Thoughts on David Foster Wallace and ‘The End of the Tour’

the movie is basically a debate about one’s authentic self versus the self that worries about how an audience assembles a false you from your fiction, and what they have read about you turns you into a construction of who they think you are.

.. all of which the movie strongly suggests was probably absolute agony for David who keeps naively fretting about his real self being co-opted by a fake self, as if a man as intelligent as Wallace would really care one way or the other, but the movie insists this was the case which perversely reveals Wallace to be the world-class narcissist so many people (even Jonathan Franzen, a close friend, and Mary Karr, an ex) always assumed he was.

.. The Wallace estate as well as his editor have disavowed the film not because it gets anything factually wrong but because it does something that Wallace would never have wanted: It turns him into a character.

.. The sincerity and earnestness he began trafficking in seemed to some of us a ploy, a contradiction — not totally fake, but not totally real either, a kind of performance art, sensing the shift toward earnestness in the culture and accommodating himself to it.

The Grunge American Novel: New York Times Review

Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so manically energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone.

.. The smaller of his two dogs, a black Labrador retriever mix named Jeeves, keeps trying to climb into his lap and lick his lips, a gesture not unrelated to the fact that Wallace is eating a bologna sandwich. ”They pretend they’re kissing you,” Wallace says of his dogs, ”but they’re really mining your mouth for food.”

.. Jonathan Franzen, a fellow novelist and confidant, says Wallace is like many serious writers who, by necessity, spend most of their time alone. ”You tend to develop the personality that corresponds to that solitude,” Franzen says.

This helps explain why sudden fame is often more awkward for a serious writer than for a serious actor, who does his work in public and is accustomed to being the subject, rather than the agent, of observation. An actor can mug his way through a fairly long string of parties and fashion shows before he is accused of overexposure and ridiculed; a writer hits that threshold sooner. ”Then his subsequent work isn’t looked at directly, but through the glare of all that publicity,”

.. Think David Letterman with a postgraduate degree and diction, and you get at least some idea of the sensibility.

.. Wallace is intentionally vague on this period of his life, and what he divulges sometimes contradicts the recollections of friends. He says he never formally entered a recovery program; Alice Turner says he did. He mentions a single suicide scare and subsequent stay in a psychiatric ward; friends allude to more than one.

.. Before moving back to Illinois, he became involved for a time with the writer Mary Karr, author of ”The Liar’s Club,” and had her name tattooed on his upper arm. He blames himself for the brevity of his attachments. ”I’m massively selfish about my work, and I don’t seem to be able to be very polite or considerate about other people’s feelings,” he says.

.. Back in Illinois, he began to attend Sunday services at various churches around town — there is something about religious faith, which was missing from his rearing by two atheists, that entices and calms him — and he formed his closest social relationship with an older, married couple, Doug and Erin Poag. They met at a Mennonite house of worship.

Could the Internet Age See Another David Foster Wallace?

he remarked to his wife, as they were moving computer equipment into their house, “thank God I wasn’t raised in this era.” Having written his first big stories on a Smith Corona typewriter, Wallace disliked digital drafts and e-publishing in general. (“Digital=abstract=sterile, somehow,” he wrote to Don DeLillo in 2000.)

.. And he insisted that Infinite Jest, for all its obsession with commercialized communication and connection, was not about the web.

.. And when the Chicago Tribune asked whether Infinite Jest was meant to reflect life in the Internet age,the author rejected the reading. “This is sort of what it’s like to be alive,” Wallace insisted. And “you don’t have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way.” (Another reading, however: “The book is not about electronic culture,” Sven Birkerts, writing in the magazine then known as The Atlantic Monthly, noted, “but it has internalized some of the decentering energies that computer technologies have released into our midst.”)

.. We are just now figuring out what that might mean when it comes to the interplay of commercialism and human connection—the relationship that preoccupied Wallace in his writing.

.. We have gone, after all, through much of human history celebrating people not for who they were, but for what they accomplished and contributed: Darwin’s theory. Newton’s law. And that has meant that we have tended to prioritize the things people contributed over the kinds of people they were. Was Shakespeare kind of a douche? Was Jane Austen sort of awkward? Was Wittgenstein a total delight at dinner parties?

We don’t know, really. But that is, perhaps, simply an accident of history. Being an author in the age of Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr might mean something very different from what being an author meant in, and to, previous eras—something more conversational, more collaborative, more communal. The death of the author, if you buy into that stuff, may be giving way to something at once more hopeful and more sad: the diffusion of the author.