Acclaimed novelist, Amherst College graduate, and Harvard philosophy student David Foster Wallace committed suicide this weekend. Infinite Jest, perhaps his best known work, was set in Boston. Evan Fleischer provides commentary on the tragic event.

"Camerado, I give you my hand."
-- Whitman

We met David Foster Wallace some six years ago when he was in town promoting Oblivion, a collection of short stories. There was a reading at the First Church in Harvard Square, and the room was packed, humid, and the acoustics were terrible. The thought of church pews melting in a non-Apocalyptic scenario hadn't occurred to us until that night.

He read "Incarnations of Burned Children," as well as a small portion of "Mr. Squishy," then answered some questions, only a few of which we remember. Wallace offered an elaboration on irony as he'd defined it in "E Unibus Pluram," raising an eyebrow and mentioning something about the impossibility of lists when someone asked him to name his ten favorite movies, and offering a hilarious leveling stare to someone who asked if he worked out. Another person prefaced his question by thanking Wallace for writing about Boston the way he did. Someone asked him if he was single, and he said he was getting married to that woman—he pointed—over there. There was applause, and that marked the end of the reading. Time to sign books.

This Bostonist ran out to meet a date. She complained about our lateness. We cited Wallace. She didn't care. "You don't know David Foster Wallace," we countered. We walked down to the Charles, sat on a bench, and talked. A few hours later, we made our way back to the church, and Wallace was still there, signing books, chatting. The line had almost petered out, and we slipped in at the back.

We asked him if he'd be up for an interview. He said maybe. That we should write him at Pomona. We shared a brief bit of very funny mutual sarcastics. He signed our version of a coffee-stained volume of Chekov short stories with the note, "David Foster Wallace has read most of this." Then he drew an arrow, curving from the top of the page to the title below."

More commentary and links to other coverage after the jump. DFW photo from Steve Rogan, used with permission.

We were disappointed by Michiko Kakutani's notion, which she included somewhat indelicately in her obituary, that David Foster Wallace wrote "self-indulgent books badly in need of editing." When the notion of self-indulgence is thrown around, however briefly, it leads to a series of questions: Whom should the writer have indulged instead? What marks the degree of indulgence that swings from self to other? What characterizes a writer's self-indulgence? The length of the book? The word choice? The subject matter?

Kakutani also praises Wallace's gifts, but our focus is this tiny thread of quiet disdain, the extremity of which might be best characterized by Walter Kirn's 2004 tea-room snob-piece that trashed Oblivion.

Back to the self-indulgence question. On a literary level, self-indulgence means what? To write for one's self? To perform certain habits?

Perhaps it derives from the criticism: "You're not thinking about the reader." If so, which reader, where? What demographic? What income? What education? What habits? Is the "reader" the baffled assembly of critics in poor disguise? (If so, how self-indulgent of them to claim that they're not being serviced.) Should writers be addressing someone else in the room as they're writing to make the act less about them? Perhaps donating to charity while practicing Buddhist meditation all the while polishing up a paragraph?

On a personal level, calling David Foster Wallace self-indulgent does good for whom, exactly? The man wasn't exactly a prima donna. He was a teacher, and, from all accounts, a good one, too.

Here's another reason why we hate the self-indulgent label: in any swing of a writer's work, chances are there will be passages that will make you leap out of your seat, makes you want to play with them, jam with them, whatever the verb is. Passages that made you want to be there, too, and you could ape their language a little bit, get at their rotating, multi-tentacled why-this-is-why-it-is a little bit, your inner wall of lightbulbs going on the fritz. That's the nugget necessaire. Walace had—and fought for—that quality in spades. We might have preferred to remain silent on the matter, but it's daft to sit around and let someone take a portion of the public sphere pie with such a claim about self-indulgence.

Consider the Lobster was devastatingly good. Infinite Jest was a joy. Wallace will be missed. Further reading: the Metafilter thread, a post by a former student, a Salon article, and a link to the Howling Fantods, the David Foster Wallace news site. Our best wishes to friends, family, students, and colleagues, whose understanding and grief far surpasses our limited own.

Infinite Jest autograph tagged Bostonist by iMatthew.