David Foster Wallace remembered (Telegraph)

TL;DR

Tim Martin's near-anniversary Telegraph appreciation (August 2009), a British-press overview of Wallace's life, work, and early posthumous reception. It is chiefly biographical and reception testimony: a career survey, the emergence of "Wallace Studies" (the 2009 Liverpool conference), and a substantial preview of The Pale King built on fresh Michael Pietsch and Bonnie Nadell quotes. Its one crux-adjacent element is a re-quotation of Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram" anti-irony statement, deployed to characterize Infinite Jest as a work "obsessed with truth-telling."

Key claims

• Death: Wallace "hanged himself at his house in Claremont, California" on September 12, 2008. Of the tributes, Martin singles out Zadie Smith's, which began "He was my favourite."
• The Broom of the System (1987) was written while Wallace finished his logic thesis; agent Bonnie Nadell recalls "It wasn't like anything I'd read before," and the book was sold to Viking "for something like a handful of" "trading stamps" (Wallace's own later phrasing).
• Biographical/compositional datum: amid the Girl with Curious Hair period Wallace suffered severe depression, attempted suicide, had electroshock therapy, and "spent some time in a halfway house to get rid of addictions to drugs and alcohol." Martin states plainly: "His experiences here would feed directly into" "Infinite Jest, the gargantuan novel published in 1996 that made his reputation."
• Infinite Jest plot precis: "More than a thousand pages long, endnotes included," set in a corporate future America (the Organisation of North American Nations, ONAN), split between the Enfield Tennis Academy and a halfway house; the Eschaton game, the feral hamsters, and "a video cassette so powerfully entertaining that it causes viewers to enter a state of neural shutdown".
• The anti-irony framing: "But Infinite Jest isn't a difficult book... It is obsessed with truth-telling, and aims for" the joy and difficulty of being alive. Martin quotes Wallace: "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an" "almost exclusively negative function," and is "singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it" debunks.
• Reception: Wallace's death produced a sales boost (IJ and the essay collections hit the NYT bestseller list); Infinite Summer invited readers to tackle "the entire 1,079 pages of Wallace's" largest novel over a summer; and the academic world began "Wallace Studies" — the first posthumous conference at Liverpool University (organizer David Hering), a CUNY symposium to follow.
• The Pale King preview: Wallace worked on it "For at least 10 years before his death," taking accounting classes "from 1998 onwards" (Nadell); Pietsch, editing the drafts with Nadell and Karen Green, describes it as "an" "attempt to look at the dark matter of tedium and boredom and repetition and familiarity" to find "a path to joy." Martin quotes the novel's "Bliss" line and the 2005 Kenyon commencement ("This Is Water") as its distillation — "The really important kind of freedom," involving "discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over" and over.

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Infinite Jest is a work of anti-irony truth-telling — the constructive answer to the corrosive irony Wallace diagnosed in "E Unibus Pluram"

• Crux: eup-connection
• Stance: endorses
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Martin frames the novel as "obsessed with truth-telling" and as pursuing "remarkably old-fashioned preoccupations," against the "blasé narratives" of Wallace's contemporaries [¶ "But Infinite Jest isn't..."]
  • [author] (re-quoted) Wallace's E-Unibus-Pluram statement: "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an" "almost exclusively negative function," "critical and destructive," and "singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it" debunks [quoted inline]
• Notes: A light, popularity-axis sighting: the article endorses the familiar reading via a re-quotation of Wallace's own essay rather than arguing it from the novel's text. No in-source counter-tension. Corroborates the existing eup-connection cluster; not a new holder.

Themes

Biography and reception; anti-irony and sincerity (the truth-telling framing); addiction/recovery as compositional source; the rise of academic "Wallace Studies"; The Pale King and the ethics of attention/boredom.

Cross-references

• One of several memorial and critical pieces that read Infinite Jest as the constructive answer to the television-irony Wallace diagnosed in "E Unibus Pluram" — a British-press companion to that reading.
• No specific scene of the novel is engaged: the material here is general plot summary (O.N.A.N., the tennis academy, the halfway house, Eschaton, the lethal cartridge), not a passage-level reading.

Notable passages

• Zadie Smith, quoted: "He was my favourite."
• Bonnie Nadell on Broom: "It wasn't like anything I'd read before,".
• Martin: "His experiences here would feed directly into" / "Infinite Jest, the gargantuan novel published in 1996 that made his reputation."
• Wallace (re-quoted): "Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an" / "almost exclusively negative function," / "singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it" debunks.
• Wallace, 2005 Kenyon: "The really important kind of freedom," / "discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over" and over.
• Pietsch on The Pale King: "attempt to look at the dark matter of tedium and boredom and repetition and familiarity".