Westward the Course of the Empire Makes Its Way

(Author’s note: I finally have figured out how to reinstall the internet and can now return to my normal blogging schedule. The official relaunch of Battling the Current will be on Sunday so expect many bells and whistles and one of those bouncy castles then. What follows is something that I have been meaning to write since I read the news on Sunday morning.)

For the most part I don’t idolize anyone. It’s even tough for me to say I admire someone. My criteria for admiration is that they have to perform at a level that I know that even on my best day I could not match and, arrogant bastard that I am, there are very few people who can ever pass that bar. To be slightly less obnoxious, I don’t think that I am better than anyone else and there are only a few people who I consider to be better than me.

One of those people is the author that I have admired the most over the past decade: David Foster Wallace. I have told people that he is the writer that I wish that I could be. He is even the mathematician that I wish that I could be. That was the first thing that impressed me about him; I could accept the fact that he was a better writer that I was but the fact that he was also better at math than me was shocking. The fact that there existed a writer who was technically brilliant from both a literary and, well, technical, perspective astounded me.

The first book of his that I read was his masterpiece: Infinite Jest. As I said at the time, if you ever pick up a book that is a thousand pages long, contains over 100 pages of footnotes and has a subtitle “A comedy” you know that in the end the joke is on you. And I did read the entire book in a month and found it to be an amazing discussion of pop culture and tennis and the crumbling of families. I was then even more impressed with his short story collection “Girl with Curious Hair”.

The more I read about David the more I found out how similar we were. We both grew up in Illinois and he went to high school just outside of Urbana. We both had a love for numbers along with a love for words and he pursued degrees in both while I lacked the courage to pursue my dream of writing for a living. While I was at Illinois he was a professor at Illinois State and while there was no way I would have known that someone so brilliant was teaching there just that fact alone made me wonder about my choice of schools. When he won the Genius grant I cheered because he was one of the first people that I admired to win the award. Even though I knew that my talent could not match his and that I could not work in the meta-fiction realm as well as he could whenever I dreamt of being a writer I dreamt of being David Foster Wallace.

I truly believe that he is the greatest writer of my generation. When you read Infinite Jest you have to take a step back because it is written in a way that you never thought a novel could be written. It breaks all of the rules of narrative structure yet in the end it all makes perfect sense. Even his non-fiction with its detached intellectual analysis of events ranging from the Illinois State Fair to the Adult Video Awards leaves you stunned by its brilliance. I have found no one that has matched his brilliance as a writer and I don’t know if I ever will.

While waiting for my movers to arrive on Sunday I was checking the news headlines and saw that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide over the weekend. It was a shock to me in a year that has seen way too many shocks. I’m saddened for his family and for his friends and for all of us who will be deprived of all of the words that were yet to be written. But while unpacking this week I pulled out all of my copies of his work, my collection of everything that he has ever published, and placed it on the top shelf of my bookcase next to my copies of Joyce and Shakespeare. Because that is where David Foster Wallace belongs and at least in my home that is where he shall stay.