Why I’m mad at David Foster Wallace

To begin with, David Foster Wallace.

I’m not his number one fan. I don’t dislike his work. I have a love-hate relationship with his writing in that I can’t decide if it’s tripe or genius; it flip-flops in my brain like one of those optical illusions where you’re seeing the old woman and the young woman at the same time. The man had a very laissez-faire attitude towards sentences, and tended to avoid paragraphs in many of his so-called “short” stories. I have yet to attempt his epic novel Infinite Jest, which is 1,079 pages long, has its own wiki page, and I suspect the joke is on the reader.

None of these is the reason why I’m mad at him. In 2008, he hung himself in his home. Now,  I know suicide is something that famous writers do, from time to time. And I know he got a major posthumous publicity boost. But that’s not exactly why I’m mad at him, either.

I’m mad at him because he knew exactly what he was doing, and did it anyway. What do I mean? In 2006, I saw him read at my college. It was a pretty big deal. David Foster Wallace. He read some of his unpublished stuff (never to be published stuff?) that I thought was pretty good. I gained a lot of respect for his style after hearing him read out loud. His stream-of-consciousness rambles make more sense when rambled aloud in a stream of, as it were, consciousness. At the end of the presentation was a question-and-answer session. I got to ask a question. I was trying to think of something clever. I asked him what the strangest piece of fan-mail was that he’d ever received.

He said, “That’s a clever, witty question to which I have a serious answer. A man once called me and told me if I didn’t call him back, he’d kill himself.” He called the guy back, and their correspondence lasted a few weeks. He said it was “the most devious piece of sadism” that he’d ever experienced.

So what the hell, David Foster Wallace? What was your intention? Did you only want to be sadistic? Did you forget what happened, or did it eat away at you and eventually kill you? Not sure if I’m justified in this line of thought, much like I’m not sure if I’m justified in my like and/or dislike of his work. (In either case, there’s a part of me that wants to reanimate him, just so I could punch him.)

But so it goes, as they say. So it goes.