Why It Bothers Me So Much that DFW is Dead

I was sitting in a diner by my apartment, waiting to order dinner. I had gone down to the overly expensive grocery store to forage, and finding nothing, decided on the overly expensive diner. I hadn't brought anything to read, so I looked up nytimes on my Blackberry. Headlines. Headlines. Financial trouble. Campaign Shit. David Foster Wallace, Writer, Is Dead at 46. I gasped and then realized that I had gasped. "Suicide," I thought. I clicked on the article. His wife had come home around 9:30 the previous night and found that he'd hanged himself. I gasped deeper and held my hand up to my mouth. The waitress seemed to notice that I was staring in disbelief at my cell phone, but didn't ask. I ordered the French Dip.

The reason I was so self-conscious about my bereavement from this writer was that I hadn't been able to make it through one of his books. I'd gotten Brief Interviews with Hideous Men out of the library a few years ago and enjoyed most of it before I moved to California and had to take it back. In truth, I'd drifted away from it when it grew overtly experimental around "Adult World (II)" and couldn't keep up. The summer before, I'd purchased the anniversary edition of Infinite Jest and with great fanfare, decided to make it my summer project. After two hundred pages or so, I moved on, not to other projects that I can remember, but more likely to endless internet articles and movies from Netflix. I posted on Facebook that was going to pick it up again in memoriam but have not yet done so. From that Saturday evening until tonight, ten days later, I don't think a day has passed that I haven't read or seen or heard a tribute to the departed Mr. Wallace, and each time I do, I'm left with the feeling of how bad it just sucks.

That Monday at work, I read a couple of his shorter articles, one being a dissection of 90's action movies, which he reasoned had descended into what he called "Effects Porn", the other an account of growing up playing tennis downstate Illinois. In each article, he despensed such a deluge of knowledge and detail that it's as if he'd just opened his brain on the given topic. He wrote like you or I would write if there were no governor between what was actually going on in your head and what eventually eeked out of your fingers. Except it was interesting, and moving, and really, really funny.

But then, he killed himself. Prior to last Saturday, if I thought of David Foster Wallace, it was with a kind of comfort that there was someone out there who just that smart. Someone who seemed like he could conceive of everything have the wherewithal to tell about it. His death is a permanent asterisk on his record, an out for the rest of us who can say, "Well, yeah, but look what happened to him." And if you're like me, you don't need another excuse.