The Suicide of David Foster Wallace

Over this summer, I had the incredible experience of reading Infinite Jest in its entirety, including only the second half of the footnotes, after I started to realize that they were just as interesting and funny as the main body of text. I have been vowing to re-read the book since I first put it down, but have been trying to get other reading priorites out of the way in the interim. I borrowed my copy because I wanted someone else to be able to talk about the book with, which was a mistake because the gargantuan novel would take anyone not as crazed and with as much free time as I was and had this summer an infinite amount of time to read the book (counting prolonged put downs of the book, which admittedly happen to the best of us), and so I am resigned to not seeing my copy for about a year or so...

But on Friday night, I was able to borrow a copy from another friend, who had the copy borrowed to him by a philosophy professor, who said that he could keep it. So the night I got home after borrowed it, I googled David Foster Wallace... only to recieve the most disheartening news that I will receive until one of my remaining grandparents dies... the author, who I dubbed my favorite author after finishing I.J., had hung himself in his apartment last week. I feel bad for one because it is such a great loss to me, and also because I was so late to find out about it.

The fact that there will never be another David Foster Wallace book is incredibly unfortunate because there is so little material from him in his humous time. As far as I am aware, he only has one other novel, The Broom of The System, besides Infinite Jest, and a number of collections of short stories. While I still have BOTS, I just know that I am going to forever thirst for more novels by this author who is now dead. I believe I should elaborate on why this novel is so fascinating to me.

It will take a proper essay in order for me to convey the true genius of the piece in my opinion, but let me simply expound on the structure, which is so in an intricate way. The bulk of the story is set between a Halfway House, Ennet House, and the Enfield Tennis Academy. The main characters are Hal Incandeza, a student and son of the creator of ETA, and Don Gately, an on duty senior resident of Ennet House. The main unfoldings are kind of mysterious to me still, but the plot is not really what grabbed me, it was the writing. The stylistic juxtaposition of complex language with post modern street slang words, like "like", he uses the word "like" so much in sentences with really big words... this book just made me constantly smile, I can't even explain it yet. Save that for the reread...

So let me just say that I am deeply panged by the loss of this genius writer, and how it is so mind boggling to me that this man who has such a strong force of manipulation of ideas and language, could possibly not have what he needs to be happy and enjoy life... to the extent where he would take his own life and destroy all of his physical powers, to the decrement of the rest of us.