In Memoriam David Foster Wallace

Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred my imagination is! My gorge rises at it.

In Memoriam David Foster Wallace

By Steven Moore

I knew him, Horatio. Not exactly a fellow of infinite jest—more Hamlet than Yorick, mild-mannered and self-deprecating rather than loud and merry—but an extremely decent human being, which made the shocking news of his suicide in September 2008 all the more painful. The greatest writer of his generation, yes, but I remember the gent who went easy on me the one time we played tennis together, gave much-needed advice on my orangutanic serve, and who politely asked to play full out before proceeding to blow me off the court.

It was with sadness, shock, and a profound sense of loss that the journal learnt of the suicide of David Foster Wallace. Through his friends and admirers, we here provide a tribute to one of the great voices of contemporary America.

His loss to contemporary fiction is devastating, because more successfully than anyone he demonstrated what the next stage after postmodernism might look like. Born in 1962, he came of age in the 1970s, the most ludicrous decade in the twentieth century except for the appearance in America of totemic postmodern masterpieces like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Gaddis's J R, Delany's Dhalgren, Coover's Public Burning, Barthelme's Dead Father, Barth's LETTERS, and Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew. How does an ambitious young author follow that parade? Certainly not by reviving Hemingwayesque understatement, as some writers in the 1980s did, and certainly not by merely imitating Pynchon et al. (Wallace was mortified when a reviewer of his first novel accused him of doing just that, because he had not even read any Pynchon at that point.) They had taken irony about as far as it could go—it was being co-opted by the culture at large anyway and was losing its bite—and these postmodernists pretty much exhausted the mine of classical literature, myth, and fables their modernist forebears had used to structure their work. Besides, they appealed mainly to highly educated readers and were representative of high culture, which in the 1980s was becoming as obsolete as spats and top hats. So for an aspiring writer like Wallace, Quo vadis? (as he asked in a special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction I asked him to edit).

He could have written precious, experimental works published by small presses and enjoyed by a chosen few. For example, Janice Galloway's The Trick Is to Keep Breathing (1989) is a brilliant dramatization of one of Wallace's signature themes (depression), but its experimental format limited its audience. With his background in mathematics he would have excelled at the rule-based fictions generated by the OuLiPo group, and in all likelihood could have produced something like Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (1978). Wallace's brilliant solution was to craft shiny new fiction that would attract the big New York publishers, appeal to a wide range of readers, yet display the kind of intellectual rigor and formal innovation that should make the cognoscenti think.

Post-postmodernism could be as brainy as postmodernism but draw its materials from pop culture rather than (or in addition to) high culture. It could leave irony to older writers who still found it a potent weapon (Gaddis, Sorrentino) and revive the compassion readers once felt for characters in novels. It could explore a wider variety of formal approaches—short fictions made up of one half of an interview, a therapy session, a dictionary entry—in a wider variety of narrative voices. Wallace's two novels were literally forward-looking, both ostensibly set a dozen or so years in the future but dramatizing what we were likely to become if we continue living the way we do now. His superb...