- from Nina MacLaughlin’s Boston Phoenix piece on David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King
I avoided reading her piece until I finished the book itself. Now that I’m done, I quoted her words because I agree with them. Wallace’s unfinished final novel doesn’t have a mean bone in its body. That’s how I read it anyway.
Wallace sometimes gave us such freaks that they seem, at first, to exist only for us to laugh at. But there’s something about the way he let his characters be themselves — in all their pathological sweatiness or officious helpfulness or whatever else — that primes me to reserve judgment, to hang out for as long as it takes for three-dimensional humanity to reveal itself in what at first seems to be a cardboard cutout of a person.
There’s a magic to the way Wallace blended pitiless description with pitiable detail. Look at this sentence: “The rodential man, whose aura was timid but kind, a sad kind man who lived in a cube of fear, had his hat in his lap.”
When I say stuff like “doesn’t have a mean bone in its body,” when I agree with Nina about the “heart, the sincerity,” it’s only honest to make clear that I’m talking about the writing; I didn’t know the writer one bit.
Jonathan Franzen knew him. I’m about to quote Franzen. It’s not anything you need to read unless you, like me, sometimes fall into cheapening Wallace’s work by baselessly idealizing Wallace himself.
Here’s Franzen:
He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend. People who had never read his fiction, or had never even heard of him, read his Kenyon College commencement address in the Wall Street Journal and mourned the loss of a great and gentle soul. A literary establishment that had never so much as short-listed one of his books for a national prize now united to declare him a lost national treasure. Of course, he was a national treasure, and, being a writer, he didn’t belong to his readers any less than to me. But if you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more lovable—funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies—than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chosen the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.
The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms.
Franzen’s full piece was in the 4/18/11 New Yorker. Only subscribers get to read it for free online. For everybody else, there’s always the library or a dentist’s waiting room.
