Soon after Infinite Jest came out, when I was still in high school, I spotted a hardcover copy of the massive tome on my father’s bookshelf. My father had talked about the big writers of his generation—about Gaddis and, of course, Pynchon—but he hadn’t, as yet, told me about anyone younger. I can actually remember asking him about Infinite Jest (asking what the book was about and if he’d read it and how much he’d liked it), and he told me he bought it because it was remaindered and looked interesting and he thought, one day, he might start it. He told me he’d done just that, started it, and that it was funny as all hell. He told me I should read it, so I tried. I got hundreds of pages in—I was only fifteen or sixteen at the time, but pretty nerdy—and then, terrified that I was stuck in the middle of this wonderful dark sea of more than one thousand pages, shut the book. I came back to it, but only after reading Broom of the System and some of his non-fiction. Still, though, I couldn’t get through it. It frightened me.
It was strange, for me, to see a book set in Tucson—I hadn’t read Barbara Kingsolver at the time, and, at be honest, I wasn’t sure if there was anything worth writing about in Southern Arizona. I was wrong, of course: the scene on ‘A’ mountain, with shadows and wheelchairs and assassin conspiracies, feels wholly appropriate for this strange, strange city. If there were more French-Canadians in town I might begint to worry.
During my freshman year of college, here at the U of A, Wallace came to read. I knew, by then, that he’d gone to the U of A for an MFA (something I didn’t really understand back then). I convinced my dad to go with me to the large auditorium in the Modern Languages building. My father had told me stories, about seeing John Hawkes and William Gass at one reading back in the ’70s, and this was the first time I’d be seeing someone large and famous. I was anxious and certain that there wouldn’t be any seats unless we got there super early. Of course, the place was full of people, but it was nowhere near capacity. I thought, how in the heck couldn’t there be more people in love with this guy? He’s hilarious and brilliant and capable of writing breathtakingly sad sentences, so why wasn’t it standing room only?
He started his reading with a bandanna wrapped around his forehead; at the time, I’d only ever seen gang members wear bandannas. I’d forgotten about their practical application, though, which was to catch all the sweat that comes pouring off a person when they’re in the middle of exerting intense amounts of energy. Five minutes into the reading, he was already using his shirt sleeves to supplement the cloth of the bandanna. He was reading, I believe, a portion of a story about an African boy in a remote village, and at the beginning of the reading he’d mentioned that there were a couple words in the story he didn’t know how to pronounce. Everyone laughed, and my dad just rolled his eyes and leaned over to me to say, “He doesn’t even know the words. What a show-off, using things he can’t even say.” I thought this was right, primarily because my father’s ideas, especially about literature, were like scripture to me. I thought Wallace was cocky and arrogant because my father thought he was cocky and arrogant. I laughed throughout the reading, self-conscious enough not to enjoy it too thoroughly in front of my father, who laughed every now and again. After the reading, I was too embarrassed to show my enthusiasm for Wallace, so I didn’t join the long line for autographs. He smiled a lot during the reading, and laughed at some of his own jokes, and seemed to be enjoying himself. He didn’t take any questions. He pushed his hair behind his ears a lot.
In the years since that reading, my love for David Foster Wallace’s work has only intensified. I still, of course, could talk about him with my father, defending Wallace while I was in college, once I was confident enough and had taken enough literature courses to hide behind. I couldn’t convince him, though. I couldn’t explain to him why it was so important that I’d found a writer I could love, someone who spoke about isolation and information overload and the frustration of being able to think constantly. Last year, when Wallace’s piece about Roger Federer was published, my dad called it a big jumbled mess. We argued in a friendly manner, but, in the end, neither of us had changed our minds. I still loved Wallace, and my dad was still skeptical. His literary opinions were no longer scripture, and in looking back I’m certain that my love for Wallace was the first instance of my personal taste bubbling to the surface.
Today, I think Wallace’s embarrassment about not being able to pronounce words from that story represents a little about why I enjoy him so much. For him, it seemed to be about getting everything down on paper—pushing out, quickly, before they left, all your ideas and images and thought experiments and storylines and character traits. It wasn’t about pronunciation; it was about the text, the act of writing, the purging, and the terrible formation of coherent thoughts on the page. To hell with speaking; just keep typing.
That is, of course, reductionism at its worst, but I’m just trying to make a point. It’s the massive amount of work David Foster Wallace left behind that will help generations deal with their world. I have no doubt that Wallace is one of the few writers from our era who will be read hundreds of years from now, because the intelligence and wit and heart inside each of his stories and essays and novels is enough to shame us all into being more alert, more aware and, ultimately, better people.
When I was accepted to the University of Arizona MFA program, the first thing I thought was, no joke, “Wow. I can say I went to the same program as David Foster Wallace.” I feel proud to be working on the same literary journal for which he was fiction editor, and I feel proud to be from a city so important to Infinite Jest.
We, at Sonora Review, give our deepest sympathies and thoughts to his friends and family. He was, unquestionably, the only writer we’ve ever had who can write about tennis and pornography and David Lynch and lobsters with equal compassion and intellect.
September 17, 2008
Brannon Larson
Sonora Review Editor-at-Large
