David Foster Wallace

I was out of town this weekend. Spent Friday through Sunday at the beach. This morning, I'm catching up on all the news I missed.

Friday night, David Foster Wallace apparently hung himself. He was 46. This took me completely by surprise. Wallace isn't an author I read extensively. In fact, of his seven or eight books, I've only read two and a half. I find his non-fiction work to be spectacular, but his fiction hit-or-miss. Still, there's no denying his brilliance as a writer. His diction puts other writers to shame. His long-winded sentences and footnotes (sometimes trailing on for a whole page or two) are the antithesis of my own truncated and minimalistic writing, and yet I read them enthralled. He strings words together to form sentences that, when you read them, give your brain growing pains. His writing is not always easy to read, and the payoff isn't always worth it (though, that's probably part of the point he's trying to make), but, more often than not, it is.

Oh, and he's also incredibly, incredibly funny.

If you've never read anything by David Foster Wallace, please start with this commencement speech he gave at Kenyon University in 2005. If you enjoy that, then I would recommend his introduction to the 2007 Best American Essays.