Donald Antrim and the Art of Anxiety (New York Times Magazine)

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TL;DR

John Jeremiah Sullivan's 2014 NYT Magazine profile of the novelist Donald Antrim, whose Wallace material is one sustained biographical anecdote. When Antrim was hospitalized and terrified of being told to undergo electroconvulsive therapy, David Foster Wallace — who had had ECT himself — phoned him unbidden and spent about an hour, "one writer to another," urging him to accept the treatment and telling him he would still be there when it was over. Wallace then killed himself on Antrim's 50th birthday. The piece advances no theory about Infinite Jest; its worth here is firsthand testimony to Wallace's own ECT experience and his kindness (the extensive material on Antrim's own craft is summarized only).

Key claims

Antrim belongs, Sullivan notes, to a loosely grouped generation of "cerebral, white-male, Northern fiction makers born around 1960" — the Eugenides–Franzen–Lethem–Means–Saunders–Wallace cluster — sharing a milieu (and, in Wallace's case, close friendship via Jonathan Franzen) with Wallace.
The Wallace anecdote: in a psychiatric ward, Antrim's doctors told him he was "very sick" and "very psychotic" and proposed ECT; the prospect "destroyed him" because he "believed it would mean the end of him as a writer." Then Wallace phoned: "this is Dave Wallace. I heard you were in bad shape." "Antrim had met David Foster Wallace through their mutual friend Jonathan Franzen", Sullivan notes. Wallace said, without prompting, that if "they offer you ECT, you should do it." — and, having "undergone the procedure himself, spent at least an hour telling Antrim" "that he would still be there when it was over, that it would" still be there. Antrim: "He just kept repeating his own story," "sort of cycling through it, because he could tell it was comforting me." Afterward Antrim told his doctors he was ready.
The pull-quote the magazine set from this passage: "David Foster Wallace, who had undergone ECT himself, spent an hour telling Antrim not to" "be afraid. ... He was saying it as one writer to another, giving the only kind of" "reassurance Antrim could possibly take seriously."
Antrim underwent ECT across two hospital stays (2005 and 2010) and "submitted to the procedure 55 times" in all; "He is unequivocal in his belief that without it he would be dead." Recovery came around the eleventh shock — "The color came back on."
The death, as it touched Antrim: "Wallace committed suicide on Antrim's" 50th birthday, while "Franzen was having a party for him in" New York; Franzen learned that day and — reeling from the news, in Sullivan's phrase — broke it privately after the party to the smaller group who had known Wallace. Antrim was "definitely thinking" "of Wallace, who made that call to" him "with uncanny timing."
Antrim would say very little about the suicide — only that Wallace "did not need to die" — and it was the one time he "choked up"; Sullivan reports that Antrim "considered Wallace a very intimate ally in a specific kind of struggle to stay" alive. Antrim's own guarded read: "He did what I would not do, now, even if it were" to get that bad again.

Themes

Biography: mental illness, ECT, and survival; kindness between writers; the suicide and its timing. No Infinite Jest interpretive theme is engaged — the Wallace content here is testimony about the man, his own treatment, and his death, not about the novel.

Cross-references

memorial-salon-ito-last-days-2008 (this bucket) — corroborates that Wallace underwent electroconvulsive therapy (the Salon "last days" feature reports his summer-2008 ECT; here Antrim attests Wallace had "undergone the procedure himself," from an earlier episode). Distinct vantage: family/agent reportage there, a fellow patient's firsthand testimony here.
franzen-nymag-on-dfw-2011 (this bucket) — Franzen is the shared node: he introduced Antrim to Wallace, and it was his birthday party for Antrim that the suicide fell on.
No IJ scene mappings — the piece reads no passage of the novel.

Notable passages

The magazine's pull-quote: "David Foster Wallace, who had undergone ECT himself, spent an hour telling Antrim not to" / "be afraid.... He was saying it as one writer to another, giving the only kind of" / "reassurance Antrim could possibly take seriously."
Wallace, on the phone: "this is Dave Wallace. I heard you were in bad shape."
Wallace's advice: if "they offer you ECT, you should do it."
Antrim: "He just kept repeating his own story," / "sort of cycling through it, because he could tell it was comforting me."
Antrim on the death: Wallace "did not need to die."