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"FacebookPinterest\n\n At one of the four public memorial services that followed David Foster Wallace's death by suicide in 2008, the writer George Saunders described Wallace with a pun that he would have appreciated: \"He was a wake-up artist.\" As a six-word biography, that's hard to beat. Other writers of Wallace's generation might move us more or alienate us less, but no one plugged us into a high-voltage socket quite like the author of Infinite Jest. Suddenly there was no excuse for being bored. The world was too outlandishly funny and terrifying.\n\n Wallace's fans are more diverse than one might expect, but he seemed to hold a special appeal for a certain demographic that I belong to\u2014under 40, overeducated, and given to a sadness with no ready explanation. Tapping into the primal insecurity and loneliness that outlasts adolescence, he showed us we were all in the same fix, even the guys who kicked ass at tennis, and it was all OK, or not OK. Encountering his work for the first time was awesome, in the true definition of the word. It opened you up.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n __\n\n D.T. Max, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has done a lot to open up Wallace in his new biography, which is necessary reading if you care about DFW or the cultural moment that shaped him and then felt his impact. If you imagine him as a character in a novel, Wallace was totally implausible. He was a top-tier writer who dressed like a wastoid, nursed a monster pot habit, and tended to live on Pop-Tarts and daytime TV. He charmed his classes by carrying his teaching notes in a pink Care Bears folder and talking a lot about The Simpsons, but he zealously marked up his students' writing and called them out in front of the class for wasting their talents. He wrote under the influence of the brainiest and zaniest novelists of the past and became a symbol of the simplest moral wisdom. Max doesn't strip out all the strange from that story, as no one could or should, but he makes Wallace begin to cohere and become more approachable, more real.\n\n Max doesn't try to get into the ring with the feints and jabs and knockout punch lines of Wallace's style, presumably because that would be stupid. Instead he keeps his prose quiet\u2014maybe to a fault, at times\u2014and lays out a narrative and a portrait that's more selective than most biographies and substantially more engrossing.\n\n Bound up in the pleasure of this book is quite a bit of discomfort, particularly for a DFW admirer. Wallace left considerable emotional wreckage in his wake, especially among women he dated. He definitely fibbed in his nonfiction to juice the story, as he hinted and others alleged. And he lied in his personal and professional life, sometimes merely to guard his privacy, at other times for more suspect reasons.\n\n The larger pain, though, comes from watching Wallace suffer through the most debilitating psychological anguish. Wallace in high comic form is exhilarating to read\u2014his Harper's editor said that when his essay about a Caribbean cruise arrived, \"It was very clear to us that we had pure cocaine on our hands\"\u2014but any attentive reader had to be worried about Wallace, too. He described the vicious circle and gathering panic of depression so vividly, and surely at some cost. Being in crisis was, he told an interviewer, \"as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion.\"\n\n On the other side of the wrenching story Max tells, however, is a gift to the reader. This biography cuts through both the mythic aura surrounding Wallace and the broader clich\u00E9 of the tortured genius. Wallace was an exceptionally brilliant writer and an outsize personality, but Max reveals that at bottom he had no special quality that surpasses our understanding. He wanted attention but didn't cope with it well; he did some things he must have hoped no one would discover; he sought out love and often made a mess of it. Is this sounding familiar? Max shows that at the center of Wallace's vast influence there was not an idol but a person, a person we should be glad to get to know.\n\nEvan Hughes is the author of Literary Brooklyn. He's on Twitter."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/david-foster-wallace-biography-d-t-max>