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[...] He'd loved writing fiction, Infinite Jest in particular, and he'd been very explicit, in our many discussions of the purpose of novels, about his belief that fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude. Fiction was his way off the island, and as long a…

if the phenomenology and the teleology of suicidality are the same as that of addiction, it seems fair to say that David died of boredom

However continually he was suffering in his last summer, there was still plenty of time, in the interstices between his identically painful thoughts, to entertain the idea of suicide

[...] If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it's because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes…

The curious thing about David's fiction, though, is how recognized and comforted, how loved, his most devoted readers feel when reading it. To the extent that each of us is stranded on his or her own existential island--and I think it's approximately correct to say that his most susceptible reade…