David Foster Wallace was the kind of writer who delivered so much more than the reader demanded that standing in the direct path of his overheated brain was like trying to fill a teacup from a fire hose or light a cigarette with a flamethrower.
Some readers found the torrent disconcerting, including, famously, book critic Michiko Kakutani (Wallace once acidulously referred to her as "a very charming Japanese lady from The New York Times"), who described his 1,079-page novel "Infinite Jest" as self-indulgent, loose and "baggy."
Others, including this reader, couldn't stand to see "Infinite Jest" end. Entering the novel was, for me, like entering a "Second Life"-style alternate existence, with its dozens of characters, skeins of plotlines and absurdity braided with the utterly real.
Wallace was playing a different game than his colleagues; he was the Tiger Woods of literary fiction, a man who, as Kakutani pointed out, could do almost anything, from the Nicholson Baker-style obsessive detail to the Thomas Pynchon-esque grand sweep.
He seemed determined to surprise, to look at the old and make it new. Accepting an assignment from Gourmet magazine to write about the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace wrote a footnote-garnished discussion of crustacean sensibilities, nociceptors and the probable discomfort that sea creatures experience while being boiled alive. One imagines the editors at Gourmet wondered what they'd gotten themselves into.
Wallace apparently had access to a whole bank of brain cells that the rest of us aren't using, and instead of using them to beat us over the head, he spent his brilliance connecting with the reader, humanizing the characters in his stories and doing that impossibly square task of teaching moral lessons.
His lessons —- that behaving correctly is important, that endless consuming won't make us happy, that people are more important than things, that sincerity counts —- couldn't have been more hopelessly out of fashion. Somehow he made them fresh and made them the tube-metal frame of what was often an adrenalin-fired rocket sled ride.
When Wallace, 46, hanged himself last weekend, those who knew him only through his books and essays and magazine articles discovered that he'd battled depression for 20 years, had been on medication, had suffered side effects and, according to The New York Times, decided to discontinue the meds last year.
Wallace's despair is a frightening thing because it seems of a piece with his conclusions about American life. In his hilarious 50,000-word account of a Caribbean cruise called "A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again," he looks into our relentless pursuit of entertainment and finds a deep anomie, a sadness that the margaritas can't obliterate.
He has said of "Infinite Jest" that he wanted to create a "sad" book, a book that reflected the feelings that washed across this country in the lapse of the last century as we discovered that having it all isn't all that.
But somehow Wallace's willingness to look at this emptiness and still find a reassuring faith in the prospect of soldiering on was refreshing and encouraging. His bravura and creative zest gave the lie to the "why bother?" response.
He seemed one who had figured it out. Except he wasn't.
Jake Mohan summed up my reaction to Wallace's death when he wrote on the Utne Reader Web site that seeing a man like Wallace give up was unsettling: "To think that one of the smartest writers in history had spent his entire adult life wrestling with the absurdities and injustices of the human condition, and still hadn't found a solution —- well, where does that leave the rest of us?"
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