David Foster Wallace, 1962 - 2008.

David Foster Wallace, whose darkly ironic novels, essays and short stories garnered him a large following and made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday, after apparently committing suicide, the authorities said. Mr Wallace, 46, best known for his sprawling 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest, was discovered by his wife, Karen Green, who returned home to find that he had hanged himself... Mr Wallace burst onto the literary scene in the 1990s with a style variously described as "pyrotechnic" and incomprehensible, and it was compared to those of writers including Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.

Timothy Williams, New York Times.

Updated through 9/20.

Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday. "What was a party is now a wake," Ulin said as the news of Wallace's death circulated. "People were speechless and just blown away. He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years," Ulin said. "He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late 80s and early 1990s," Ulin said. "And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything."

Claire Noland and Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times.

"This is a terrible blow for American letters," comments Ed Champion, pointing to the ongoing discussion at Metafilter.

Updates: "I worked with Dave on three pieces for Premiere magazine," recalls Glenn Kenny:

"David Lynch Keeps His Head," which was nominated for a National Magazine Award and subsequently anthologized in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again; a consideration of Terminator 2 and the rise of "effects porn" that Premiere declined to publish and subsequently saw print in the in-house mag of the British book chain Waterstone's; and "Big Red Son," an account of the Adult Video News award that appeared in Premiere under the title "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment" and the dual byline Willem de Groot and Matt Rundlet. (It is in the book Consider the Lobster under its original title.) And yes, therein lies a tale. A few tales, really.

Right now, I don't have the heart to tell them. I will tell you that not only was Dave a genius and great, hilarious company, he was also one of the most stand-up guys I've ever met..... To learn tonight that he had taken his own life, it is just inconceivable to me. Inconceivable. I don't know how I can make that word register with the strength it needs to right now. Inconceivable.

For Time, Josh Tyrangiel collects "a few examples of his considerable skill."

Via Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay, John Seery in the Huffington Post: "Frankly I had a hard time keeping up with him - I thought he was always two or three chess moves ahead of me. But as the keen observer of the human condition that he was, he seemed to take into account his interlocutor's shortcomings and made gentle accommodations for them, without being patronizing. So we talked."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth notes that "Wallace's collection of short stories Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is the basis of the forthcoming feature directorial debut from actor John Krasinski."

Jim Emerson passes along a short short story DFW told during his Kenyon Commencement Address in 2005.

"David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer - his manic, exuberant prose; his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness - to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad 'deep and meaningless' facets of contemporary life." An appraisal from Michiko Kakatuni in the NYT.

"One piece that always stuck with me was 'Host,' a profile of right-wing radio talk show host John Ziegler that the Atlantic Monthly ran in 2005," writes Chris Barsanti. "Being Wallace, it's nowhere near a simple feature. Instead the story not only presents a wonderfully complex and sympathetic portrait of what seems to be a profoundly unpleasant man, but one that digs with wonkish delight into the myriad details of what goes into making talk radio pop the way it does. Wallace also couldn't resist, being the serial digressor that he was, from including numerous footnotes and side notes throughout the piece."

"I initially labeled the book Infinite Pest, but this appellation proved to be a profound mistake. Fifty pages in, I became acclimated. The book hooked me.... He was, as some have overlooked, a world builder." A personal tribute, with footnotes, from Ed Champion.

"For all of its celebrated intellectual brilliance, Wallace's writing always resolved itself on the simplest, most human terms while still vigilantly guarding itself against the ever present threats of lazy thinking, sentimentality and, as he discusses in the Kenyon address..., our 'default thinking,'" writes Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker, pointing to the collection of reports, obituaries and remembrances at the Howling Fantods.

"A few weeks ago, I reread the beginning of Infinite Jest, and stupidly cursed right out loud its author, David Foster Wallace, out of jealousy, because I will never write - or even think - like he does in just the first few pages of what is the best novel written since I've been old enough to read," writes Joel Stein for Time. "[R]ead the soliloquy from Hamlet that gave Wallace's great novel its title. It is Hamlet's meditation on mortality, now tragically appropriate, that begins: 'Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio - a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred my imagination is!'"

