Booking It: Every Love Story is a Ghost Story

D.T. Max’s revealing and compelling biography of the writer David Foster Wallace comes at a time of surging popularity of Wallace’s writing and new academic analysis of his work.

Wallace, tragically, ended his own life in September of 2008 after a long struggle with depression and an inspiring literary career. His foreshortened body of darkly brilliant work at the time of his death consisted of two essay collections, two other nonfiction books, three short story collections and two novels, one of which, Infinite Jest, is considered by most to be his magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. In 2011, Wallace’s unfinished novel, The Pale King, was published to great acclaim, receiving a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. Despite the relatively small body of work, critics have consistently named him the greatest writer of his generation.

Given the excitement surrounding Wallace, it should be no surprise that fans have long awaited Max’s biography. Luckily, Max’s book seems to have met the enormous expectation surrounding it, which is, I should add, no small accomplishment.

Drawing on Wallace’s letters, interviews, essays and novels, Max depicts Wallace as a fascinating, dynamic and truly pathetic figure. Some of the most interesting moments of this biography provide little glimpses into his life, some sad and disturbing: his hospitalizations for previous suicide attempts, or his moments of uncontrolled rage, like when he, deeply enraged by his then-girlfriend, walked outside and punched his fist through a car window.

But the biography also illuminates some less grim details behind his books, like a copyright debacle that preceded the publication of his first short story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, or the strange cover of Infinite Jest. Max provides these details with great care and, for the more challenging moments, with great sympathy and understanding.

As most literary biographies do, this one ties moments of Wallace’s life, settings and characters, to the novels and short stories. Members of Wallace’s MFA class appear in his short story “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way;” a man from a halfway house in Boston in which Wallace stayed appears in Infinite Jest, as does his mother, in the form of Avril Incandenza.

D.T. Max also pairs moments from Wallace’s life with their corresponding instantiations in his novels: the beginning scene of Infinite Jest, in which Hal Incandenza has a “breakdown” during a college interview, comes from an interview Wallace had with Oberlin College as he was applying there.

As with this scene, Max often describes moments of Wallace’s life by simply quoting the descriptions from his novels. These comparisons are prone to reducing fiction to nothing more than autobiography, but Max deploys them with such elegance that they rarely, if ever, impoverish Wallace’s writing or underplay his imagination.

But while all of these details are enriching and important, the real strength of this biography lies in its agenda. Max has a very clear, and largely helpful, interpretation of Wallace and his work. For him, Wallace began with a “quintessentially metafictional mind,” writing his first novel with a picture of Pynchon above his desk and The Crying of Lot 49 on his mind.

But as Wallace grew older, he began to see postmodern fiction as unhelpful and cliché, co-opted by media itself. Thus, according to Max, he began searching for “fiction that surmounted television-mediated reality.”

The final product of Infinite Jest was just that: “In Infinite Jest, Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire,” says Max beautifully.

In his mind, Wallace went from a clever postmodern writer to one concerned with morality and spirituality and redemption, an “apostle of sincerity.” This interpretation, although somewhat limited and flawed, ultimately proves convincing.

The ending of this biography is heartbreaking. The last chapter of the book ends, as Wallace wrote in The Pale King, with the “abruptness of a coastal shelf.” In spite of this, Max tells a powerful tale, one that this reader found nearly impossible to put down.

This biography is truly fitting for such a beloved writer, and Max, through his own emotional engagement with the story, seems to have found a kind of redemption in Wallace’s life, which is, in Max’s view, something we should all try to see.

Recommendation: If you’re an avid reader of Wallace, this is a must read. But if you’ve never read him before, go read his commencement speech online. It will change your life.