. "He was just terrified of so much. We would just try to hold him. He did tell me that he was glad I was his mom." James and Sally Wallace flew back home to Illinois at the end of the month. A fortnight later, Karen came home from a shopping trip to find her husband dead.

News of Wallace's suicide first broke on the Twitter page of the Brooklyn-based writer Edward Champion. By the time the mainstream media picked up the story, Champion was already gathering tributes and testimonials from the "literary community" on his blog, the comments box of which was soon filling up with expressions of shock and anguish from Wallace's fans. The confession of one devotee that "I haven't really cried over the death of someone I haven't met since Kurt Cobain" was typical.

Within a couple of days, Dave Eggers's McSweeney's ope ration had a virtual book of condolence up on its website, and people were posting reminiscences of meeting "DFW" at readings in out-of-the-way branches of Barnes & Noble, of taking writing classes with him and, in one case, of playing tennis against him in fifth grade. (Wallace had been an adolescent tennis prodigy, playing the junior circuit in the Midwest in the mid-Seventies. The first piece of extended narrative journalism he wrote, for Harper's magazine, was about summers spent "being driven through dawns to tournaments all over Illinois, Indiana and Iowa"; and Infinite Jest is, among other things, probably the finest, and certainly the longest, work of fiction about tennis ever written.)

The internet is a uniquely effective mechanism for processing public grief, of course, but there was something striking nevertheless about the sheer copiousness of the reaction to Wallace's death. This was partly because he was the kind of writer who attracts acolytes as well as admirers. The esoteric, self-enclosed quality of much of Wallace's fiction, not least the great thousand-odd-page slab of Infinite Jest itself, tended to inspire unusually fierce allegiance in many of his fans - the sort of obsessive who can tell you the likely effects of putting your head in a microwave (this being how the father of one of the central characters kills himself) because they've checked with a "med-school acquaintance", and who posts elaborate theories about arcane plot points online ("It sounds far-fetched, but check this out . . .").

Just as striking, and much more significant, however, was the reaction of other writers, Wallace's peers. There was spontaneous, unanimous agreement that he had been the best of them. Jonathan Franzen described Wallace as a "huge talent, our strongest rhetorical writer". In Zadie Smith's view, he had no "equal among living writers. He was an actual genius". He was also, everyone agreed, an unusually generous man: as "sweet a person" as Franzen had ever known, "meticulous about putting people at their ease", according to Smith.

Eggers posted a series of anecdotes about Wallace on the McSweeney's website. In one, he recalled the first time they met, in the mid-Nineties, at a diner in New York. While Wallace chewed tobacco, using a teacup in his lap as a spittoon (a habit he would never give up), he and Eggers "talked about how he'd grown up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and how I'd gone to college there, how his father taught there, about the pleasures and quirks of east-central Illinois. There's something very strange and uniquely powerful about meeting a guy whose writing you find world-changing but who also comes from your part of the world."

Who else could have written a story about a marketing executive who plans to inject deadly cultures into a snack he’s testing with focus groups?

Wallace was, by his own description, an “infantile transplant” to Illinois from upstate New York: his father had done his PhD at Cornell University and had come west to teach philosophy at the University of Illinois in Champaign. His mother taught English at a local community college. Wallace described the atmosphere of the family home in an essay he wrote for Harper's: “Suppers often involved a game: if one of us children [Wallace had a sister, Amy] made a usage error, Mom would pretend to have a coughing fit that would go on and on until the relevant child had identified the relevant error and corrected it. It was all very self-ironic and light-hearted; but still, looking back, it seems a bit excessive to pretend that your small child is actually denying you oxygen by speaking incorrectly.”

Being raised as an "extreme usage fanatic" by a teacher of composition certainly left its mark on the mature Wallace's prose style. In another of his McSweeney's posts, Eggers remembered the time Wallace sent him a story, "Mister Squishy", together with a note asking that if it was to run in his magazine, it should do so under the pseudonym "Elizabeth Klemm". Eggers agreed ("we were so proud to publish it"), but the subterfuge didn't last long: Wallace was simply "too recognisable to hide, too singular to fool anyone". Who else could have written a 60-page story about a marketing executive who hatches a plan to inject deadly cultures into the "snack cakes" he is testing with a focus group? And all this in sentences of improbable length and fiendish complexity.