"Perhaps someday we'll be offered an explanation for why David Foster Wallace took his life on Sept 12, but any reader can see how his fiction had, in recent years, moved into greater darkness," writes Laura Miller in Salon. "Infinite Jest, though 'sad' in accordance with its author's stated intentions, bubbled with humor and the sort of creative energy that is a kind of hope, the belief that, in the telling, the tale might redeem what is told. The story collection Oblivion, the last book of fiction Wallace published before his death, shows character after character flailing away at the impossible task of making life endurable."

In his bleak appreciation at AICN, Mr Beaks points to the piece on Terminator 2 that Glenn mentioned earlier: "Wallace was not blasting away at Cameron's spendthrift sci-fi because he loathed the man's movies; on the contrary, he was a fan. This fact alone elevated 'F/X Porn' above the petty squabbling of [Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth] Turan v Cameron: Wallace's supreme distaste for T2 had everything to do with Cameron betraying the terse, resourceful brilliance of T1 - and, in the process, pointing the way to a new, rapidly proliferating kind of soulless cinema."

Rex Sorgatz rounds up reviews, interviews and essays by or about DFW; and here's the NYT's "Times Topics" page.

Updates, 9/15: Granta gathers links.

"[O]n the small, strange, planet (or, more accurately, asteroid) inhabited by novelists doing their best to re-invent the novel, this is the death of Kurt Cobain," writes Julian Gough. "You are going to be reading agonised analyses of who he was, how he died, and why he mattered, in every books section of every newspaper, on every major anniversary of his death, for the rest of your lives. Well, OK, not for the rest of your lives, because newspapers won't have book sections in another six months. But you get the gist."

For those in Berlin: There'll be a modest memorial gathering at Saint Georges Bookshop on Wednesday evening at 8:30. No eulogies, no gnashing of teeth. Simply a series of short readings.

"He set the bar so dizzyingly high with each new piece of writing that I cannot imagine where he might next have taken his art; and it hurts that I will never know." Robert Potts. And Michael Carlson writes the Guardian's obituary.

FishbowlNY gathers links, including this, from Time's Michael Scherer: "For a decade at least, he has been one of our nation's greatest ongoing innovators of narrative journalism, of the magazine story, and a rightful heir to the golden age writers of old."

"His 2000 piece on John McCain is my favorite discussion of authenticity in politics," blogs Christopher Beam at Slate. "The driving question: When McCain tells you he seeks only to inspire Americans to serve a cause greater than their own self-interest - or, to update for 2008, when he says he'd rather 'lose an election than lose a war' - is he speaking the truth or mere hooey? In other words, is John McCain 'for real'?"

The Literary Saloon gathers tributes.

The NYT's Dwight Garner passes along a passage from Infinite Jest "that contains one of the best summations I know of Wallace and his gifts - the idea of a head that pounded like a human heart."

"It would be tempting to see his Wallace's body of work as a damning critique of the moral bankruptcy of capitalist culture," writes Michael Bierut in Design Observer. "But I'd maintain you can't come up with something like 'The Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster; unless you have some kind of empathy for the people who devise - and respond to - such things. Wallace turned the language of Powerpoint into poetry, and created a way of seeing depth in a shallow world."

I want to draw special attention to Ed Champion's roundup of comments from critics and fellow lit bloggers.

"David Foster Wallace began his review of John Updike's Toward the End of Time by classing Updike, along with Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, as 'the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar American fiction.' The word narcissist isn't strictly disapproving there." Troy Patterson in Slate: "Of the three older writers, Wallace most closely resembled Mailer. Both earned their celebrity and electric esteem - becoming not just famous writers but author-heroes - on the strength of maximalist novels of ambition-announcing bulk and scope (Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Wallace's Infinite Jest). And both produced nonfiction so bold and inventive as to surpass their achievements as novelists. As a journalist, Wallace... left American literature with a body of work as fine as any produced in America in the last two decades."

"One book I hope doesn't get lost in all the tributes sure to keep coming after Wallace's death this weekend is Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity," writes Andy Battaglia at the AV Club. "It's a non-fiction book about math at its most complicated and abstract, but Wallace winds his way through it like a guide eager to tug along anyone who would even consider the enterprise."

