Jonathan Franzen on David Foster Wallace (New York / Vulture)

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TL;DR

A short 2011 New York Magazine / Vulture blog post by Willa Paskin flagging Jonathan Franzen's New Yorker essay "Farther Away" — his "rich, raw, complicated remembrance" of his friend David Foster Wallace, published the week The Pale King appeared. This is not the Franzen essay itself but a write-up that frames it and reproduces one long excerpt: Franzen's angry, grief-stricken reading of the suicide as an act "calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most" and a choice of "the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him." It advances no theory about Infinite Jest — its testimony is biographical, about the man and his death, given as Franzen attests it and as Paskin excerpts it.

Key claims

The framing: Franzen's essay is set on "a remote island in the South Pacific," where he went bird-watching and to reread Robinson Crusoe, having promised himself that "After I'd finished my book project, I would allow myself" "to feel more than fleeting grief and enduring anger at David's death."
Paskin reads Franzen's central, painful observation as being that "Foster Wallace's suicide was a way for him to give" "himself to his readers and not his loved ones."
The reproduced Franzen excerpt (his own words, quoted by Paskin): "He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I" "loved a person who was mentally ill." "The depressed person then killed himself, in a way" "calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left" "feeling angry and betrayed." Franzen says the suicide "took the person away from us and made him into a very" public legend — and that the real Wallace was "more loveable" but also more "dubious" than "the benignant and morally" "clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him," so it was "hard not to feel wounded" "by the part of him that had chose the adulation of strangers over the love of the people" closest to him.
A vivid biographical anecdote of the friendship: Wallace once inscribed a book to Franzen by tracing "the outline of an erection" "so huge that it ran off the page," annotated with a little arrow and a remark that the scale was 100 percent.

Themes

Biography, friendship, and grief; the suicide and its effect on those closest to him; the gap between the public "saint" and the private, more complicated man. No Infinite Jest interpretation is engaged.

Cross-references

No IJ scene mappings — the piece reads no passage of the novel; it is about Wallace the person and Franzen's grief.
Sits with the biographical memorials (the Salon "last days" feature, the Lipsky Rolling Stone account) as testimony about the death and its aftermath, from the vantage of Wallace's closest writer-friend.

Notable passages

Franzen's promise: "After I'd finished my book project, I would allow myself" / "to feel more than fleeting grief and enduring anger at David's death."
Franzen: "He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I" / "loved a person who was mentally ill."
Franzen: "The depressed person then killed himself, in a way" / "calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left" / "feeling angry and betrayed."
Franzen: it was hard not to feel wounded "by the part of him that had chose the adulation of strangers over the love of the people" closest to him.
The friendship anecdote: Wallace traced "the outline of an erection" "so huge that it ran off the page".