David Foster Wallace, 1962 – 2008
David Foster Wallace, one of the most innovative writers of modern fiction and journalism, died last Friday. I didn’t hear the shocking news of his suicide until Monday morning. He was only 46 years old.
I started reading his stuff when Harper’s Magazine began publishing it back in the late eighties. The first book of his that I read was his collection of short stories titled Girl with Curious Hair. I instantly became a fan and read most everything that he wrote before and after that book was published. I shared it with friends, and many of them also became fans.
The voice of the narrator in the story “John Billy” from that book has stuck in my head ever since the first time I read it back in 1989. What follows are two excerpts from the first two parts of the story, which I suggest you read out loud in a slow Okie-hick twang:
1. WAS ME SUPPOSED TO TELL SIMPLE RANGER
Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed. Brought up the Ranger to date on Chuck and Mona May Nunn’s boy Chuck Junior, closest thing to handsome and semi-divine we got here in Minogue Oklahoma, good luck bad luck man, who everything that hit him stuck and got valuable, but on whom of this late time the vicissitudes of human relatings had wrought grief and retinal aggravation to such extreme that C. Nunn Jr. lost his temper to a nameless despair and got him some vengeance.
…
2. CHUCK NUNN JUNIOR MORE GOD THAN NOT
Told Simple Ranger some data on how Chuck Nunn Junior, more God than not to those of us peers that lived for a whiff of his jet trail, ate up his school and town, left us bent and in mid-yearn his eighteenth year and moved on to Oklahoma University, Norman, at whence he was observable throwing high-altitude televised spirals and informing his agriculture and range-management teachers of facts they did not know. Then how Nunn chucked it all to give time as a volunteer in The United States’ Involvement in Vietnam, whence trickled down rumors of the glory and well-armed mightiness of Nunn: how he toted his unit’s fifty-calibers up sheer and cliff-like impediments to conflict; how he declined to duck, never once crawled or ate mud, however never even once smelled lead in his cranial vicinity; how he got alone and surrounded by VCR’s (Viet Cong Regulars) in ‘71, and through sheer force of personality and persuasion persuaded the whole battalion of sly slanted Charlies to turn their own guns on their selves. How etc. etc. How he sent me a postcard with a red bloom of napalmed jungle on the front, wrote how he wished my personal vision was better so I could leave the feed store and get over there to watch and whiff the trail of his jet.
A few years later I was fortunate to attend one of his readings of Infinite Jest at the Elliot Bay Bookstore, and found him to be a very engaging, smart, witty man. He autographed that 1089 page book for me. (Here I must confess that I have not finished reading it. I will, I just need some huge blocks of time and no distractions.)
Harpers’s Magazine has a page up with links to many of the articles he wrote for them. I highly recommend “Shipping Out.”
I read a column at Slate.com that I thought was especially good. That column linked to “Consider the Lobster,” one of his better known magazine articles that he wrote for Gourmet magazine.
His death is a terrible loss for all of us who appreciated his style, his humor, and his honesty.
May he rest in peace.