The Believer posts the full text of Dave Eggers's 2003 interview with Wallace.

"In memoriam." Harper's collects and posts Wallace's contributions to the magazine.

Updates, 9/16: "Nothing in his work will tell you what a sweet man he was," writes Verlyn Klinkenborg in the NYT. "He had the very rare gift - something he shared with Seamus Heaney - of carrying the greatness of his ability intact within him and never letting it obtrude upon his colleagues."

"Public deaths usually strike me with all the emotional force of the deflation of a giant Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade balloon," writes Sam Anderson for Vulture. "Wallace's death is the first that ever caused me a visceral reaction: It knocked the spiritual wind out of me - made me actually, shockingly, cry, and then choke up whenever I tried to talk about it. He was my favorite living writer, and the contest wasn't particularly close. (Judging by the appreciations blooming across message boards and newspapers, this is not a minority opinion.) In his best work he hit something like an ideal suspension of personality in text: He was the perfect hybrid of hilarious-serious, intellectual-colloquial, personal-formal, youthful-ancient. He understood, both instinctively and analytically, why literature still matters in an increasingly text-averse culture."

"Kurt Vonnegut, a novelist who practically begged to be put on suicide watch, thought that writing novels was a treatment for depression, if not an outright cure," notes Graeme Wood in the Atlantic. "Vonnegut somehow made it to life's finish line without taking a shortcut, whereas Wallace, sadly, did not.... I wonder whether we can decently consider Wallace's death a sign that the postmodern novel fails as a psychiatric remedy, where the merely comic novel does not."

"The publication of Infinite Jest in 1996 seemed to show up despair as a mistake," writes Benjamin Kunkel in n+1:

You didn't have to have read the book yet - and I didn't start until 1998 - to get a sense of historical, generational redemption. The few critics I trusted, plus the smartest people I knew in college, agreed that Wallace had done something amazing. When I finally read the book, it confirmed what before was mostly a set of willful, abstract premises: literature can matter as much now as ever; the age is no bar to greatness; even this world before our eyes can be represented in a novel....

The sentence of Walter Benjamin is inescapable: every great work of art really does simultaneously found and dissolve a genre. For me, as for a lot of other writers of our generation, Wallace offered liberation of a fairly precise kind. After the constrictions of minimalism and dirty realism, and against the aestheticism of someone like Nabokov, and beyond the chilly glare of our hero DeLillo, Wallace showed that you could write in a colloquial and informal register - the register in which we sound to ourselves like the people we actually are - without thereby cordoning off any part of your vocabulary or experience.

McSweeney's: "Below, we've begun a thread of memories of David Foster Wallace that will, we hope, be some kind of salve during this wretched and bewildering week.... If you would like to send a contribution - and it need not be beautifully written or profound - e-mail cmonks@mcsweeneys.net. New entries will be added to the top of the thread each day. This site will be devoted to his memory for the foreseeable future."

Update, 9/17: Slate gathers remembrances: Sven Birkerts, Jordan Ellenberg, Colin Harrison, Gerald Howard, Joyce Carol Oates, Martin Riker and Sean Wilsey.

Update, 9/18: "We strain now against the weight he leaves us." Chris Osmond and Will Layman in PopMatters.

Updates, 9/19: "This weekend, I propose you explore three very different forums for Wallace’s hard won, forgiving vision." Tips from Wyatt Mason.

Jared Roscoe, a former student of DFW's, at n+1: "In class, his self-effacement and self-presentation were comical - of course, he was self-conscious of that too."

Max Fisher has quite a roundup at the New Republic. Via Jeffrey Overstreet.

As a sort of expansion on Glenn Kenny's earlier post, Leon Neyfakh talks with him about working with DFW on pieces for Premiere.

Update, 9/20: "A fierce grammarian, deeply pop- and high culture-literate, he could also do maths and analytical philosophy, and could easily have vanished into what Gore Vidal once called the 'Research and Development' arm of American fiction," writes Christopher Tayler in the Guardian. "But he also knew about sadness and tennis and drug-taking, and by the 90s he'd become the de facto spokesman for a less emotionally arid brand of avant-garde writing."

Posted by dwhudson at September 14, 2008 3:56 AM