Infinite Loss: David Foster Wallace and the Troublesome, Inescapable \"I\" (LA Weekly)

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TL;DR

Gendy Alimurung's LA Weekly essay from the week of Wallace's death (September 2008), a personal reception piece that braids the author's own history of reading Wallace with a tour of Los Angeles bookstores sold out of his work. Its interpretive hook is biographical rather than crux-scoped: it reads the "troublesome, inescapable 'I'" — Wallace's virtuosic but self-consuming first-person voice — as poignantly of a piece with his suicide. It advances no theory about Infinite Jest's plot or design; its value is as a snapshot of first-wave reception and as a period-accurate picture of how the novel was read.

Key claims

Death, as reported that week: Wallace "hung himself this past Friday at his home in Claremont. His wife found him." — he had "been severely depressed for months, had been taking medication for years."
A period-accurate reception picture of IJ's arrival: "Infinite Jest had just come out and was the book to read", with a class marker — the "pretentious" "English-department highbrows were reading Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the lowbrows like" her, Infinite Jest. Her clinically-depressed then-boyfriend John carried the shared copy "like the Bible", "determined to get through all of its 1,079 pages", and reading it "seemed to cheer him up in a gallows-humor sort of way."
The essay's thesis about voice: Wallace was "a smart, postironic postmodernist who wielded the subjective point of" view, the run-on sentence, and the page-long footnote "with a frenetic, hilarious vengeance" — and Alimurung reads it as "both surprising and tragically not surprising that someone with those capabilities would feel trapped in the troublesome, inescapable" first-person self, wanting "to relieve himself of it forever." She cites colleague Jonathan Gold on the first person: "You have to earn the right to use it,".
Reception snapshot: bookstores across LA sold out (Borders Westwood down to one battered Broom of the System, "the novel" "he published when he was 24"); a clerk who'd "Never heard about the MacArthur" grant; at the public library, eleven people already in line for A Supposedly Fun Thing; the librarian's aside that his books were "back on the Amazon.com best-seller lists". She notes Michiko Kakutani's obituary as "glorious, appropriate, definitive".
Closing, she quotes not IJ but the title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (the cruise piece) — the "unbearably sad" luxury-cruise passage ending "I predict this'll get cut by the editor, but I need to cover some background."

Themes

Reception and grief (the bookstore run, the sales spike); the first-person voice as both virtuosity and trap; biography and depression. No novel-interpretation theme is engaged — the "inescapable I" is a reading of Wallace's authorial voice and psychology, not of Infinite Jest's cruxes.

Cross-references

No IJ scene mappings — the essay reads no passage of the novel; its one extended quotation is from A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, not Infinite Jest. Sits with the first-wave 2008 memorials as a reception datum.

Notable passages

Alimurung, reporting the death: "hung himself this past Friday at his home in Claremont. His wife found him."
On reading IJ: "Infinite Jest had just come out and was the book to read."
The highbrow/lowbrow marker: "English-department highbrows were reading Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the lowbrows like" me, Infinite Jest.
Jonathan Gold, quoted, on the first person: "You have to earn the right to use it,".
The thesis line: Wallace, "trapped in the troublesome, inescapable" first-person "I", wanting "to relieve himself of it forever."