David Foster Wallace, Dead at 46

I know this is a church blog, but since I'm the one doing the writing, I get to indulge my own desire to write about something important to me: David Foster Wallace's death on Friday. The NY Times has a great obituary that summarizes his life and talents better than I could.



I wrote my MA thesis on Infinite Jest, DFW's (as he was known by his fans) masterpiece. As all articles and reviews point out, Infinite Jest was 1, 076 pages long, the last 96 pages being footnotes that you had to read as they came up in the main text.



This is the one novel that I love to push on people, insisting they read it. While it seems intimidating and long (one reviewer actually said that she didn't read it because it was too long and too heavy, more useful for holding down your beach towel than for reading), I really got into it while on vacation (before children, of course) and read the last 700 pages in the last three days of vacation. And while lots of people disparage the ending, when you figure out where the final scene fits into the non-linear story, you see how powerful and beautiful Wallace's writing can be.



As DFW said in his Salon.com interview, in IJ he tried to do something sad and funny and deeply intellectual all at the same time. And he nailed it. It is all of those things and more. Plus you can add all the insightful cultural commentary that makes you look at the world in a different way: America's addiction to entertainment, athletes' lives being similar to drug addicts, the power of Alcholics Anonymous, etc.



Because of all these reasons, I think that this novel might be remembered as one of the best novels of the 1990s, and DFW as one of the best writers in America.



But he was also a deep believer in humanity and the power of empathy. Read this commencement speech at Kenyon College, and you'll understand. And when he says the power of education is to teach us the power to actually think and control how we see the world, to choose to think in an empathetic way. As he says,

[Choosing how to think, free of society's constant, weakening
distractions] is real freedom. That is being educated, and
understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the
default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had,
and lost, some infinite thing. . .

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

Good words to live by. And unfortunately difficult for some of us, even the speaker, to remember.

Rest in peace, Mr. Wallace.

PS: Here's a short story DFW published in Esquire that I teach my 8th graders every year. It is short, but powerful, and the kids love discussing what the ending means and how an entire story can be only one paragraph long. Enjoy reading.