Remembering David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

The death of novelist David Foster Wallace represents a major loss to American letters. In an age in which serious fiction seems content with achieving smaller and smaller effects in a marginalized corner of contemporary culture, Wallace was not afraid of trying for the home run. He reminded us that the novel still possesses the ability to cut through the noise and banality of modern life and deliver something more formidable than even the latest blockbuster on your local megaplex movie screen.

Wallace’s Infinite Jest is a big, sprawling book that scares off many readers by its sheer size. Spanning 484,000 words on almost 1100 densely packed pages, this is a big novel by any definition. Yet the creativity and energy of Wallace’s vision never lag. Few writers have ever been better at delivering scintillating prose, sentence after sentence, without ever seeming to run dry. He is one of those authors — Proust and Nabokov come to mind here — whose books can be opened to almost any page at random, and the reader will be sure to find something brilliant and quotable.

Yet this was more than mere word play. Infinite Jest is not just an exercise in dazzling prose. Wallace crafted one of the more profound works of fiction of our time, an exposé of the follies and foibles of post-modern life. There is a certain paradox here: Infinite Jest was, as its title suggests, full of good humor . . . but with a skull in hand. This is one of the most sober (in more than one sense of the word) novels you will ever read, and also one of the funniest. The novel is also loaded with irony, but also one of the most caustic critiques of irony.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool. You can follow Ted Gioia on Twitter at www.twitter.com/tedgioia.

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