David Foster Wallace Is Dead

The most ambitious and talented American fiction writer of recent memory has committed suicide. People of my generation said he was our Pynchon or Gaddis, and to a degree, I agreed: while I found his essays and short fiction simultaneously amazing and infuriating, Infinite Jest was the book that got me excited again about the possibilities of American fiction; the book that once again — after far too long — made false Hofstadter’s claim that in a time when the ocean of knowledge has burst its shores, the encyclopedic novel is no longer possible; that we could never again have another Don Quixote, Middlemarch, Bleak House, Zauberberg, Gravity’s Rainbow, or any other work that adequately encompassed the world and knowledge and spirit of its age. Infinite Jest did so, brilliantly.

I’m sad to know he’s gone.

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David Foster Wallace Is Dead

One thought on “David Foster Wallace Is Dead

  • September 14, 2008 at 11:05 am
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    Oh my God.

    I don’t know what to think, or to say.

    I am so sad for him.

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