David Foster Wallace shot to literary superstardom in 1996 with “Infinite Jest,” his 1,100-page novel filled with run-on sentences, footnotes and a futuristic story about a movie so entertaining that it kills you. But my introduction to Wallace was through his essays - most notably, his hilarious takedown of a luxury Caribbean cruise in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” I also loved his brilliant essays about tennis, which were later collected in the book “String Theory.”
Wallace had been a state-ranked tennis player in high school, as I was, and my fantasy interview was to talk with him - somehow - while we were batting balls back and forth. That never happened, but I did interview him several times over the years. The last time was in 2004 about his short story collection “Oblivion.” We talked about that particular moment in literary culture, when Wallace himself was grappling with the tension between irony and what he called “the inner sap” of life.
“You want your art to be hip and seem cool to people, but a great deal of what passes for hip or cool is now highly commercially-driven,” he said. “Some of it is important art. It’s also relentlessly corrosive to the soul. Everything is parodied and everything is ridiculous. Maybe I’m old, but I can be steeped in about an hour of it and then I have to walk away and look at a flower or something.”
Wallace wasn’t that old - he was only 42 - but four years later, he took his own life after struggling with major depression for years. His suicide was shocking to me and so many other admirers. Since then, there’s also been a reckoning with Wallace’s reputation as stories have come out about his abusive treatment of women. Now, on the 15th anniversary of his death, we examine this complicated legacy in “Rethinking David Foster Wallace” - and also dig into our archives to hear Wallace’s own words.
-Steve