David Foster Wallace

The postmodern novelist who shattered literary barriers

1962–2008

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David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself last week in his California home at age 46, was one of the most audacious fiction writers of the last two decades. Though his reputation rested mainly on his mammoth, dazzling novel Infinite Jest (1996), all of his work was marked by dizzying wordplay, narrative pyrotechnics, and other innovations that pushed the limits of prose itself.

The son of college teachers, Wallace majored in philosophy at Amherst, said The Washington Post. There, a professor declared him a genius. “It was the happiest moment in my life,” he recalled. “I felt like I would never have to go to the bathroom again—that I’d transcended it.” He turned his senior thesis into his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), following up with a short-story collection, Girl With Curious Hair (1989). “Both books attracted enthusiastic reviews and something of a cult following.”

That cult became huge with Infinite Jest, said The New York Times. The title of the “1,079-page monster” referred to “an elusive film that terrorists are trying to get their hands on because to watch it is to be debilitated, even killed, by enjoyment.” But Foster’s masterwork was really a mind-bending riff on turn-of-the-millennium America—“a place besieged by too much data, too many video images, too many high-decibel sales pitches.” Wallace gave the impression that he had absorbed so many aspects of this clotted culture “that he could only expel them in fat, prolix narratives filled with Möbius strip–like digressions, copious footnotes, and looping philosophical asides.” Following the publication of Infinite Jest, Wallace won a MacArthur “genius” grant.

“Wallace’s encyclopedic self-reflexiveness made his work, at its best, a wonder,” said Newsweek, “and at its worst, nearly unreadable.” He devoted most of a Gourmet article about lobsters, for example, “to the discomfiting question of whether it was ‘all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure.’” Though he was perpetually playful, what Wallace called his “weird self-destructiveness” often cropped up uncomfortably in his work. Many of his characters end up killing themselves; in 2005, he told the graduating class at Kenyon College, “Adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

Wallace had been on antidepressants for 20 years, but reportedly stopped taking them in 2007. He is survived by his wife and parents.