[...] the harrowing David Lipsky piece Rolling Stone published after his death, wherein we find Dave confessing to Jonathan Franzen that, in Jon's words, Dave had a "notion of not having an authentic self. Of being just quick enough to construct a pleasing self for whomever he was talking to. I see now he wasn't just being funny--there was something genuinely compromised in David." He evidently came at this "'meta'-stuff" not from a Modernist perspective, in which difficulty becomes a kind of aesthetic merit badge, or from the John Barthian "literature of exhaustion" perspective, in which literary sophistication equals seeing through literary devices, but rather out of his personal struggle to find within his own mind an authentic, honorable artistic self. In no other Wallace book is this struggle so painfully clear. The pieces have no formal connection; what they have is a metaphysical connection. In this sense they go beyond Modernism and beyond Postmodernism and into a realm for which we do not yet even have a name, though I have often wondered if it might not be called a form of literary postlapsarianism.

[...] I'm pretty sure the "Sarah" and "Eric Yang" from "Church Not Made with Hands" are the implied questioner and questionee from the final Brief Interview, in which we learn about a woman who saves herself from being murdered by a deranged mulatto. The man in this Brief Interview, who tells the story of the woman and the mulatto, seems to give away his real identity when he tells the female interviewer, "Now we're on your terra firma. The whole prototypical male syndrome. Eric Drag Sarah To Teepee By Hair." [...]

[...] The day I bought BIWHM at the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn, I was still reeling from having been recently left by my fiancee (I even spontaneously asked out the girl who rang the book up; she said no), and was basically spending ungodly amounts of time alone. I went to the movies alone, ate dinner alone, went to the park alone; I was a bouquet of loneliness, irradiated by grief and bewilderment, and this book, which is also irradiated by a different kind of grief and bewilderment, felt in this midst of this self-loathing megalomania somehow aimed at me. [...] I read "Octet" in a Chinese restaurant in Chelsea, and something about Wallace's direct address of the reader, in which he admits that this maneuver is doomed to make him appear "fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even [his] most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like" the way he, David Foster Wallace, does--well ... can I ask for a critical full-stop here? Can I say something not smart or interesting or James Woodian at all, and just tell you that, reading those words, in this ghastly Chinese restaurant, I put the book down and started to cry? I was lost, and confused, and frightened, and the one person I thought I knew better than anyone, my fiancee, had now revealed to me that, in fact, I knew nothing and no one, not at all, and there I was, as desperate as some kenneled animal, and who do I see beside me, equally caged, but a writer I admired and loved as much as any in this world? It was terrifying as well as heartening, and so my relationship to this book, which I love very much is caught up in the ganglia of a profoundly miserable time in my life, which makes it difficult to talk about on a purely literary level. It is like asking me to describe the fabric of the life jacket I was wearing when I was pulled out of the Atlantic Ocean after being lost at sea for five weeks. [...]

[....[ In the end, I can't think of another writer whose work was more engaged with the difficult demands of simple human decency. Wallace was a Midwestern Kafka, the Borges of Normal, Illinois, and, for the rest of my life, I know that whenever something interesting happens, culturally, politically, or literally, I will sit back and wonder what Dave Wallace might have made of it. I can't think of another writer more emblematic of this, of our, time. Part o what I know about being alive now feels like I owe to him. And now--certum est, quia impossibile--he is gone.

But where David Foster Wallace became singular, in my opinion, where David Foster Wallace transcended all the postmodern games and became flat out heroic--that was the point where he took these structures and took all those superb toys from his playground and applied them to nothing less than the singular struggle to manage the doubts and voices and fears and weaknesses inside your head and ... just ... fucking ... live.

It is unbearably difficult to read writing that makes you more connected to yourself and the universe and all the wonders and disappointments and tiny desires for decency that come with being alive, and also to know that the person who wrote those words hung himself. The easy and natural guess is that Wallace was able to portray the loneliness and sadness and struggle so well because he was so deeply enmeshed in this struggle, every single day of his life. Enmeshed to the point where maybe he related to and saw the struggle more clearly as a mechanism of coping with his depression, the point where maybe his writing about these things was his only release from what was going on inside his head. Where maybe even the struggle and joy of expressing all this so clearly was also its own pressure and caused its own anxiety and depression and problems.

The hard, cold fact is, for a period of almost twenty years David Foster Wallace was able to focus all of his considerable writing gifts and powers of observation on the struggle of fighting with yourself to stay alert and alive. And he was able, with more clarity and acuity and brainpower and charm and humor and insight than anybody else of our time, to express what it was to be completely and utterly locked in this fight.

I am reminded of the book's timeliness every time I teach it to 21st century undergraduates. Though they are properly dazzled by its mixture of high-tech literariness, pop-culture savvy, and story-telling brio, they are frankly bewildered by the book's urgency and sense of mission, Wallace's authorial adversaries are as obscure to them as Kierkegaard's battle with Danish Hegelians is to the rest of us. For them the 1980s is a comical decade of bouffant hairdos, pastel suit jackets, and conspicuous consumption. Hence it takes some doing to convey to them how diametrically opposed to all of that was the era's prevailing literary ethos, which, in violent counter-reaction to the fabulist excesses of the 19760s and 1970s, embraced austerity and restraint, concreteness and cynicism, brevity and banality. Writers like Richard Ford, Anne Beattie, Bobby Ann Mason and, most importantly, Raymond Carver reclaimed realism from the bad rap it had gotten from Barth and Barthelme, and the growing guild of grad-school fiction writers quickly followed suit--and who could blame them? After all, the Dirty Realist short story, with its emotional obliqueness and less-is-more ethos, was tailor-made for the graduate workshop, not to mention the university-sponsored literary magazine. Minimalism ruled, and Carver was king.

We published "Mr. Squishy" with the fake name, but I don't think we fooled anyone for very long. Dave had at least four distinct styles, maybe more, but "Mr. Squishy" was written in his most recognizable. (OK, acknowledging that this is ill-thought-out and incomplete, a stab at his four most clear-cut styles would be: (1) the plainspoken and fluid journalistic style demonstrated in his McCain piece (this is the style that goes down the easiest, and where his passions and opinions are most unguarded); (2) the ramped-up journalistic style of the cruise-ship piece and similar pieces of epic observation (these pieces have the more elaborate footnotes and digressions); (3) the humor-isolating and accessible style of Brief Interviews and the "Porousness of Certain Borders" stories; and (4) the dense, discursive, and insanely detailed style of his novels and certain stories.

I remember coming out of a screening of the film, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke and his face, and thinking, "Shit, I gotta call Dave and tell him about this movie." And then remembering--it was like a stab--that there was no more Dave.

[...] To be a footnote in his narrative! To have him as a footnote in mine! Our little lives, petty and puny, rendered important, if at all, in afterthought, digression, totally random dude-ness, a Bernoullic tactic of tacking, that tracks as mere tendency and tender tending. But it is clear now that's where he lived, in the ever-expanding running sole at the bottom of the page, the infinite open-endedlessness, the possibility inherent in that begging space down in the heels on bended knee, there to be filled with everything and more, one foot in the door of the Library of Babel and the other foot always always in the grave, the rest of the rest.

[...] I am too personally at my own firm of Alan Schoenweiss and Associates. 'So then where's Mr. Associates?' the hilarious Solomon Silverfish asks me every time he has had a cocktail in my presence. 'When do I get to meet Mr. Associates?' [...]