This is news I do not want to believe!
The suicide of David Foster Wallace aged just 46 is a massive loss and a huge shock.
How can one whose writing is so full of life have been driven to such a step?
Obituary writers will pull out the facts from their files and these can be found on any wiki search. What this won’t begin to say is what made him so special.
For me it was his ability to sythesise all the immense data that faces us every day and draw upon it for stories, essays and insights that help in trying to assimulate all this information into our lives.
He did this with so much humour and insight that it’s hard to imagine what could have tipped the balance in his personal life.
David was one of those rare writers (I can count them on one hand) that I felt articulated the way I saw the world . Now he’s gone and there is surely no-one else who can write a novel as overwhelmingly brilliant as Infinite Jest.
He is absolutely irreplaceable.
Writing about someone who reminded me of the possibilities of language in a way probably only Joyce or Beckett have done previously, it is a sobering to have to concede that sometimes there are no words.
RIP David wherever you are.
You made my life richer.
