SPL Reads!

I opened an email from my brother this morning, one that made me sigh and start my day with a heart a little heavier than the one I woke up with, even on a Monday morning.  It seems that the world became a poorer place on Friday.  Acclaimed author David Foster Wallace took his own life at the age of 46, throwing in the towel after a nearly life-long battle with depression that had become severe in recent months according to Wallace’s father.

Wallace was one of the most acclaimed writers of the last two decades, an acclaim owed mostly to his magnum opus Infinite Jest, a massive novel with enough end- and footnotes to occupy a novel themselves.  Infinite Jest is a sprawling, non-linear novel, filled with an outrageous cast of characters and a whirling vortex of a plot.  The only possible comparison I can offer is Thomas Pynchon’s outrageous masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow.  Wallace weaves together a number of disparate narratives to tell a story of life in the near future, a time when corporations sponsor entire calendar years and a large portion of what was once the United States has become one giant landfill.  It is a story that involves an academy of tennis prodigies, a halfway house for recovering drug addicts, a group of wheelchair-bound French-Canadian terrorists, and the strange history of a film so entertaining that it causes its viewers to become zombified catatonics after only brief viewings.  I was absolutely enamoured with Infinite Jest when I first read it two years ago.  Once I started that doorstop of a book, I couldn’t be parted from it.  Every free moment became an excuse to read a few more pages.  Lunch breaks were devoted to reading it.  Sleep was lost.  It was that good.

Wallace was also a gifted essayist.  The titular essay of his collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again never fails to bring a smile to my face. In recent years, Wallace was a creative writing professor at Pomona College, where by most accounts he was a favorite professor of the creative writing department.