Wallace had been writing The Pale King since 2000 — an excerpt also appears in The New Yorker. Max writes,

It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, "The Pale King" suggests, ultimately sets them free.

Unsurprisingly, Wallace had trouble writing about the transcendence of boredom — his editor Michael Pietsch says he "'posed himself the task that is almost the opposite of how fiction works,' which is 'leaving out the things that are not of much interest.'" Wallace described the project at one point as like "trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm." He had suffered from depression and anxiety since high school, but he stopped taking his antidepressant, Nardil, in part because, according to Max, "he thought that removing the scrim of Nardil might help him see a way out of his creative impasse."

As we now know, it didn't work. Wallace had to be hospitalized for depression, and when he got out, he was too anxious to give any new antidepressant time to work. Max's article is the first to quote Karen Green, Wallace's wife. She says she knows when her husband decided to kill himself. Of the week before his death, she says, "That Saturday was a really good day, Monday and Tuesday were not so good. He started lying to me that Wednesday." He hanged himself on Friday.

A lot of people (including myself) have written about David Foster Wallace's death, and a lot of them have used him as an example of how difficult it is to be a creative person. I now think this is misguided. While Wallace's writing troubles caused him great anxiety and sorrow (of The Pale King, he wrote, "the whole thing is a tornado that won't hold still long enough for me to see what's useful and what isn't" [...] "I've brooded and brooded about all this till my brooder is sore."), anxiety and sorrow are far from unique to writers or artists or intellectuals or people who achieve success (as Wallace did with Infinite Jest) and then worry about topping it. What we can learn from his life — insofar as it's possible or even right to learn anything from anyone else's life — comes not from the fact that he wrote and died young, but from the actual stuff that he wrote. It's possible that his depression gave him special insight into the despair that many people sometimes feel about having to live in the world, but it was the value he placed on both moral rightness and moral nuance that made him want to do something about it.

"Look, man," he said in a 1991 interview, "we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?" Quite the contrary, he believed that fiction should help people "become less alone inside." It's a tall order, but it's also the best and, oddly for Wallace, the simplest explanation of what art can do that I've ever heard.

It's difficult — or at least it's difficult for me — to write about David Foster Wallace without writing like him. Perhaps this is because, for all the annoyingness of his digressive, footnote-heavy style (especially as he got older, he himself was aware of this annoyingness), his writing encourages the constant questioning and revising of every single thought. It's not, perhaps, the healthiest way to live your mental life, but once you've had a taste of it, it's hard not to feel that it's the most just and correct way. In a now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College, Wallace said that being free "means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct
meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed." I don't agree that you will be hosed if you don't make your life a series of conscious cognitive choices. But I believe that only if you do this, and only if you are willing to examine those choices again and again and again, will you come even close to understanding the way the world and other people work — to being the kind of person who can make other people become less alone.

The Unfinished [The New Yorker]
Wiggle Room [The New Yorker]
New Yorker Publishes Part Of Unfinished Wallace Novel [Washington Post]

Krasinski’s new film, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, is a dark comedy based on a David Foster Wallace series of short stories by the same name. It tells the story of a graduate student who copes with her recent break up by interviewing “hideous” men for her dissertation. At the premiere, Krasinski said, "She's basically interviewing all these guys trying to get a lot of information about what goes on and what makes men make these decisions… I think at the end of the day it's a feminist movie which I'm really proud of, yeah." While we’re not entirely clear on how this is a feminist film — bashing men is not inherently feminist — it is refreshing to see an actor call his “feminist movie” something to be proud of. [The Star]

Bernie Mac taught us the meaning of the word "motherfucker."

Dancer Cyd Charisse had the "world's most valuable legs," but ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya charmed Russia with her view that "ballet should be imbued with life, not artificiality."

Newsman Tim Russert's death made all of NBC choke up.

Heath Ledger left behind ex-fiancee Michelle Williams, daughter Matilda, and a terrifyingly adept performance as the Joker.

Singer Yma Sumac was the only Peruvian on Hollywood's Walk of Fame.

A black woman married to a white man, Mildred Loving challenged Virginia's anti-miscegenation law and won, invalidating such laws in 15 other states as well.

Golden Girl Estelle Getty explained that "a whore, a slut, a tramp, it's all the same."

