Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

David Foster Wallace, looking pensive

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max is a tremendously sad book, and not just because we know how it is going to end. We all know that writers struggle with self-confidence and motivation, but it seems hard to believe that anyone struggled more than David Foster Wallace. Even as he was writing Infinite Jest, possibly the defining book of my generation (if not, ironically, his) he was questioning every aspect of his project. I remember reading Infinite Jest--indeed, I think I wrote a blog on it--and wishing that he had provided a more satisfactory conclusion that told us what actually happened to his characters, but even at the time I understood that his intention was to make us uncomfortable and show us that we are as addicted to certain narrative conventions (beginning, middle, end) as his characters are to illicit substances or twelve-step programs or television.

It is terrifying to realize that an author this good suffered so much for his art. Or, in other words, he was a certifiable genius who published a pretty decent novel a year out of college and a magnum opus around my age. If he had it this hard, what chance for the rest of us?

I feel a particular affinity to Wallace because I remember watching his Charlie Rose interview and recognizing how incredibly uncomfortable he was with the spotlight and how unbearably painful it was to watch. Also, he is the only person I know to have stated flat out the dilemma between having to teach to earn a living, but being unable to write due to having to teach (although he was apparently an incredibly dedicated teacher, much more so than I). I also profoundly respect the candor with which he always discussed his mental illness, including his experiences with ECT, which I know only one other person (Martha Manning) to have written about publicly.

Max doesn't really attempt to analyze Wallace's work, and that's probably a good thing--a task better left to a cadre of graduate students--but his insights into Wallace himself are excellent. He understands that Wallace felt more or less like a freak his whole life, someone who simply couldn't fit it, did not play well with others. He also understand that Wallace, like many young recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship ("Genius Grant") was paralyzed by the need to live up to the honor. I think this happens more often than we know. Max is also very sensitive in describing Wallace's relationship (whether real or imagined) with author Mary Karr, recognizing that Wallace was forever trying to create his own family and that he was convinced that they belonged together, even if she wasn't.

The end of the biography is, of course, gut wrenching. We know all along how it will end, but that makes it no less horrifying when we see Wallace start lying to his love ones and realize that he's trying to buy himself time to kill himself. Unfortunately, no one understood Wallace's desperation until it was too late, and he hung himself, much, much, too young. I was at 57th Street Books in Hyde Park last week and on their front table there are new books by Eugenides and several other people of Wallace's era. But of course there's nothing new by him...just this biography, which is hardly the same thing.