Take the passage in which the protagonist fantasises, while briefing his focus group, about how much ricin or botulinus it would take to bring the entire corporate snack industry to its knees. As he is doing so, he is struck by his ability to entertain such fantasies in "total subjective private" and then by the thought that half the people in the room with him are doing the same:


This is writing of extraordinary syntactic control, and it is characteristic of what Eggers describes as Wallace's "dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style". The sentence continues for almost another page; the paragraph in which it occurs runs over four pages. Eggers says that he asked Wallace to consider breaking up some of the paragraphs before the story was published: "It was as if he were visiting the notion . . . for the first time. He was that kind of genius, whose understanding of the workings of his own fiction was, I think, largely separate from ideas of audience."

Actually, Eggers is missing something here, because Wallace thought more deeply about questions of audience and address than any other American writer of his generation. All that "insane" detail, and the formal strategies he borrowed from postmodernism (authorial intrusions, digressions, footnotes, flash-cutting between scenes and so on), were meant in fact to serve the rather traditional end of saying something about "what it is to be a fucking human being".

Wallace believed that each of us is "sort of marooned" inside our own skull, and that it is fiction's job to "aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people". It was the estranging apparatus of his style - the postmodern rhetorical devices, the hyperextended sentences - that was meant to do the aggravating.

That, at least, was the theory. However, Wallace was tormented by the thought that the “antagonistic elements” in his fiction might in fact just be manifestations of a pathological exhibitionism. He deplored his own “grossly sentimental affection for gags” and weakness for “formal stunt-pilotry” that served no narrative purpose. But he also understood that this predicament was not his exclusively; it was that of an entire generation of writers who, in a sense, had come too late – who had arrived, that is, just as the bold innovations of postmodern novelists such as John Barth, William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon were being absorbed and neutered by the culture.

Wallace believed that each of us is “sort of marooned” inside our own skull and that it is fiction’s job to “aggravate this sense of entrapment”

This highly developed generational self-consciousness is one reason Wallace was held in such esteem by his peers: he held up a mirror to their own anxieties, and articulated them more clearly and honestly than they ever dared.

Infinite Jest bears the scars of Wallace's parricidal struggle with his influences. He insisted that he had wanted it to be an "extraordinarily sad" book about loneliness and addiction, rather than a postmodern one. And to this end, the novel's two principal settings are a tennis academy, which Wallace depicts as a kind of laboratory of obsession (he writes with considerable feeling about the psychic costs exacted by endless early-morning tennis drills), and a halfway house for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. However, it is also crammed with set-ups and gags that could have come straight out of the fiction of Thomas Pynchon: a geopolitical agglomeration with the acronym ONAN; a gang of wheelchair-bound Québécois separatists; and a film so entertaining that it paralyses anyone who watches it.

At times it seems as if the novel is conducting an argument with itself - for instance, in a long scene in which Don Gately, a former drug addict who is now a live-in staffer at the half way house, goes to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Boston. One of the residents in Gately's care is there, too, and complains about the "psychobabbly dialect" that's de rigueur at events like this. Gately admits that the "seminal little mini-epiphanies" routinely experienced by new inductees into AA come embalmed in language of "polyesterish" banality. Then someone else says they also find the sentimental argot hard to stomach - especially the habit the speakers have of saying they are "here but for the grace of God", which phrase, she points out, is "literally senseless", and should be used only when introducing a conditional clause. Wallace is flattering his hip and savvy readers here, inviting them to identify with this sophisticated cynicism. But it is also clear that we are meant at the same time to find something ridiculous and overwrought about someone who is driven to want to "put her head in a Radarange" by a home-spun solecism or two. Indeed, Wallace said later that the scene was designed to get his readers - privileged, educated Americans, most of them - to "confront stuff about spirituality and values", stuff "our generation needs to feel".

