Although, Of Course, You End Up Becoming David Foster Wallace

In 2004 or 2005, my friend Liz told me that I should read the book Oblivion, what ended up being the final collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace. When I’d go to bookstores, I’d eventually gravitate towards the Ws in “Fiction,” and I’d see it on the shelf sometimes, with the way the title wraps around the front cover and the spine of the book, putting a big “V” under the name of the book and the author’s name. But I never got around to reading it until 2009, when I checked it out from a university library. And when I finished it, I sent a message to my friend Liz, telling her I had finally read it, and also apologizing for being an incredibly shitty friend.

But that’s another story.

The first book I (attempted) to read by David Foster Wallace was A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. It was the summer of 2005, and I was living in my mother’s house after graduating from college. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, reading, and with Wallace’s name being fresh in my mind, I looked to see what the public library in Freeport, IL had to offer. The answer was, of course, very little. The copy they had was the original hardback; bright yellow cover, and a graphic of a sun with x’s for eyes in the center.

Even with an essay about Lost Highway and David Lynch, at 21, I felt that I was way too stupid to be reading David Foster Wallace. Maybe at 25, when I picked up Infinite Jest, I was still too stupid, but I powered through it anyway because I felt like it was something I had to do, and according to the foreword written by former literary wunderkind Dave Eggers, in the 10^th anniversary edition of the book, 25 is the right age you are supposed to be when you read it.

I had to take a break, though, about midway through, opting to read a book about David Bowie’s time spent in Berlin, recording the albums that would be referred to as the “Berlin Trilogy.”

The thing about Infinite Jest, at least for me, anyway, is that it’s well beyond page 700 when all of the various plot strands, times, and characters begin to converge, and you realize just what it is your reading, and just how amazing it is.

Then came my second attempt with A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again; shortly after that, Consider The Lobster, and then Oblivion. Later in 2009, it was his debut novel The Broom of The System, the loosely tied together collection of stories Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and then his first collection of short stories, Girl With Curious Hair.

Later on, it was his “unfinished” novel The Pale King, and the well beyond posthumously released Both Flesh and Not. Then a slim volume of interviews, the longform interview Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, and the incredibly uneven and slightly unflattering biography Every Love Story is A Ghost Story.

There was even the $45 I shelled out for a first edition of Signifying Rappers, a book on hip-hop he co-wrote in 1990, which has been subsequently reprinted.

The sad thing about all this is that I was a total bandwagon hopper, despite always looking at the Ws in every Borders or Barnes and Noble I went into as a young man. When David Foster Wallace was found dead on September 12, 2008, I was actually working in a bookstore—an independent bookstore in Northfield. The story was everywhere online, and for some reason, I felt gutted. I frantically looked around the store for any books by him that we had. It turns out we didn’t have any, and there was such a demand in the wake of his death, that it took us over a month to get any copies in.

It turns out, for as well known as Wallace was, in a small town in Minnesota, he was a hard sell, according to my manager, anyway.

When I was in college, a very angry, difficult girl a few years younger than me, didn’t believe me when I said that my favorite band was Radiohead. She, in her affect, thought that people just said they listened to Radiohead to sound smart—that, in fact, no one actually listened to them for enjoyment, or any other reason. I feel like Wallace’s work—specifically his fiction, has that same stigma. Infinite Jest alone is over 1,000 pages, plus footnotes that are tucked away in a separate section in the back. His essays, while incredibly well written, have a layer of intelligence that can keep someone at a distance at first. I feel like if you tell people you’ve read Infinite Jest, they either a) haven’t heard of it, or b) don’t believe you. Or if they do believe you, they c) are confident that you probably didn’t understand what you read.

Despite the portrait of Wallace as a bit of an arrogant womanizer, D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is A Ghost Story also harrowingly describes Wallace’s bouts with depression, both early in his life in college, and then later in life, which is what ultimately killed him, as his frenetic final days ended with a failed suicide attempt at a motel, then waiting until his partner Karen Greene left for the morning, and after tidying up the partial manuscript for The Pale King, and writing a suicide note, Wallace hung himself in the couple’s garage.

It was in 2009, well after I had finished reading Infinite Jest, that I decided to use this quote from the book as my email signature—

It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool.  It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui.  Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip-- and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. 

I don’t even know if anyone really reads it at the bottom of my emails now, but I used to get a lot of questions about what “anhedonia” was.

I’ve given Wallace’s books out as gifts—copies of his Kenyon College commencement address This is Water to family and friends that have graduated; A Supposedly Fun Thing to one of the ushers at my wedding; both The Pale King and Although of Course to my friend Tom. I have no idea if anyone has ever bothered to sit down and read these, or have taken away from them a fraction of what I have.

I used to try to read books Wallace often cited as influences, or at least inspirations—The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon; later, Wittgenstein's Mistress, which I don’t know if I’ll ever been intelligent enough to read.

When thinking about trying to write about a writer, for a blog about music, I couldn’t get over the fact that I got into Wallace for what, by appearance anyway, could have been the wrong reasons—a popular author I should have been reading died so I should get on board with him. Though unlike how I tried, and failed, to get into Elliott Smith immediately after his passing in 2003, only getting into him later (for the right reasons in 2010.) But in thinking about this, I thought, strangely enough, of the lyric from “Candle in The Wind”—“I would have liked to known you, but I was just a kid,” and I thought that was appropriate. I was 13 when Infinite Jest was published, and even younger when Harper’s sent Wallace on a cruise and to the Illinoi State Fair for the now infamous essays that helped shape who he was as an author.

Attempting to turn this back around to music, somehow, it is noted in Every Love Story that Wallace was a big fan of “The Big Ship” by Brian Eno, and in Although of Course, Wallace talks quite a bit about REM’s single “Strange Currencies,” taken from 1994's Monster. I’m not, like, the world’s biggest REM fan, but ever since I first heard it 20 years ago, “Strange Currencies” has always been one of my favorite songs of theirs—the desperation in Michael Stipe’s lyrics, the big dumb “rock” guitars (a theme throughout the record), and the overall beauty in the way it is structured.

I guess it’s by coincidence that I recently finished the short memoir by William Styron, Darkness Visible; a book that goes into great detail accounting his sudden descent into a practically debilitating depression. He says of it, “In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience- one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would by lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.” Without a doubt, that is the most accurate, and heartbreaking depiction I have ever encountered.

A popular quote from David Foster Wallace is that fiction is about what it means to be a “fucking human being.” And even in his non-fiction essays, there was a incredible humanistic warmth in the way he could write about just about anything. Tennis, Terminator 2, a talk radio host, the Illinois State Fair—even if you don’t find it interesting, Wallace could make it interesting to you.

In reading about his struggles with depression, I couldn’t help but take stock of my own. Wallace did not write at length about it in his work, knowing that it was there within him as he wrote, makes me feel a certain kinship with him. And even with his too intelligent for his own good exterior, in some way, if we are aware enough of ourselves, we all know what is like to be a fucking human being.