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Despite never having met him, David Wallace has had a huge influence on me -- on the way I write, the way I think, the way I perceive other people. It's safe to say that his impact in my life has been greater than that of most people I have met. On or off the page, I've never encountered a writer with such myriad gifts; his compassion and intellect were unparalleled, and few could engage the ironic mode so deftly without collapsing into cynicism or solipsism. Wallace found an intimate, covalent bond between the comic and the tragic. He used laughter to make us think, atrocity to make us laugh, and every gradation in-between. Not once did he abandon his defining principle, that fiction was about what it feels like to be human:
I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of "generalization" of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple.Reading his work really was like occupying the skull in which he was "marooned," exposing yourself to the full and beautifully messy brunt of his consciousness. Not a day passes when I don't wonder what he'd make of some quotidian detail or major social phenomenon. Philosophy, politics, sports, addiction, psychology, depression, interpersonal communication, ethics, lobsters, porn, snack cakes, hangnails ... life. He could tackle the microscopic and macroscopic with equal aplomb and grace, an earth-shattering insight lurking on every page, lapidary prose tucked neatly in every footnote. My own writing is no more than a cheap pastiche of his own, self-self-self-conscious, an attempt to attain that intoxicating and infinitely expressive blend of high and low vocabularies.
I'm a member of a listserv devoted to him, and the past week has seen an unmitigated outpouring of grief and remembrances. Hundreds have written about how he affected them, and the media's coverage has grown exponentially. If any self-respecting fiction-lover hadn't heard of David Foster Wallace, the secret's officially out. It seems that he was unanimously respected not just as a writer but as a human being. I envy those who counted him as a friend.
The closest thing I have to an anecdote: In late January, when W&M's philosophy department sought a new professor, Sam and I took a candidate out to lunch. He made an offhand reference to a brilliant undergrad he'd advised at Amherst in the late '80s, a mathematical, philosophical and literary prodigy who whipped up two summa cum laude honors theses in one year, finishing both of them by spring break. I asked who, knowing full well what the answer was going to be.
Once the professor left, it was agreed that I looked like I'd spermed myself.
In a way, not having known Wallace personally makes his death even stranger, somehow less comprehensible. The proximate aspects of grief are irrelevant; we won't feel his absence on a day-to-day basis, i.e., at an atomic level, the way we do when someone close to us dies. It's a more confused, distant absence, something off-kilter. Since he was never "here" to begin with, it's all too easy to forget that he's no longer out there, feeling, breathing, helping us come to grips with twenty-first century American life. It's as if we've mysteriously lost touch with the world's most dedicated pen pal.
I only wish I'd had the guts to write him back when I could.
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