David Foster Wallace

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.

Farther Away Essays Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 322 pp., $26 I didn't much like Jonathan Franzen's essay "Farther Away" when I read it a year ago in the New Yorker. A complicated mishmash of a piece, it seeks to juxtapose the author's visit to the South Pacific island of Masafuera, renamed in the 1960s "for Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish seaman whose tale of solitary living … was probably the basis for Daniel Defoe's novel 'Robinson Crusoe,'" with his thoughts on Defoe and on the novel, and, most important, the effort to process the death of his close friend and sometime literary rival David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in 2008.

Farther Away Essays Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 322 pp., $26 I didn't much like Jonathan Franzen's essay "Farther Away" when I read it a year ago in the New Yorker. A complicated mishmash of a piece, it seeks to juxtapose the author's visit to the South Pacific island of Masafuera, renamed in the 1960s "for Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish seaman whose tale of solitary living … was probably the basis for Daniel Defoe's novel 'Robinson Crusoe,'" with his thoughts on Defoe and on the novel, and, most important, the effort to process the death of his close friend and sometime literary rival David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in 2008.

"The Pale King" is composed of parts of the "something long" on which 46-year-old David Foster Wallace was working before he hanged himself at his home in Claremont on Sept. 12, 2008. Wallace — author of fictions such as "The Broom of the System," "Girl With Curious Hair," "Infinite Jest" and "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," not to mention a score or so of wonderful loopy discursive nonfiction essays on subjects as diverse as tennis, John McCain, David Lynch, cruise ships, and baton-twirling — left more than 200 pages of typed manuscript for "The Pale King" in a neat pile, almost as if spotlighted, on the desk in the garage that served as an office.

This Is Water Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life David Foster Wallace Little, Brown: 144 pp., $14.99 I can't believe he died. That's how vivid his words seem. This commencement address, the only one David Foster Wallace ever wrote, was delivered to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005. In this small book, the words are laid out like thought-poems, a few lines to a page. This gives the reader time to digest them.

David Foster Wallace has given us a meditation on addiction--the unkickable addiction of readers to all those old storytelling conventions Wallace gleefully blows up like a rotten kid cherry-bombing an electric train. The biggest addiction may be Wallace's own to writing, a habit so consuming that the only way for him to shake it is with an abrupt, cold-turkey ending. "Infinite Jest" takes place sometime early in the next century. Books don't count for much in Wallace's dystopia.

"Tell me a story about how things will get better," David Foster Wallace asked his friend Jonathan Franzen last summer. It was a particularly dark summer for Wallace, mired in a depression that ended, on Sept. 12, in suicide. Franzen spoke Saturday at a simple memorial service at Bridges Hall on the campus of Pomona College, where in 2002 Wallace was named the first Roy E. Disney endowed professor of creative writing and professor of English.

It takes a special kind of nerve to write a book with roughly the mass of a medicine ball and then end it so abruptly and unsatisfactorily that the poor reader perversely finds himself wishing it longer. But David Foster Wallace's coda disappoints only because the preceding 3 1/2 inches of "Infinite Jest" have succeeded so well at projecting a world of brain-scalding complexity.

On a warm, windblown evening in late March, David Foster Wallace showed up at an old-style Mexican place in Pomona called El Ranchero. He was wearing shorts and a Pomona College sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, so that he looked like a faintly menacing guy you might see late one night at a 7-Eleven buying Gatorade.

No, David Foster Wallace's latest book, "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," is not just a collection of brief interviews, transcribed in Q & A format with the Qs left unasked. Some are just brief stories, observations really, such as the opening, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life," which in its entirety reads: "When they were introduced, he made a witticism, hoping to be liked. She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked.

David Foster Wallace's novel "The Broom of the System" takes place in a Cleveland suburb which has been planned so that, from the air, it resembles the head of Jayne Mansfield. The movie actress and sex symbol died in a car crash in 1967 — decapitated, according to urban legend. So why shouldn't that once-gorgeous head become a model for playful city planners and a future distraction to airline pilots whizzing over the Midwest? That was the idea that occurred to an aspiring young fiction writer, then still an undergraduate at Amherst College.

Anyone who still maintains that documentary films are the domain of the dry and donnish has never seen the work of Ondi Timoner. Her latest effort, "We Live in Public," which opened in Los Angeles on Friday, is an aggressively hip telling of the rise, fall and reinvention of new media mogul Josh Harris. With a dizzying visual style that is a headlong rush of imagery, editing, music and ideas, "We Live in Public" -- which won the Grand Jury Prize after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, making Timoner the first filmmaker ever to win that award twice -- is culled from 5,000 hours of footage shot over 10 years.

This Is Water Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life David Foster Wallace Little, Brown: 144 pp., $14.99 I can't believe he died. That's how vivid his words seem. This commencement address, the only one David Foster Wallace ever wrote, was delivered to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005. In this small book, the words are laid out like thought-poems, a few lines to a page. This gives the reader time to digest them.

"Tell me a story about how things will get better," David Foster Wallace asked his friend Jonathan Franzen last summer. It was a particularly dark summer for Wallace, mired in a depression that ended, on Sept. 12, in suicide. Franzen spoke Saturday at a simple memorial service at Bridges Hall on the campus of Pomona College, where in 2002 Wallace was named the first Roy E. Disney endowed professor of creative writing and professor of English.

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.

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46. Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace's wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself. Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.

Nobody sets out to be a literary groupie. You just read something you like, tell all your friends and hope to get some credit for discovery in a hip, high-brow way. Problem comes when tastes converge. It's highly embarrassing, not to mention cruelly ironic, when the same writer strikes a critical mass of people--especially people in your demographic group--and you find that you've not so much unveiled a new voice as perpetrated a fad.

THERE is no writer alive to whom I would more happily entrust the task of covering the Adult Video News Awards (the porn industry's Oscars) than David Foster Wallace. There is no writer alive more incisive and hilarious, more ruthlessly tender, when it comes to documenting the perversities of modern American life. Wallace's reputation, of course, precedes him. He is the brainiest and most prolific of our young masters.

THERE is no writer alive to whom I would more happily entrust the task of covering the Adult Video News Awards (the porn industry's Oscars) than David Foster Wallace. There is no writer alive more incisive and hilarious, more ruthlessly tender, when it comes to documenting the perversities of modern American life. Wallace's reputation, of course, precedes him. He is the brainiest and most prolific of our young masters.

David FOSTER WALLACE has earned a place as one of America's most daring and talented young writers. His use of language is pyrotechnic, and he is impatient with traditional narrative forms. In his new collection, "Oblivion," he is up to his customary tricks, but he has also plumbed a little deeper in matters of the heart. Those who are familiar with Wallace's inventive wordplay will not be disappointed.