The following is a continuation of this brief remembrance of David Foster Wallace. Read it first for context.
We were alike in so many ways. Fractured relationships with our fathers, jammed into highly competitive sports at a very young age, both of us with degrees in Philosophy, MFA Students at Arizona together, drug addicts, in and out of mental institutions. Writers.
I hope he would be proud of all the places I’ve been published, my handfuls of awards- rather my one handful of awards. But, seriously, I’m not even in the same hemisphere of success as he was. Maybe I could have been, if only things had broken differently for me. And I’d had just a little goddamn support. Isn’t it amazing how you can look back at your life and cite all those near misses and wonder- if just one had hit…
Maybe my best work lies ahead, I doubt it. My life is saturated with family and the morass of computer programming I make my living with and can’t seem to crawl out from.
But enough of all that. This is about reading David’s Infinite Jest.
I just finished it, my penance for not giving him the time of day way back when. It’s an elephantine thing, 1000 pages in that large paperback format, just a tad longer than the combined Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m not gonna lie, it was a struggle. I started out with the best of intentions, plowed through 500 pages, got sidetracked, came back a month later and so on.
Infinite Jest is dense and convoluted, full of bizarre characters and bizarre stories, and altogether wondrous. Up until last year, David was perhaps America’s greatest living novelist. His death was felt so deeply by so many, because he was positioned to be a true champion of the written word in a time when literary writing needs all the help it can get. The things he did can simply not be done by any other art form. Novels like his, the handful that are at that level, are essential, desperately needed, right here, right now.
David once said that the reason he wrote was to make the reader feel more human.
After reading Infinite Jest, I feel saddened, I feel blown away by the rambling, dazzling sentences often hurtling headlong for nearly a hundred words. I feel humbled by his brilliance. It’s a hugely challenging novel, one that like works by Joyce or Faulkner, will reward the reader a little more with each subsequent visitation. It’s already acknowledged as one of the great works of the last century and, trust me, that reputation will only grow.
Knowing now what I know about David, and now that I’m freed from that young man the-world-revolves- around-me- and- my-little-plans thing, I wish I’d taken the time to have had a cup of coffee and one of those immense muffins from the University coffee shop with him.
Talked with him about philosophy. And our psychotic depressive breaks. What the medication does to a person. How it makes life cotton, how it sticks your consciousness in a web you can’t break out of. How dangerous it is to go off them, how they jerk your mind into a serotonin free zone where all that lies before you is a big dark pit.
David fell in that pit. I’ve been down there. I made it out of my most recent visit. Barely. David didn’t.
We always think that if we’d know how deep in trouble someone was, he could have helped them. What a joke, so like the dark satire present in Infinite Jest.
The best I could have done was acknowledge his pain.
In the end, all I really know is I miss him.
If he was still alive, I would look him up, I swear. Not for him to put a word in with his agent or his publisher to help me get published.
Just for his friendship.
I swear.