Odetta wowed Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and America with her "liberation songs."

George Carlin pointed out that "pro-life is anti-woman" and his ghost told a psychic "what a bunch of bullshit religion is."

Majel Roddenberry was the voice of Star Trek's USS Enterprise, and Trek fan Joan Winston was almost as popular as Kirk himself.

Isaac Hayes lent his genius to both Chef and Shaft.

Pinup Bettie Page (link NSFW) turned America on with "a pride in her body unusual for the times."

David Foster Wallace wrote about depression, September 11, and cruise ships with both gravity and humor.

Paul Newman was "the thinking woman's sex symbol."

Lesbian activist Del Martin wed her longtime partner in the first legal gay marriage in California; the battle she helped wage goes on in her absence.

Remember Them Well [Newsweek]

David Foster Wallace was a novelist, essayist, and short story writer, and his work is especially important for anyone who has ever been an American, a consumer, or in pain. He was at his funniest and his most accurate when he was all three. In his essay "The View From Mrs. Thompson's," he wrote about trying to buy a flag in Bloomington-Normal, Ill. in the days after 9/11:

The cold reality is that there is not a flag to be had in this town. Stealing one out of somebody's yard is clearly just out of the question. I'm standing in a fluorescent-lit KWIK-N-EZ afraid to go home. All those people dead, and I'm sent to the edge by a plastic flag. It doesn't get really bad until people come over and ask if I'm okay and I have to lie and say it's a Benadryl reaction (which in fact can happen).

"The View From Mrs. Thompson's" showcases one of Wallace's biggest talents: a keenness of observation that can only come from someone deeply uncomfortable in the world. Of his neighbors' assiduous lawn-care, he wrote, "to be honest, it's all a little creepy, especially in high summer, when nobody's out and all that green just sits in the heat and seethes." But this creeped-outness also comes with compassion. "There's a half-page photo of a student at Bloomington Central Catholic HS saying the Rosary in response" to 9/11, he wrote, "which means that some staff photographer came in and popped a flash in the face of a traumatized kid at prayer." It's this weird mix — what he might have called a sensitive-alien-comes-to-Earth-and-kind-of-like-the-locals outlook — that made him able to take on luxury cruises, the Illinois State fair, sports memoirs, and the 2000 candidacy of John McCain with both abiding love and palpable despair.*

But the real beating heart of the Wallace oeuvre is his novel Infinite Jest. This book is famous for being 1,079 pages long, and for having 96 pages of footnotes.** It should be famous for being fantastic. It's about a lot of things — a teenage tennis player, a recovering drug addict, and a videotape that kills, all set in a dystopian near-future America where years are sponsored by companies. But it has a quality that many great books have of seeming to be about you,*** a kind of narcissistic switcheroo I think Wallace would have appreciated.

I wanted to end this post with a pull-quote from Infinite Jest, something that would encapsulate its funny, sorrowful weirdness. But Infinite Jest is so excited about its own world, so packed with information and information about information, that it resists encapsulation. There's a disturbing description of depression ("It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul.") and a heart-rending bit on what it's like to be a teenager with adult athletic ambitions ("Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute. [...] What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher."), but neither of these quite sum up the genius of a book almost as complicated and messy as a life. So I'm just going to close with the novel's final line:

And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

*The word despair comes up a lot in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," Wallace's essay about his trip on the Celebrity Cruise ship Zenith, and you feel it every time.
** David Foster Wallace helped start the contemporary footnotes craze, a craze which has been much maligned but which also allows the writer to tell many more jokes than would ordinarily be possible in an otherwise serious piece. "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," for instance, includes this footnote description of a conversation about cruise ship bathroom accoutrements: "One guy in particular was fixated on the idea that somehow the shower technology could be rigged to administer fellatio if he could just get access to a "metric ratchet set" — your guess here is as good as mine."
*** I read the book when I was 18, so for me it was about adolescent angst, frustrated desire, and nerdy trivia, the three pillars of my life at the time. It also took up a quarter of my suitcase and enabled me to ignore my family for an entire vacation.

Infinite Jest [Amazon]
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments [Amazon]
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays [Amazon]
David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46 [NY Times]
Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok [NY Times]

Related: David Foster Wallace Dead of Suicide at 46 [Gawker]