To some, David Foster Wallace was an articulator of the
seemingly ineffable, a man giving voice to the most pressing issues facing
modern man. To others, he was a writer of overwrought prose all too willing to
impress with postmodern pastiche. To many, he was an intellect who realized
that his smartness was not enough to fulfill a reader and more importantly
himself – that an equal helping of heart went a long way, and was
even of paramount importance. And yet to others still, he was just the next
logical step up from writers such as Barth and Pynchon, the satirist of today
satirizing the satirists of yesterday. If he wasn’t the modern patron saint of
depressives everywhere, he was just another unfortunate, disappointing
statistic.
Whatever your opinion of Wallace and his writing, D.T. Max’s
absorbing biography Every Love Story is a
Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace is an absolute must read.
Since the writer’s suicide in 2008, much
has been mythologized about his life. Luckily for us, Max lucidly and
straightforwardly chronicles the phases of Wallace’s life: his childhood spent
on the Great Plains of Illinois, his prodigious college years at Amherst, his
ascent to literary prominence, his struggle with clinical depression and drug addiction,
and his later years culminating with his tragic end.
The book is at
its most compelling and haunting when Wallace puts his struggle between his
head and his heart (“the head throbbing heartlike”) on the page, particularly
with his letters to fellow writers. In light of the first round of edits to his
debut novel The Broom of the System,
Wallace expounds for seventeen pages on literary theory and criticism in an
attempt to dissuade his literary agent from allowing the editor to make certain
cuts an corrections. In another letter, Wallace pleads with genuine desperation
to his literary agent in order to extend a deadline: “Please don’t give up on
me… Do not assume I’ve given up in despair…”
Peppered
throughout the book, however, are surprising tid-bits that at times can paint an unflattering portrait,
pockmarks and all. Among the surprising revelations: he had callous and strained
relationships with his mom and sister, he was a notorious womanizer, he
considered carrying out a homicidal crime of passion, he fabricated large
portions of his famous nonfiction essays, and he voted for Ronald Reagan.
But Max, ever
the humanist, reflects Wallace’s deep urgency to connect with readers in a
culture that is becoming increasingly atomized by technology, media saturation,
solipsism, etc. Wallace wanted to invoke a hip, experimental aesthetic that was
more associated with a nihilistic sensibility while genuinely extoling
traditional verities linked with fiction prior to postmodernism. One of the
most poignant parts of the book, which aptly describes Wallace’s struggle with
fiction, comes when Wallace is giving an interview: “..good fiction’s job [is] to comfort the
disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
Ultimately Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is
exactly as the title suggests – an unnerving recounting of a life that
won’t be soon forgotten and a body of work that will stand the test of time.
Whatever compelled Wallace to cut his life short will remain a mystery, but in
a commencement speech given in 2005, he leaves behind haunting yet heartfelt
words: “The
only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to
try to see [life].”
By Brady Detwiler