Infinite Jest turned out to be Wallace's last novel. He didn't stop writing fiction - there were two further collections of stories, the second of which, Oblivion, contains some of his finest work - but, as Mark Costello observed in his Amherst encomium, something changed: "If you sit down and read his prose from the early Nineties to later, you'll hear the music changing. You'll hear sentences getting longer and longer, with these wonderfully balanced dependent clauses."

According to the novelist and journalist Tom Bissell, who knew Wallace, this was also a shift in "world-view". Bissell told me: "I think the man who wrote Oblivion would not have been satisfied with the cross-dressing leader of a Québécois separatist group whose primary mode of transport is wheelchairs, or with the political acronym ONAN, both of which are kind of silly in the way Pynchon is silly, but not in the way the world ever feels silly. I believe he escaped the anxiety of his influence."

Wallace's deepening ambivalence about the moral as well as aesthetic legacy of postmodernism is especially noticeable in the non-fiction he wrote in the last decade of his life. In many of his essays, whether the brief was to write about Caribbean cruises or the Maine Lobster Festival, he can be seen grappling obsessively with all that "stuff about spirituality and values".

A good example is a piece he wrote after Harper's sent him back to Illinois to attend the state fair, and to gorge on corn dogs while watching the rural Midwest at play. "Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All" derives all its considerable force from the tension between Wallace's self-acknowledged "East Coast cynicism" and his yearning for a kind of authenticity.

He describes coming across a small hillock that, for some reason, has been covered in artificial grass: "a quick look under the edge of the fake-grass mat reveals the real grass underneath, flattened and already yellowing". Now, the postmodernist debunker in him would have been content to leave that image to stand for the emptiness and shoddiness of the state fair as a whole. But Wallace doesn't settle for simply unmasking the event as a sham; and this is partly because, for all his protestations that he is no longer "spiritually Midwestern", he remains of the place he is describing.

He understands that to be Midwestern is to be "marooned in a space whose emptiness is both physical and spiritual", and that what the state fair provides is a kind of temporary communal respite from that condition. As Bissell, himself from the Midwest, puts it, "in terms of literary persona, [Wallace] was temperamentally speaking a rural Midwesterner, intellectually speaking a high-wire postmodernist, and emotionally speaking an artist-as-priest type. I'm not sure anyone else has really managed to combine those qualities."

Wallace’s best essays are artefacts of this multifarious literary personality, dramatisations of its internal conflicts. Nowhere is this drama more powerfully performed than in the 15,000-word article he wrote for Rolling Stone about a week he spent following John McCain during his Republican primary battle, in 2000, with George W Bush. (The article was turned into a short book this year to coincide with McCain’s second run at the presidency.)

It is unsettling reading the piece now - after a Republican campaign this year conducted mostly from the sewer - to recall that eight years ago McCain represented to many the last, best hope for decency and truth in American politics. Even the most jaded hacks aboard McCain's bus, the Straight Talk Express, were wondering if "humanity and politics, shrewdness and decency" really could coexist. And Wallace finds himself as inspired as anyone: "It's difficult not to feel enthused and to really like this man and want to support him in just about any sort of feasible way you can think of."

Underpinning McCain's promise in 2000, of course, was "something riveting and unspinnable and true": that the candidate had been imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam War, and spent five years in a box-sized cell at the "Hanoi Hilton". But whatever it was in his character that sustained McCain during those five years was shut away in that box, too. This, for Wallace, was the essential "paradox" of his campaign: the fact that the "box that makes McCain 'real' is, by definition, locked. Impenetrable." Which meant that it was up to the voter to decide whether McCain was "truly 'for real'".

What the essay is really about, therefore, is the "interior war" inside Wallace's own head between the need to believe in something larger than himself and his anxiety that the need to believe might be a sham or a fraud. And "fraud", Mark Costello reminded the mourners at Amherst, "was one of the worst words in his personal vocabulary".

In the end, Wallace took his own life. Perhaps the struggle to believe in something was too great; he had suffered too much. He was the ultimate victim of his own interior war.

