Norman Green

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I never heard of the guy until I read in the NY Daily News that someone had ripped him off  for a commencement address somewhere so I thought I’d check the guy out. The work in question is titled ‘This is Water.’ It turned out to embody much of what I love from a good writer: short, incandescent, ethereal, spiritual and perhaps most important, shorn of any inessential bullshit. The man knew what he wanted to say, and like a good boxer, he batted your defenses aside, opened you up and then he nailed you with it.

Beautiful. Perfect. Incredible.

Wow, I thought, does this guy have chops. So, I picked up a few of his longer works…

Oy…

I am not a critic. I hate criticizing other writers because I know what kind of effort goes into the writing of a book, I know what it takes. Maybe you do, too. And when a writer, (including this one) tells you that he doesn’t care what the critics say, he is full of shit. All this dithering is, I suppose, my way of apologizing to Wallace, who is not around to defend himself, for the following:

The guy was a great technician. He could take you back to your childhood, make you feel the feelings and smell the smells all over again, he had the gift for sketching a character in a paragraph or two, for showing you how the guy thought, who he was, where he lived.

And yet…

It’s hard for me to believe that Wallace ever got around to writing about the things he really cared about. I’m not saying he wasn’t good at what he was doing because clearly, the man was gifted, but never in anything else of his that I have read did he get close to the heights he scaled so beautifully in ‘This is Water.’

You can hear something similar in musicians sometimes, to me it’s like the difference between Clarence Clemmons and Branford Marsalis.  Marsalis is technically superior, there is probably no doubt of that, by any quantifiable measure you would have to say he is the better horn player, but Clemmons could tear open a note, he could smack you in the face with all of the raw emotion in a song and I never heard Marsalis do that.

One final note: David Foster Wallace pulled his own plug some time back. You hate to hear that about anyone but I hate it most of all when an artist does it, particularly when you get the feeling that he had a lot more to give. And as someone who has had to deal with more than his own share of mental illness in friends and family I can tell you for sure that sometimes depression is not existential angst, not really. Sometimes it is a biochemical malady that must be treated biochemically.

No comments yet.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.