Impossibly talented. Crazily original. Hilarious. Soulful. Deeply moral. Incandescently intelligent.
The news is devastating: David Foster Wallace’s wife called Claremont police at around 9:30 Friday night to say that her husband had hanged himself at their home.
This is from the Los Angeles Times. (I just didn’t have the heart to put up the details last night. But I’m doing it now)
Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday.
“What was a party is now a wake,” Ulin said as the news of Wallace’s death circulated. “People were speechless and just blown away.
“He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years,” Ulin said.
[SNIP]In a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni wrote, “Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone.”
Wallace was best known for his rule-bending door-stopper-masterpiece of a novel, Infinite Jest —a literary game-changer that was also fun to read. But many of us also loved him madly for his astonishing, inventive, funny, intellectually dazzling essays.
Novelist and short story writer, David Gates, wrote a smart, insightful meditation on Wallace that was published on Sunday in Newsweek. Here’s a clip from the piece that gets to one of the qualities that made Wallace’s work so unusual:
“I suspect that Wallace was a genius who happened to be a writer,” writes Gates, “rather than a writer who happened to be a genius….”
We need our geniuses. It’s really not okay for DFW to be gone. Not okay at all.
If you’ve never read him, please just do it.
He made great writing seem possible.
Still stunned ~
Me too.