Jonathan Derbyshire is a writer and philosopher

The best of David Foster Wallace

1987: The Broom of the System

The metafictional game-playing and sheer verbal inventiveness of Wallace's first novel established him as a successor to American postmodernists such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. It is set in the near future in Cleveland, which now stands on the border of the Great Ohio Desert (or GOD), a vast tract of land filled with black sand.

1989: Girl With Curious Hair

The centrepiece of this first collection of stories is "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way", a 150-page novella set in a creative writing workshop. Wallace said the story was "written in the margins" of Barth's Lost in the Funhouse - the professor running the workshop is the author of a famous story also called "Lost in the Funhouse".

1996: Infinite Jest

The gargantuan novel that sealed Wallace's reputation as the most exciting and ambitious American novelist of his generation. The plot motor of Infinite Jest, which is over a thousand pages long and weighed down with more than a hundred pages of endnotes, is a movie of the same name which paralyses anyone who watches it.

1997: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Wallace's first collection of extended non-fiction contains some of his most celebrated essays: the titular record of a comically awful Caribbean cruise; a paean to the genius of David Lynch; and "E Unibus Pluram", his account of the way the "rebellious irony" of postmodernism was co-opted by television.

1999: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

In the title story of this second collection of shorter fiction, several unidentified men describe their sexual proclivities - including one who can't help shouting "Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!" when he is on the point of ejaculating. Another story, "The Depressed Person", with its extravagantly long sentences, footnotes and abundant psychotherapeutic jargon, is typical of Wallace's later fictional style.

2004: Oblivion

Oblivion has several of Wallace's finest stories, notably "Good Old Neon" and "The Suffering Channel". The former is narrated from beyond the grave by a high school acquaintance of "David Wallace". In the latter, a journalist on a hip New York style magazine travels to Indiana to profile a man who developed an ability to shit perfectly rendered sculptures while on latrine duty during the first Gulf War.

2005: Consider the Lobster

When Gourmet magazine sent Wallace to the Maine Lobster Festival, he came back with the title essay of this collection, in which he asks whether it is morally acceptable to boil sentient creatures alive (short answer: no).

2008: McCain's promise

This short book about John McCain was published this year to coincide with the US presidential election. Originally published as a long narrative report in Rolling Stone magazine under the title "Up, Simba!", it is an account of a week spent following the McCain's campaign during the 2000 Republican primaries. Wallace admired McCain the man, if not the politician, and was fascinated by his years in prison in Vietnam. He did not live long enough to see the outcome of this year's presidential election.

the death of Kurt Cobain

Whatever the cultural significance of Kurt Cobain's suicide, his reasons, as with David Foster Wallace, were first and foremost personal. Struggling with heroin addiction, various medical problems and facing an impending separation from his wife, Courtney Love, the lead singer of Nirvana shot himself at home in April 1994. Yet when news broke, the public outpouring of grief among teenage fans in his home city of Seattle resonated around the world.

To many, his death represented a clash between conflicting value systems: the counterculture from which Nirvana had emerged, and the corporate world of MTV and major record labels that transformed them into global rock stars just months after the release of their 1991 album, Nevermind. Cobain's suicide seemed like an admission that these two worlds could not be reconciled. "The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I'm having 100 per cent fun," he declared in his suicide note. The irony is that this exit only pushed Cobain deeper into music-industry mythology.

But it is a mistake to see his death as an artistic gesture. Cobain had come adrift in his life, which is something he shared with the increasing numbers of young men who kill themselves every year. In England and Wales, for example, suicide remains the second most common cause of death for men under the age of 35. If you really want to know something about the hopes and fears of a generation, understanding these everyday tragedies is as important as unpicking the famous ones.

Daniel Trilling


Joanne Goldstein's picture


Andrew Chapman's picture

This is quite a good article. Many new questions emerge to the surface, all you need do is to read further information about the issues. Only then one can form a final view on a particular subject. Otherwise everything is seen only in the dimension of cum more black and white. The natural logic of evaluating things before they were properly cognitively processed is a horrible mistake, made by those less intelligent. People should not throw away their common aquaparky sense easily. Anything and everything deserves appropriate time for making judgements.

writeon's picture

'Grover' or should I call you something, else? Your 'delightful' style reminds me of another, but never mind.

