jd87: DFW in the New Yorker

by Josh Delman

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DFW in the New Yorker

D.T. Max has published a piece in The New Yorker about David Foster Wallace entitled "The Unfinished" and his life dealing with depression, writing novels, short stories, and nonfiction pieces (but mostly on his unfinished novel, The Pale King.) The piece mostly deals with DFW's relationship to his work, which was of course infinitely interesting to read about. A lot of post-mortem pieces on DFW seemed to focus on his aloof genius qualities which were of course interesting but I always felt like they were depicting him in a sort of robotic sense. Max chronicles Wallace's struggles to complete his work. Just reading about it makes Wallace seem less like a genius robot and more like a human:

Wallace began writing “The Pale King” around 2000. A severe critic of his own work, he rarely reported to his friends that anything he was working on was going well. But his complaints about this book struck them as particularly intense. Pietsch remembers being on a car ride with Wallace and hearing him compare writing the novel to “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” On another occasion, Wallace told him that he had completed “two hundred pages, of which maybe forty are usable.” He had created some good characters, but the shape of the book evaded him. In 2004, he wrote to Jonathan Franzen that to get the book done he would have to write “a 5,000 page manuscript and then winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light outside.”

March 1, 2009

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