David Foster Wallace, the author best known for his 1996 novel ”Infinite Jest,” was found dead in his home, according to police. He was 46.
Wallace’s wife found her husband had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m. Friday, said Jackie Morales, a records clerk with the Claremont Police Department.
While I’ve yet never made it more than 150 pages into Infinite Jest, I am a big of Wallace’s two essay collections, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. While I won’t really argue anyone who claims that DFW might have been, perhaps, something like pretentious, I very much liked that he wrote essays in the spirit that they were, in fact, a viable literary form (not that he’s unique in this, of course). And while I can admit further that his bag of tricks might, perhaps, have been not as deep as he’d have us believe, I still liked his writing. I still think he’s funnier than than David Sedaris, less self-absorbed than Jonathon Franzen (whose essays are also very good), and a better writer hands-down than that hack Augusten Burroughs.
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
28 July 2009 at 1:07 am
Bad idea to insult a writer whose work you have not read. Worse when the writer is dead. Shame.