Why on earth are you so agressive, intemperate and angry? Why do you even care about my opinion, about Foster Wallace? I don't particularly like his style, so what? How does that impinge on your enjoyment of him? I prefer Flaubert, so what? How does my not likeing DFW make me a moron? There is no connection here as far as I can see. These are only novels after all, and he was only a writer. Aren't people allowed to have differing tastes in your highly heated and partisan world?

Why have I 'very obviously never read DFW'? Because I don't subscribe to the notion that he was a 'genius'? How can that possibly irritate you so?

As to my wife who you also choose to insult. I've probably undersold her level of education, position and the type of teaching she does, and where. I mention this only in passing, as her formal academic qualifications are normally considered outstanding in this field. Apart from this, she is an extraordinarily perceptive and sharp reader, and not just in my opinion. I thought DFW was pretty good, she didn't agree, she thought he was virtually unreadable, but then, she can't stand Joyce or Rusdie either. She's taught them, but she just doesn't like them!

Your comments about the 'marketing of suicide' are ignorant and naive. Are you just pretending? When 'entertainer' die or commit suicide this is seen as an opporutnity by marketing departments to cash in on their 'product' and capitalise on the publicity. This happens repeatedly. It's part of our culture. To get angry and abusive about something which is so obviously true, is extraordinary and incomprehensible.

As to you attack relating to the Vietnamese, I do know rather a lot about them. You are making the common mistake of extrapolating from the particular to the general on a non-existant or flimsy foundation.

The point is, was McCain really tortured?

I'll attempt to educate myself

Alex the Hut's picture

To Mr. Tomasi, 2 years late:
Your use of the word "unreadable" belies not only a deep laziness but also a contempt borne of envy. The great irony here is that this type of ignorant and jealous American sloth is very often what DFW was attempting to address, albeit sometimes somewhat subliminally. But I suppose you never finished Infinite Jest, so you obviously could never be expected to attempt to understand the gravity and depth of the book (and its underlying series of themes...). As Vonnegut said, "So it goes."
Or perhaps you would find "Hi-Ho" to be easier to read and digest. Maybe something about pearls and swine?
On a side note, I would like to say that Wallace's writing is potent and daring, and as time will surely tell, a pinnacle of American authorship.

andrewsam's picture

"There was no subject which David Foster Wallace could not write about. He was a hero to a generation. But struggled terribly with depression. This summer, he took his own life"

And there was. No editor for this piece

Nate's picture

@writeon 3 years late
I agree with the point you make about John McCain. How could a genius not see through the BS that was the "tortured in a Vietnamese cell" narrative? A subsequent poster wrote that since he was a writer he tended to be attracted towards the heroic story. I disagree. I think a writer's basic goal should be to use the extra time and freedom to think given to him to get a close to the truth as possible, especially when writing about modern politics, whose terrible state makes it an easy target for writers looking to make a name for themselves. DFW didn't do this. instead, he wrote a contrarian book that sells itself based on the idea that McCain was such maverick that he transcended party politics(basically the only reason to vote nowadays) and could get liberal hyper educated, priveledged elite hip writers like DFW to write about him-you have to admit , this is one of the main selling points of the book.
Other than that, how was he critical of postmodernism and considerate of the audience? The very things that make his books unpleasant, the footnotes, length,etc of Infinite Jest are his was of reaching out to his readers? I think not. He seems comparable to Mishima, who also wrote books containing words that not even Japanese scholars could read w/o a dictionary, simply to showoff-yet wants to believe he is doing something profound and useful.

writeon's picture

I don't know, I just don't know. I'm not particularly enamoured with this style of writing. I think it lacks elegance and I suppose, wit. It seems to take itself way too seriously, considering the content. It's not exactly Flaubert is it? I think it needs more "soul" and precision, and the real world needs to push itself, shoving all this self-regard to the side. Maybe I think it just needs balls, blood, life and air.

I'm also dead against the romanticsm surrounding artists who top themselves. Curt Cobain was a dickhead to kill himself. He had a child who needed him as a father not bloody ghost. His mother was right, why did he have to join that stupid club? I love his music, but he should have just gone off to New Zealand, cut his hair, changed his name and worked on sheep farm for a couple of years, anything than killing himself. It's not cool or romantic - it's just dumbass.

