Infinite Sadness

David Foster Wallace, author of one of the most audacious, ambitious, wild, messy, hilarious and heart-crushing books I have ever read, "Infinite Jest," took his life Friday. He was 46.

Wallace received a genius grant after the book's 1996 release, and never published another novel. Subsequent short-story collections seemed to betray something of a growing disinterest in linear narrative ("The Office's" John Krasinski has been working on a film version of "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men"); his books of essays, on the other hand ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and "Consider the Lobster"), offered breathtakingly meticulously observed and often hilarious ruminations on subjects ranging from cruise ships, the porn industry, right-wing talk radio and David Lynch.

His most recent book was an expanded version of a magazine article about time he spent with John McCain's 2000 Presidential campaign. Though the original piece was admiring of McCain, Wallace recently told the Wall Street Journal, "His flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now."

As "Infinite Jest" is famously over 1,000 pages long, one could spend paragraphs explaining what it is about - tennis, addiction, product placement, humans deformed by chemicals in the environment, wacky characters, random apocalypse, giant roaming feral babies on the East Coast contained by giant fans trapping contaminated air, footnotes as a precursor to online hypertext, you name it. A lot of scenes lead up to or immediately follow some big plot action or development, which we're not quite entirely made privy to.

Mainly, it's about efforts to rein in one's brain. The title (a phrase courtesy Shakespeare) refers to an underground film made by one of the characters, a black-hole of entertainment that anyone who partakes of, as with Monty Python's "killer joke," literally amuses themselves to death - they're physically incapable of doing anything but watching it over and over on an endless loop until they die. The book endlessly explores the difficulty of human interaction, about how we get in the way of our connecting with one another.

Perhaps no other contemporary writer (aside from, maybe, Richard Powers) thought so long and so hard about what he was writing about. His sentences could run for pages, such were his vaunted, valiant efforts to wrangle the contents of his mind.

In a 2005 speech, he said:

"It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."

For the record, Wallace hanged himself.