Open Letters

mourns the death of novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself on Saturday at the age of 46. It’s ironic commentary on the effusive nature of his work that the reader’s first response to news of his death is the urge to ask him for his comments on it.

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B. F. Skinner characterized suicide as the ultimate act of impatience, and this too takes on a new shading of irony, in light of the particular voice threading through Foster Wallace’s work. From the acerbic talkiness of The Broom of the System to the mordantly over-inclusive Infinite Jest (and those signature footnotes urgently elaborating and clarifying everything), the main nerve of his writing was an impatience with the traditions of every genre he practiced.

When tragedy strikes, the temptation is always there to freight hindsight. In one of his last short stories a character says, “verily as I say I was a fair-haired boy on the fast track but wasn’t happy at all, whatever happy means, but of course I didn’t say this to anybody because it was such a cliché.”

Sappho dvdrip Such an impulse is only natural. Readers will no doubt theorize about what Foster Wallace’s body of work did and did not characterize, represent, reject, and epitomize. This is the way with writers dying suddenly; though David Foster Wallace’s mortal end was one of confusing abruptness, his ongoing literary presence can still teach us about the craft into which he poured so much that was alive.