As a society artists are allowed a lot of space to f'++k up. We seem to want them to f++k up for us, because we're too bourgeois to try life out on the edge. It's like a cult of death that gives artists more attention than they deserve and surrounds their work with a sickly aura of decadence that we find attractive. The whole idea of decay and wasted talent - what might have been. It's both sentimental and nostalgic mixed with tragedy.

It's like artists choose to become characaters in their own lives, really characatures.

And all this bull about John McCain drives me nuts. How can a "genius" fall for this crap, soap, b-movie, nonsense? McCain isn't noble at all, or a maverick. He's like Bush the spoilt son of rich and powerful family, who knows it, and has used it his entire life.

The Vietnamese treated him with kid gloves in prison. They knew who he was straight away. He wasn't tortured. Almost everything about his capture and imprisonment is lies he created as a usful narrative which could be used in the political career he was planning. Believing in fairytales is dangerous.

Dave Weeden's picture

To any NS readers who haven't yet read DFW and, on the strength of this piece, are about to order every title above - whoa there! The final book - the McCain one is included in the penultimate book, 'Consider the Lobster', AFAIK in its entirety.

Now, to address writeon's points above. He (she?) and I will just have to disagree about certain aspects of John McCain's imprisonment: to wit, whatever is meant by 'kid gloves' and 'straight away' not forgetting 'who he was'. Who was John McCain? A navy pilot; the VC did work that out straight away: they shot his plane down. Also the son of an admiral, but that means what? DFW's article is unequivocal about JSM's stolid refusal to be released or to be treated differently from his fellow prisoners. After that though, DFW didn't cut McCain slack. He finds McCain's campaign to be 'right-wing'. (DFW admitted that he voted Democrat.)

I find I'm not clear where writeon's beef lies: what 'style of writing' is objectionable? The above or DFW? As someone who thinks DFW was a very fine writer indeed and I don't think his prose lacks balls etc.

That's not to say that I agree with everything in Jonathan Derbyshire's essay. I doubt DFW's suicide was the result of unsynthesiseable antithesis. A brain chemical imbalance seems much more likely and better aligned with the facts, esp the ending of his drug regime.

writeon's picture


This is pretty much water under the bridge now, but let's just say that McCain's version of the conditions, and his treatment in prison in Hanoi, are drawn into question by the Vietnamese authorities and some of his fellow prisoners.

He was treated differently because he was a high-value prisoner from an influential family. He gave 'questionable' interviews which were used by the Vietnamese for propaganda purposes.

According to the Vietnamese he was never subjected to torture and was given exceptional medical treatment. Obviously one can argue that their version is false, but one cannot argue that it doesn't exist.

But was McCain really a hero? Does getting shot down make one a hero? Do all prisoners of war automatically become heroes? What did DFW base his evaluation of McCain on? Maybe he should have gone to Vietnam instead or following McCain around? Obviously writers like naratives like McCain's. They have liked them for thousands of years. Heroes imprisoned by barbarians etc. But for me the really exciting story is, what if it's all a fabrication, a fake, designed to further a political career? Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you're right, maybe it doesn't matter anymore?

I don't think DFW is a 'bad' writer. I'm just not into his 'style' of writing. It' just not to my taste. You like it far more than I do, that's fine by me. I find it too 'self-absorbed' it just lacks something for me. My wife, who teaches english, cannot stand him, but then he hates my stuff too!

What does drive me nuts, is the romanticism surrounding artists who choose suicide. I'd like a complete reversal of our attitudes. I've known two, a gited young poet and a musician, who both 'joined the club' they were both very talented, but very romantic young men. I'm also angered by the commercialisation of suicide, and tragic death, in the marketplace, as a marketing ploy to sell product to the masses. That alone should make true atists think again.

Rollo Tomasi's picture

David Foster Wallace was and shall remain an overrated writer. He's considered a genius because he wrote a big unreadable book.


I think a better question is "Who would want to?"