I first stumbled across his work when I read “Shipping out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” in the January 1996 issue of Harper’s. Harper’s continued to publish several of his essays over the years, such as Ticket to the Fair, a postmodern deconstruction of a midwest county fair. [sorry, these links require a subscription to go any farther] The former became the title piece of his book of essays, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” It was great fun to read how his more-or-less slack and sloppy way of living collided with the polished and buttoned-up style of a high-end cruise ship.
With the mega-novel “Infinite Jest” he really hit his stride and introduced us to the concept of footnotes-within-footnotes. By turns hilarious and tragic, it’s packed with virtuosic writing, the kind that makes you think that this guy’s more than just a writer, he’s so on top of the craft that it feels kind of strange to even call what he does “writing,” more like it’s something from a higher order altogether.
Which isn’t to say it’s a great book, or particularly especially readable. The construction is pretty loose, and it seems to end almost in mid-thought. My stock joke when someone said they’d never finished it, I’d say “That’s OK, neither did the author.” But something about it makes me think of some kind of huge 19th century novel that tries to fit the entire world in between its covers.
My old friend Anthony Cartouche highlighted a lesser-known work of Wallace’s that’s among my favorites, “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity.”
Richard Feynman said that if you can’t explain something to your mother, than you don’t really understand it. Wallace makes the obscure and difficult mathematics behind the many (you’d be surprised how many) different flavors of infinity not only easy to follow, but fun and entertaining at the same time. I never took a math class past pre-calc in high school, but I just loved this book.
The death of this writer is a great loss. Just 46 years old, he’d been suffering from depression for many years, and it finally overtook him. The terrible blackness that this malady brings to a person’s soul is nothing to be trifled with.