David Foster Wallace

 

I keep coming back to David Foster Wallace’s work.  This is an old story, and one that I may have shared on this blog before, but here it is again because this is something that has been important for me.

I picked up Oblivion, the book that turned out to be Wallace’s last short story collection on the recommendation of a friend.  This guy had been pushing Wallace on me for a long time.  Infinite Jest seemed too long ( I didn’t have the same tolerance for long books then that I do now) and too much of an investment.  I opted for the short story collection, which probably delayed my actual appreciation of Wallace for a while.  

Anyway, I struggled through parts of this book and wrote off this writer.  After further insistence from my friend, I picked up Infinite Jest a couple of years later.  I struggled through it and finished it.  I thought it was dumb and pretentious.  I didn’t care about the characters and I think that my reading of it suffered because it was such a struggle and it took me nearly a year to get through it.

The problem that I had is that I kept thinking about it.  When I was in the middle of reading it, I had just started in my doctoral program at the University of Tennessee and I was trying to figure out the direction I wanted to take my studies.  I kept returning to this novel, kept thinking about it.  There was something to it that I couldn’t figure out and it got to me in a way that novels that I just don’t like cannot do.  I went through my courses and decided that I would focus on contemporary postmodern fiction (this wasn’t much of a choice, it is and was all I read).  

I won’t go into too much detail here, but I ended up rereading the book a couple of years later and the whole thing clicked with me.  The book is big and difficult to read, but it is worth the read.  I have made attempts to read through the rest of Wallace’s catalogue and have ended up putting a good dent into it.  I can say that I sort of liked The Broom of the System and will probably read that again soon.  I really like his non-fiction and essays, but I have never liked his short fiction.  Infinite Jest stands out to me as an absolutely stellar novel that is the more stellar because it stands alone among his fictional offerings as a truly, truly quality work.  

This is what brought me to Wallace.  What I am here to write about is D.T. Max’s biography of Wallace, titled Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.  I read this book years ago while I was writing my dissertation (of which Infinite Jest was the focus of a chapter).  It had just been released and it seemed like a source for good supplemental material.  I read it quickly at the time and got a couple of good quotes out of it.

Well, I just finished reading this and my take is a little different.  I still like the book.  I think that Max did a good job with the subject material.  He focuses the narrative of Wallace’s life around his writing and attempts to present a sympathetic version of Wallace for the reader.  Overall, he succeeds in doing this.  This time that I read it, however, I was more struck by Wallace’s idiosyncrasies and the unlikeable aspects of his personality.  After Wallace’s suicide, many sources went out of their way to portray the writer as an earnest, kind person.  I think that he was this.  But I think there was more to him.  I won’t get into my evaluation of him as a person here because all I would be basing it on is my reading of his work and a few interviews.  That doesn’t matter here.

Here’s the thing: I still love Infinite Jest.  I hope that it stands the test of time and continues to be a good book.  The aspects of Wallace’s personality that I don’t like don’t really matter because I never knew him.  I don’t think that he was terrible, so I don’t need to bend myself to make excuses to like him.  By all accounts he really was a nice person and cared a lot about his students.  That is good.  I like that.  

I have mixed feelings about this biography, but that is not specific to this biography.  I think that there is a problem that all biographers face, and that is how to present the narrative of another person’s life.  Max made a decision about how to write about Wallace.  He cast Wallace’s life in a particular light to achieve a particular end.  All biographers do this.  I take a page from Hayden White in this.  White wrote about history and his belief that historians cast events in a particular narrative arc: comedy, tragedy, irony, or farce (I think.  I may be wrong on that last one, I am doing this from memory).  This cuts against the so-called “objectivity” of history because it necessitates the historian’s perspective and affects the way that it is, then, written.

The same must be true of biographies.  This shouldn’t be earth-shattering.  An author must feel a certain attachment -- positive or negative -- to their subject.  And this will come through in the writing.  Wallace’s life was not a narrative, but it was narrativized.  And from a particular perspective.  

So, I reread this book after I had gotten some distance from Wallace’s work.  I still like it.  I think the author did a good job and related some key aspects of Wallace’s life, especially as they connect to his writing.