I picked up Infinite Jest–Wallace’s best-known and most massive work of fiction, famous for its sheer length (1,079 pages) and its obsessive use of endnotes (388 of ‘em)–in late 1996, the year of its publication. I had first read about the novel in a 1996 New York Times Magazine story on Wallace by Frank Bruni, entitled “The Grunge American Novel; David Foster Wallace is being touted as the Jay McInerney of the 90′s. Can he survive the attention?” I liked the idea of reading something that was hot and talked-about and literary at the same time. I also liked the challenge of tackling a really long book, something I don’t think I had done since the David Copperfield debacle documented in the previous post.

I finished the book in January of 1997. At that point, or perhaps in the middle of reading IJ, I found Wallace’s two nonfiction pieces for Harper’s where he went on a cruise and went to the Illinois State Fair. These were republished in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, the first as the title story, the second as “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All.” I laughed until I cried when I read them Harper’s, and pretty much repeated the expderience when I re-read them in ASFTINDA.

At that point–after reading IJ, and before ASFTINDA was published–I used the University of Delaware library, where I was employed at the time, to get my hands on all of DFW’s published essays and nonfiction. I worked in interlibrary loan at the time, so I drew upon my colleagues to get everything possible.

Once ASFTINDA was published, all these essays were collected between hard covers. Shanon and I went down to Washington DC to hear DFW read from the collection and to get my copy of Infinite Jest (first edition, second state, without the misspelling of “William Vollmann” on the back cover) signed. When the time came for me to meet the author who was now a hero of mine, I tried to make some joke about how I’d tracked down all these essays separately and how ASFTINDA made all that work moot. Wallace didn’t get that I was pulling his chain and was all “no, this is better, don’t you think? All together and without all the cuts that the Harper’s editors demanded?” I was embarrassed and hemmed and hawed. Afterward, Shanon was like “smooth move, man.”

Since then, I haven’t kept as close tabs on Wallace. I have read very little of his fiction since Infinite Jest. I missed him when he came to Colorado College a few years back. I own his second collection of nonfiction pieces, Consider the Lobster, but I have only read about half of it.

A friend of mine tried reading some of Wallace’s more recent short fiction and found it really unpleasant. I told her that I don’t usually recommend Wallace to a lot of people. Being a DFW fan can feeel like having a friend whom you know is very funny and compassionate, but who gives a first impression as being something of an impenetrable pretentious pain in the ass.

One thing I have read and re-read in more recent years is DFW’s commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005. It’s getting some play right now in the wake of Wallace’s death, mostly because it explicitly talks about suicide. But I hope it gets more attention for its real subject matter: how difficult it is to be alive and conscious and aware in the world. Here is the part right after he talks about suicide:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

* * *

When I heard of Wallace’s suicide, I immediately thought of James Incandenza’s suicide in Infinite Jest. I guess I’ll leave you with this, a passage that I found howlingly funny when I first read it, and damn it, it’s still funny in an awful ghoulish way today. The scene: James O. Incandenza’s two sons, Hal and Orin, discuss the details of their father’s suicide (IJ 250, which I located thanks to the Infinite Jest Online Index):

‘I didn’t even think a microwave oven would go on unless the door was closed. What with microwaves oscillating all over, inside. I thought there was like a refrigerator-light or Read-Only-tab-like device.’

‘You seem to be forgetting the technical ingenuity of the person we’re talking about.’

‘And you were totally shocked and traumatized. He was asphyxuated [sic], irradiated, and/or burnt.’

‘As we later reconstructed the scene, he’d used a wide-bit drill and small hacksaw to make a head-sized hole in the oven door, then when he’d gotten his head in he’d carefully packed the extra space around his neck with wadded-up aluminum foil.’

‘Sounds kind of ad hoc and jerry-rigged and haphazard.’

‘Everybody’s a critic. This wasn’t an aesthetic endeavor.’

‘…’