Be Careful For What You Wish For: The Tragic Story of David Foster Wallace

Thoughts After Reading ‘Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: The Life of David Foster Wallace’ by D.T. Max

I’m probably one of the few writers you’ll ever meet who doesn’t consider David Foster Wallace an influence. I’ve only read one book, the short story collection The Girl With Curious Hair, which I highly enjoyed. I have a couple of others on the ‘to be read’ pile and eventually I’ll get around to reading them.

For many writers, especially young writers, David Foster Wallace is a virtual god. His impact and influence on many literary aspirants is enormous and if you read only some of the novels which have followed in his wake, that influence is clear for all to see. However, for me, he’s never had that sort of impact. Nevertheless Wallace’s story and impact on literary culture has always intrigued me.

For years I’ve listened to writers who actively sought out some sort of ‘Literary Messiah’ and for some, Wallace fits the bill, a highly ambitious author who struggled with many doubts about his own work, numerous troubles in his personal life, and the creative blocks he struggled to overcome.

I learned more about Wallace while reading D.T. Max’s Every Love Story is A Ghost Story: The Life of David Foster Wallace in its entirety one evening. There was a lot I could relate to in his story but also a lot I couldn’t, since our respective positions in the grand scheme of the literary world couldn’t be further apart (I’m barely a blip on anyone’s radar). His story, ultimately, is a tragic one — that of a highly ambitious artist whose psychological issues compounded his creative ones.

Wallace’s creative process fascinated me. I found his high ambitions admirable but also the very thing which ultimately destroyed him. A highly literate and educated young man, he approached the page with the specific intent on making an impact, of being up there along side his own literary heroes. Here was a man who wrestled with his respect for the avant-garde literature of the 1960s and 1970s — Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, John Barth —  and his love for the so-called ‘genre fiction’, mostly thrillers, which he devoured as much as the more ‘highbrow’ material available to a creative writer. Add his philosophical influences into the mix — Jacques Derrida and Ludwig Wittgenstein — what you have is a young creative artist seemingly at conflict with these two diametrically opposed influences crashing together and his struggle to reconcile them.

Throughout the book one reads excerpts from his personal letters to other literary figures —  His good friend Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, among others — documenting his creative dilemmas and his struggle to find his footing. In addition to this, he was battling depression, and a portrait emerges of a highly ambitious, highly talented creative force seemingly ‘blocked’. His struggles to write were not easy on him, despite the fact that he produced a hell of a lot of work in his short life, both fiction and non-fiction. He was a young man who was always writing, very serious, but simultaneously struggling with his ‘seriousness’ in the literary world.

Due to the success of his first novel, The Broom of The System in 1987, when Wallace was only 25 years old, he was already being touted as ‘The Next Big Thing’ (negative reviews of his first book as ‘derivative of Pynchon and DeLillo’ notwithstanding).Viewed as an alternative to the literary ‘brat pack’ (Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz), tremendously high, and perhaps unrealistic expectations were thrust upon him, expectations he himself had trouble sorting out. On one hand he was being served up as an alternative to the reigning new fiction of the day, but at the same time was influenced by it, his debt to Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero not willingly acknowledged but present nonetheless. He was a young creative writer with high ambitions, conflicted and unsure of himself, wrestling with his own creative and personal demons, trying to find a voice in which he was entirely comfortable with.

Throughout his short career, there were his champions and his detractors, and his rising fame and all the attention bestowed upon him contributed to his creative troubles, rejecting all the glowing attention with one hand — such as finding his publisher’s statements about his writing being ‘a literary event’ highly uncomfortable — but embracing it wholeheartedly with the other. He was headlong into the creme de la creme of the Literary World, somewhere he aspired to be but didn’t know how to handle it once he got there. He was now ‘up there’, his name hardly ever mentioned without other literary greats such as Pynchon and DeLillo in the same breath.

The circumstances surrounding his 2008 suicide, as well as the failings in his personal life,  are well known and not needed to be documented here, nor am I interested in doing that. I walked away from this book feeling sad that such an immense talent never saw its full potential. A talent which could have gone on to do truly amazing things had he been able to shed all the trappings which accompany the ‘serious literary world’. I had to wonder, had he been able to reconcile his creative conflicts and comfortably settle into his own, unique path, would he still be with us today? Hard to say, and I am certainly in no position to say, but I wondered if all the attention thrust upon him to be the ‘next big thing’ in literature, coupled with his own psychological struggles, wasn’t the deadly cocktail which led to his unfortunate suicide, or was it something inevitable?

No matter what the circumstances actually were, and no matter what you may think of his work, a unique voice in literature was lost. It is also a cautionary tale for those who are serious about their art. The desire for fame comes with its own set of problems, and it reminds me of the old adage:

Be careful for what you wish for. You just might get it.

Every Love Story is A Ghost Story: The Life of David Foster Wallace is available here.