peevish mama

I guess I just don’t want to let this day pass without paying my respects to David Foster Wallace.  

Last night Doctor Dash got home from work around ten thirty at night, looking ragged and hangdog in the shadows of the mud room.  The first words out of his mouth: I just read something really sad . . . David Foster Wallace hanged himself.   Noooo I softly wailed from the couch, no, no, no.  Suddenly, the flickering lights of the TV seemed garish and intrusive.  Oh God, no.  

We are not among his most diehard fans, but fans we are.  We both read Wallace’s crazy, genius, and hilarious Infinite Jest and loved it.  Dash is the only other person I know personally who actually finished it (besides me).  We have lots of friends who tried to read it but put it down.  It is an enormous and sweeping book, and almost too much for one brain to process, which is to say nothing of how incredible it is that one brain created it.  This book, 981 pages long, with nearly a hundred additional pages of tiny-printed footnotes that serve as lush background, insane riffs, convoluted tangents, vivid color, and hysterical, hyper-focused explanations, is a work of pure literary muscle pounding away with so much force yet such finesse.  Wallace’s mastery of the English language leaves you dripping wet on the floor, mouth agape and exhausted.  Words, words, words, strung together in ways so insanely poetic and, I’ll say it again, hilarious, and dark and sad and shameful and shocking and redeeming and tender and exaggerated and true. Never for a second, does he stray from what is true – no matter how insane and over the top, Wallace is true.  True to himself.  True to his characters.  True to his reader.  

Where the hell does he come up with this crazy shit?  Never have I flipped a book over so many times to look at the picture of the author.

Dash and I read this book before having kids, when we could invest that kind of time in art. We went to see him at the Boston Public Library when he spoke for a book signing.  Dash stood in line with our copy of Infinite Jest and his pharmacology book from med school for Wallace to sign (there is a ton of really specific and, according to Dash, spot-on pharmacology know-how in this book – not surprising, considering it is set in a half-way house and a posh tennis academy where the kids used lemon-scented  Pledge as sunscreen).  Wallace turned Dash’s pharmacology book over curiously, chuckled and signed it.  

Dash said he felt like the wind got knocked out of him when he read that Wallace had hanged himself.  I knew exactly how he felt.  It’s not like we know him or are some sort of fawning disciples.  We aren’t seeking out vigils and lighting candles and trying to talk about this with people.  It’s just that we read what will now be his greatest accomplishment and were blown away by his talent.  The world is a poorer place without him in it.  A huge loss.  Even if he never wrote another word, his passing is a huge loss.  

But what is sadder than our collective loss, much much sadder, is the fact that Wallace was so sad.  His despair must have been blacker than black. It must have been razor sharp and unfathomably deep - superhuman and incredibly exhausting to be able to quash his will, his spirit, his ability to experience pleasure.  I don’t know anything about him, but I can only assume that creating Lateral Alice Moore, a secretary who could only move sideways, had to have made him chuckle.  Les Assassins de Fauteuils Roulants (the Wheelchair Assassins), are a Quebecois Separatist group in the novel who all lost their legs because their initiation involved playing chicken with freight trains.  Those with the biggest balls were pulverized, but the next ballsiest ended up amputees and the top tier of the AFR’s leadership.  How could this not have brought Wallace pleasure, exquisitely warm and velvety pleasure?  I would be hugging myself for the rest of my life if I had come up with that and it was just one tiny hair in the thick textured braid that was the novel.  The self-discipline alone it must have taken to write Infinite Jest proves that Wallace was anything but a quitter.  He was a sorcerer with language and story, but any one who has ever tried to write anything knows magic is never enough.  He had to have been one hard-nosed and determined son of a bitch to finish that book.  

Hell, what do I know?  This kind of thing happens over and over and every time it is such a waste and such a pity and so very very sad.  I am just so sorry he was so sad.  

I have nothing left to say.  

Sometimes, apparently, words are not enough.