IJ study archive

It Doesn't Mean We're Wasting Our Time: Reflections on a postcard from David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

A 2012 Guernica personal essay in which the novelist Frank Cassese reflects on a postcard David Foster Wallace sent him in 2004. Cassese, a struggling young writer who had been galvanized into the vocation by reading Infinite Jest in 1996 ("nearly mystical … as close to epiphany as anything I have encountered"), wrote to Wallace asking him to read his manuscript; Wallace declined by postcard, kindly ("only because when the stack reaches a certain height, I decline to add to it"), advising him not to despair: "Lots of us don't publish, though--it doesn't mean we're wasting our time." Cassese first read the refusal as patronizing, then, after Wallace's suicide, as compassion and a coded truth that publication is not the promised land. The essay advances no reading of the novel; its value is a reception testimony (IJ's generational impact on aspiring writers) and a documented instance of Wallace's private kindness to strangers.

Key claims

  • IJ as conversion experience. Cassese received Infinite Jest as a 1996 birthday gift, approached it with "reserved and suspicious interest," and found the reading "nearly mystical … as close to epiphany as anything I have encountered." "It changed my life, literally, providing me with the final thrust I was waiting for" toward the writing vocation — the book's author "was speaking to me and my generation in ways few others even attempted to". (A reception datapoint for IJ's effect on young readers, amid the 1996 hype: Newsday's "next heavyweight of American fiction," Kakutani's virtuoso "who can seemingly do anything.")
  • The correspondence. In fall 2004, two unpublished novels and "a shoebox of rejection letters" in, Cassese wrote to Wallace care of Little, Brown asking him to read his second novel.
  • The postcard. Months later a Dodger Stadium postcard arrived: Wallace declined, "but only because when the stack reaches a certain height, I decline to add to it", called it "no cause for despair," advised sending sample chapters to agents, and promised to think of Cassese "in a supportive, avuncular way." The line Cassese fixes on: "Lots of us don't publish, though--it doesn't mean we're wasting our time."
  • The reversal of meaning. Cassese first read the postcard as condescending; after Wallace's September 2008 suicide he re-read it as "a sincere gentleness" and "serious compassion for an unknown and struggling writer", a coded message that publication "was not the promised land I thought it was" — the reminder that "creation is its own reward, that the project of writing is its own gift, provides its own consolation."
  • The survivor's vertigo. Wallace's death "cast a serious pall over my mood for weeks": if a writer of "unparalleled" genius "could not find enough solace in his work and success to fend off the demons of life," Cassese asks, "what hope was there for someone like me?" He notes his awareness that "clinical depression is a chemical thing" and that medication was a factor.

Themes

Reception and fandom (IJ's galvanizing effect on a generation of would-be writers); the ethic of creation as its own reward against publication-as-validation; Wallace's private kindness and the parasocial bond between a writer and a reader who has never met him; the shadow his suicide cast over admirers; mental illness acknowledged from the outside.

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • On first reading IJ: "The experience of reading this novel was nearly mystical for me, as close to epiphany as anything I have encountered."
  • On its effect: "It changed my life, literally, providing me with the final thrust I was waiting for".
  • The postcard's refusal: "but only because when the stack reaches a certain height, I decline to add to it."
  • The postcard's consolation: "Lots of us don't publish, though--it doesn't mean we're wasting our time."
  • The reader's distance: "I'd never met David Foster Wallace. I'd never talked to him. I'd seen him at a few readings and that was the extent of it."
  • The lesson kept: "creation is its own reward, that the project of writing is its own gift, provides its own consolation."