I got an email last night about the death of the writer David Foster Wallace. He hanged himself in his home in Southern California. I had trouble getting to sleep. Like everybody else who admired him (entirely from his work, although I did get to meet him once, at a reading) I am in shock and mourning.

A friend, similarly upset, wrote to say that DFW’s essay about John McCain (recently re-released) was the best thing ever written about McCain. It’s true. Also, his essay about cruise ships (”A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) was the best thing ever written about cruise ships, his essay on the Illinois State Fair the best thing ever written about State Fairs, his essay on the porn industry’s annual awards ceremony ditto (which is I why I didn’t bother going myself for my own book, he had said what needed to be said) his remarkable portrait of a talk radio host the best ever about that; you get the idea. He wrote like one of those mathematician’s hypothetical demons who knew the movement of every particle of the world.

When I sat down to write my own book, I had three particular models of non-fiction writing in my mind: Nicholson Baker for his honesty and his music and his humanity; Ian Frazier, for his knowledge and his enthusiasm and his humor, and, towering above everyone else, DFW, for his sheer brilliance, his curiosity, his unbounded appetite for observation and thought and analysis, and for the way he simply would not let the bounds of language and grammar and format and precedent restrict his voracious mind. I should say here of course that I never imagined I could equal them, and I didn’t.

It breaks my heart he would take his gifts from us.

Update: The New Republic website posts a list of DFW works available online, here.   I’ll recommend “Host,” the first entry, if you only have time or inclination to read one. It’s not as funny (not nearly) as some of his earlier non-fiction, but it’s a great example of his drill-down style, and it quite cleverly uses hyperlinks to express his discursive mind. On the printed page, they used text boxes commenting on the primary text, like the Talmud.

Also, I’ve had some discussion with other DFW fans about What Could Possibly Have Made Him Do It? The answer, sadly, seems predictable, mundane, and heartbreaking: he was a life-long clinical depressive, who ended up losing the fight. See the end of the New York Times obit, here:

James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.”

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