It’s hard to think of another stranger whose death could have been more upsetting to me. David Foster Wallace was not only incredibly talented and funny, but his writing always had a humane and optimistic streak which I always respected, although I couldn’t share it. I read with bemused cynicism his article about how inspiring John McCain was and his monumental review of a dictionary which turned into a meditation on democracy, but at the same time I felt comforted that he was out there, being idealistic when it would have been easier to be nihilistic. I envied him his apparently sincere and principled search as much as I enjoyed his winningly, self-deprecatingly complex writing style.
The fact that he seems to have given up that search in suicidal despair only adds to the ache I feel at his death. I had several paragraphs more written, but I don’t want this to seem like a ripoff of Wallace’s sesquipedalian style, so I’ll just stop. I will miss him.
In almost every picture I’ve ever seen of him, Wallace was wearing a colossally silly-looking do-rag (à la Prison Mike), so I’ll just reproduce the cover of his best-known book, a cover which I feel represents both his refreshing style and the wide-open breadth of his unfortunately-curtailed literary ambition.
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