Grieving the Loss of a Literary Giant

It's been several weeks since the untimely passing of David Foster Wallace, an immensely talented American novelist, essayist, and philosophical everyman. I just finished reading an article recounting Wallace's memorial service, which brought together a pantheon of modern literary giants who recalled his edgy humor, his humanity, and his striking ability to inhabit the lives of those characters he created. Don Delillo speaks well of Wallace's sentences, which "shoot rays of energy in seven directions." The most recent issue of Rolling Stone includes a memorial article written by David Lipsky, excerpt available online.

Wallace suffered for many years with depression, an illness that led him to take his own life. He will be sorely missed, and readers who love brilliant pose, irony, and insightful social commentary can only wonder what essays will go unwritten, what stories untold. In the spirit of the current election season, I urge readers to check out Wallace's 2000 Rolling Stone essay, "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub: Seven Days in the Life of the Late, Great John McCain," an essay that despite the title is not an anti-McCain diatribe but a very fair treatment of McCain the Vietnam veteran's failed 2000 presidential campaign.

For those of you curious enough to want to check out Wallace's work, I strongly recommend A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of some of Wallace's short essay that is accessible and ably demonstrates his vast intellect and incredible prose style. Wallace is best known for his book Infinite Jest, a 1088-page novel (which includes nearly 150 pages of endnotes commenting on the main text, a common feature of Wallace's expansive style). I've gotten halfway through this tome about three times, and I've made it my goal to complete it once I've finished my current book. There are excerpts of Infinite Jest that are incredibly moving, including one character whose eloquent soliloquoy about how it feels to be in the grips of "depression" still haunts me.

Anyway, I hope that some of you might find time to check out Wallace's work.