Emotional Truth

New Yorker image

This week's New Yorker has a biographical piece on Claremont's David Foster Wallace, who died by his own hand at his home here last September. The article recounts Wallace's life through the lens of his fiction, beginning with The Broom of the System written when he was an undergraduate at Amherst.

We fear that the circumstances of Wallace's lifetime of coping with depression and those of his death on Friday, September 12, 2008, are too tempting a subject for the biographer to ignore. The biography in The New Yorker is typical of its genre: interweaves, flashbacks, long quotes--the kind of article that gives you plenty to talk about at this week's cocktail party without any of the heavy lifting to acquire the information yourself.

While Wallace's depression and suicide command a good bit of prurient interest, his writing is of more interest to us. This week's number of the magazine also has a four-page excerpt from Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King. (to be published next year). Wallace captures with great accuracy the meanderings of a mind bored with the repetitive work of an IRS wiggler. None of us have experienced this and all of us have.

The bio is written workmanlike, with a couple of wrong notes that David Foster Wallace would have revised away, or probably not have written in the first place. One refers to "an old girlfriend" of Wallace's when the writer means "a former girlfriend".

The writer has done his homework and his interviews and gives us the obligatory account of Wallace's end. The two or three closing paragraphs are superfluous to this, the one that illuminates a dark truth: Wallace's wife, visual artist Karen "Green believes that she knows when Wallace decided to try again to kill himself. She says of September 6th, 'That Saturday was a really good day. Monday and Tuesday were not so good. He started lying to me that Wednesday...'"