By Justin Roberts

DF Wallace

“David Foster Wallace is the author of two novels, ________ and _________; a book of essays and arguments, __________; and two story collections, __________ and __________. His short fiction has appeared in __________, ________, __________, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a ___________ and numerous other awards.” He is dead. What was his favorite food?
After his suicide (age 46; hanging) in September, many people in publishing and literary criticism rushed the presses to put their anguish on paper, to testify to a glowing character, to develop the definitive theory of who he was and what he meant. Wallace’s legacy had begun taking shape the week he was buried. Did he have a favorite color?
I first became acquainted with him through his NY Times obituary. I moved onto the short fiction published in ________ and read the finest of many discussions of his artistic importance on Salon.com. His story (the one that sells newspapers, at least) resonates. Did he have a temper?
The English/Philosophy double major who rejected a promising future in the latter to become a virtuoso in the former. A man who admired fellow writers but never pulled a punch or turned a blind eye to what he thought was a moral indiscretion. He wanted fiction to mean something more; searched his soul for every piece, obsessed with expressing the thing’s meaning more than the reporting its existence. A giant with, I have been assured, the sweetest disposition. The idealist who ended it all. Had he ever been arrested?

I’ve bought a few of his books and begun scouring the pages for the Nabokovian complexity and Tolstoyian morals. From what I have read, I can tell you that some of his subject matter is prosaic and uninspired, making the meaning he labors to convey seem contrived and him look like a yuppie taxing the memories of a life many would consider great for a self-important struggle.

I can also tell you that reading some of his stuff is like getting your heart bashed with a sledgehammer; that he makes you feel things you barely understand more strongly than anyone you have ever read before. I could assure you that he is the best writer of my time.

If I was the one listening, though, I would have a hard time swallowing it. Wallace has fallen into vogue because of his romantic fixation with pop-ethics, his above-average composition skills and his suicide. Yet, in the end, his legacy amounts to little more than a look at a postmodern-literary rock star and his lurid following.

Take a walk around New York, stop in a few of book stores, and you will see legions of posthumous fans avidly pouring over his work. I have seen this phenomenon and taken part in it. To these people, its as if death made him real. Authentic.

No, it was not death that transformed him. To his friends death made the man into a corpse but to the rest of us, to everyone who read the New York Times obituary, the suicide made him a celebrity. A story. Something we wanted a part of. A thing we wanted to know, to experience, to own.
David Foster Wallace is dead. The man is gone but his writings survive. Why he ended his life, what any of it meant to him or what he might have thought about his new popularity, we will never know. There was someone there, behind the novels and the awards and we will never know him.
How would he have judged the meaning so many have hitched to his dead self? Its hard to imagine that someone known for his moral earnestness would appreciate the grand comparisons and exhortations.