What Will Suffice

A long time ago I picked up David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, and immediately set it down again. Being the kind of person who can’t imagine ever reaching the end of her appetite for books, I will usually think: there will be time. There will be time to read this and understand it and think about it. And until that time, I think I will read something else to while the hours away. Something, hopefully, that does not expose me to the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome. And that has no footnotes, none whatsoever.

I never really liked Wallace’s fiction that much – the short pieces I read, anyway. As is often the case with prestigious writers I don’t like, I don’t think he was untalented. I can see why young men love him. There’s a visceral, throttle-the-dictionary pull to his prose. I can see how that can get addictive. He wrote with what often felt like a strong optimism in the possibility of language, which was great in an essay but took me nowhere in a story.

Most bookish women I know dislike him too, though there are exceptions.  I was puzzling this out with someone the other day, oddly enough.  Without reducing anyone’s writing to their genitals, though, I think a worldview like Foster Wallace’s feels somehow false to most women.   To me, the arrogance involved in testing the limits is something that seems to be completely given and obvious. This is not so for most young men that I talk to. They bristle when I suggest that it is anything other than true that the world is full of possibility – even, as they say in this country, if they are liberals. This is the privilege, I suppose, of being born in a world where you are a member of the universal, and everybody else gets to be different. Things “are” for such lucky people in a way they will never “be” for the rest of us. It is your privilege that allows you to think things work the way you think they do.

Which isn’t to say they don’t feel the constraints. Icarus flies too close to the sun, and all that. Indeed, they probably feel them harder than the rest of us because the limits of what you can do in this world don’t just hold you back, they destabilize the way you think.

As you know, Foster Wallace hanged himself on Friday. Whenever I hear of this kind of death – by which I mean the by-your-own-hand death of a creative person, intentional suicide or accidental overdose – I am never surprised. I guess I still harbour a romantic view of the artistic temperament. If you’ve always got one eye on the stars, it’s pretty startling to be pulled back to earth by a mortgage bill or an out-of-nowhere miscarriage or illness.

Who knows what pulled this particular person back to earth this time – but it’s evident he did not land softly. I feel for his wife, who apparently found him. But at the same time, when the first person at the drunken table I sat at last night found the story on her Blackberry and told everyone, the lot of us cried out in sadness. There is something in that, having people know who you are when you, quietly or ostentatiously, leave the planet. Someone somewhere sees a candle go out, and you know they felt that little bit connected to someone on this earth. It’s just too bad Foster Wallace didn’t feel any obligation to keep that porchlight on for himself.