David Foster Wallace: not enough information, and too much

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David Foster Wallace, the ‘Infinite Jest’ author who died on Sept. 12, is the subject of an extensive feature in the Oct. 30 issue of Rolling Stone (Issue No. 1064, with Barack Obama on the cover). The article’s reporter, David Lipsky, spent a week with Wallace in 1996 for a feature that never ran; after Wallace’s death, Lipsky returned to the material and talked to family and friends to pen ‘The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace.’ Click on that link and you’ll get some of the story -- but only a small section about his college years. The rest isn’t online -- to get it, you’ll have to purchase the magazine from a newsstand.

I am curious about Wallace’s life, and this interview with Lipsky shows that he sensed levels to Wallace’s interviewee persona, which I think makes his resulting work valuable.

But there is something sad about a feature on this great writer not making it to print during his lifetime; it’s sadder still that it took his suicide to bring his life to the magazine’s pages.

His death -- which generated all kinds of tributes -- was recorded, in the simplest of terms, by public officials. The website The Smoking Gun has posted the case report from the Department of the Coroner of the County of Los Angeles (the link will take you only to the website’s homepage; you’ll find the report there easily enough, if you’re sure you want to see it). The report is as prosaic as it is horrifying, as plainspoken an evocation of a tragedy as you could find.

-- Carolyn Kellogg