It is very difficult to imagine Jennifer Egan, the latest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, ever taking her life, or indeed doing anything that would cause her readers sorrow. I have nothing but a packet of intuitions to support what I’ve just said, but I can boil them down to one point of surmise. Both as a writer and as a woman standing in front of strangers reading from her work and answering questions about it, Egan seems to me to be Not A Romantic. She also appears to be untroubled by mental illness. Her fiction is dark but clear, and it recurs to an old and unfashionable view of human nature, according to which we do more harm to other people than we do to ourselves. This is at odds with tragic modernism, which pierces the gifted hero with the spears of his own strength. Egan doesn’t believe in heroes. I think that she believes in curiosity — a curiosity that kills some other cat.

These thoughts are occasioned by perusal of The Pale King, and by the strange multifaceted essay that Jonathan Franzen published in last week’s New Yorker. I’m not sure that it was a good career move for Franzen to sift the ashes of David Foster Wallace’s career and death; there are too many moments in the piece where Franzen sounds like the earnest older brother whose lamentation for a fallen sibling muffles unmistakable cackles of self-satisfaction.

That he was blocked by with his work when he decided to quit Nardil — was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it — is not inconsequential.

Franzen (who seems much more like Jennifer Egan than he does his late friend) inflects his observation that “David died of boredom” with the accent of someone amazed by such a remarkable feat, and clearly incapable of it himself.

Which was it that killed David Foster Wallace — his romanticism or his depression? I suspect that they were densely intertwined. What interests me about wallace isn’t the accretion of small-scale discouragements that must have surrounded the locality of his suicide, but rather the doom that was presaged by the unruly immensity of Infinite Jest, twenty-odd years ago. I haven’t read it, but I understand it to be an attempt, as Wallace put it in conversation with David Lipsky, to capture “what it feels like to be alive right now.” Although he was the keenest of reporters, capable of reducing almost every observation to fully-articulated prose, I’m not sure that Wallace will be remembered for his fiction.  I do mean to read The Pale King, but not as a novel. Because it’s unfinished, retains a rough documentary quality, attesting to the author’s accumulation of views, that a final editing would almost certainly have effaced. Or maybe not! 

The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving elationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing an abstract of spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent…David’s fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates, and yet the people who had only glancing contact with him took his rather laborious hyper-considerateness and moral wisdom at face value. 

That is not the profile of a writer of mature literary fiction. Not every great novel is about love (and its failure), but most are, and to write instead about the simulation of love seems to me an adolescent exercise, something that you do before you have fallen in love yourself, while you are still tempted to think that love is an illusion, a puff of poetry, as a way of excusing the monstrous defect that must be preventing you from sharing a transcendant experience. For my part, I see adolescence — struggling to be an adult — at the bottom of addiction (substance abuse provides both a shortcut to the desired state of mind and a distraction from the search for it) and at the heart of romanticism as well. As if to prove my point, Wallace not only dressed like a teenager, but like a teenager from an earlier era — a hippie, in fact. I’m always surprised that Wallace’s appearance goes unmentioned, when it was so patently a costume.  is shambolic appearance is at complete odds with the precision of his voice, even when that voice is registering the blur of ambiguity. 

It’s not a stretch to imagine Jennifer Egan writing a novel about David Foster Wallace.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.