Grieving DFW: Karen Green's Bough Down (Boston Review)

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TL;DR

Nicole Rudick's 2014 Boston Review notice of Bough Down (Siglio, 2013), the artist Karen Green's fragmentary prose-and-collage lament for her husband, David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in 2008. This is a review of Green's book, not a piece about Infinite Jest: its yield is biographical and reception testimony — the bare facts of Wallace's death as his widow recorded them, and the placement of Bough Down in a lineage of oblique grief writing (Didion, Barthes, Anne Carson). It advances no theory about the novel and engages none of its interpretive questions.

Key claims

The book's occasion: "In 2008, Karen Green's husband committed suicide. They had been married almost four years" — he a writer, she an artist. Rudick treats Bough Down as "as much about her odyssey through psych wards and medications after the suicide as it is about sorting through the suicide itself."
The identity Green cannot escape is that of the famous writer's widow — "the designated survivor" — which Rudick frames as both central and incidental: "her husband was David Foster Wallace. This fact is both central to Bough Down and incidental to it." Strangers e-mail her to say "Nobody knew you before your husband took his life."
Green refuses the elegiac register: "I always feel like saying he died is letting him get away with something," and Rudick notes "there is no blush in her account of Wallace's death by hanging."
The most-quoted line, and the one biographical fact the piece attests most starkly: "I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down" — i.e. Green found Wallace hanged and cut him down herself. Echoed later: "The policeman asks, Why did I cut you down," "Because I thought and still think maybe."
Rudick's critical placement: Bough Down belongs with the oblique, "elliptical and bitterly lyrical" grief literature that approaches death "sideways" — Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Barthes's Mourning Diary, Anne Carson's Nox — against Didion's own observation that grief's "literature seem[s] remarkably spare."
Green's own compositional method as Rudick reads it: collage and reordered memory as Green's way of "re-authoring factual data" to create new narratives, building "a code she can decipher"; "When the person you love dies," Green has said, "life becomes another code, a language" "that you don't understand."
No pat resolution: "I can't wrap this up," Green admits at the book's close; the review ends on her lines "There are other things to do besides being man's best friend," she writes: "One can sit around and compose, for example."

Themes

Biography and grief; the writer's death and its aftermath as recorded by the survivor; art as a way of ordering loss. None of the novel's interpretive themes are engaged — the piece's subject is Green's memoir and Wallace the person, not the fiction.

Cross-references

karen-green-2011 — Tim Adams's 2011 Guardian interview with Green, timed to The Pale King. Distinct piece, same subject: the Adams interview is a portrait of Green's art and her account of the posthumous manuscript; this is a review of her grief memoir Bough Down. They overlap only in the widow-and-artist material (the "forgiveness machine" is Adams's focus; the color-as-forgiveness remark surfaces here too) and in the bare biographical facts of the death.

Notable passages

Rudick: "her husband was David Foster Wallace. This fact is both central to Bough Down and incidental to it."
Green: "I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down"
Green: "I always feel like saying he died is" / "letting him get away with something"
Green: "The policeman asks, Why did I cut you down," / "Because I thought and still think maybe."
Strangers, per Green: "Nobody knew you before your husband took his life."
Green: "When the person you love dies," "life becomes another code, a language" "that you don't understand."
Green: "I can't wrap this up."