The author with a double vision

I didn't know David Foster Wallace all that well. We met a couple of times, and once, I interviewed him onstage at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. I asked him on a few occasions if he'd review for the paper, but he said he'd had a bad experience and had sworn off reviewing for good. We shared a literary agent.

In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, we spent an hour or so on the phone one afternoon discussing politics, which he followed with the rabid fascination of someone who, despite all better judgment, believed the process mattered, that somehow, somewhere, there was a candidate who might see us through.

I never got a chance to discuss the current presidential race with Wallace; no one did. That's our loss, for Wallace, who reportedly hanged himself Friday night at age 46, was an astute observer, sharp and clear-eyed, idealistic and skeptical all at once.

His 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain -- reissued in June as the slim, stand-alone volume "McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope" -- offers a vivid example of this perspective. Wallace sees the campaign mechanism for what it is while still recognizing something fundamentally different, real even, about the candidate, who eight years ago was in some sense the Barack Obama of his time. Here we have a hallmark of Wallace's writing, his unwillingness to take anything at face value, the penetrating focus of his thought.

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An auspicious debut

Wallace emerged out of nowhere with the publication of his first novel, "The Broom of the System," in 1987. He was 25, a graduate of Amherst and the master of fine arts program at the University of Arizona, and along with a handful of other then-emerging writers (William T. Vollmann, Jonathan Franzen), he helped transform American fiction in a fundamental way.

The 1980s, after all, was the era of "Dirty Realism," of small-bore, naturalistic stories in the style of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. For such writers, literature was essentially domestic, but Wallace blew that approach away. Exuberant, picaresque, cynical but also heartfelt, "The Broom of the System" hit the literary circulation system like a 450-page burst of amphetamine.

It wasn't a perfect book; like much of Wallace's early fiction, it wore its inspirations -- especially that of Thomas Pynchon -- on its sleeve.