The Children's Hospital: On David Foster Wallace
A review by William Deresiewicz
Almost three years have passed since David Foster Wallace hanged himself on the patio of the house he shared with his wife in Claremont, California. Wallace was 46, an icon, for readers and fellow writers, of talent, ambition, humility, humanity. The publication of Infinite Jest in 1996 had established him, by wide agreement, as the writer of his generation. Revered for his brilliance of mind, he was beloved for his generosity of spirit, his willingness to stand for sentiment and sincerity in an age of irony and nihilism. In the world of letters, his death was received as a collective tragedy; no fewer than four public memorials were held. Suicide is a black hole, attracting explanations only to bury them beyond its event horizon, but the meaning of Wallace's death was, if anything, overdetermined. The lifelong depression he never spoke about in public is everywhere implicit in his fiction, where thoughts of self-slaughter are seldom far from the surface. Yet the author of Infinite ...
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Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear by Javier Marias
 "One life, one writing," Robert Lowell said. The writer's experience is all of a piece, and so too, however disparate it may seem, is the work to which it gives rise. The personal emphasis here is typically poetic, but novelists have long shared the desire to give a higher unity to their careers...
Zeroville by Steve Erickson
 "The last time he was in the United States," begins a sentence in Steve
Erickson's 1993 Arc d'X, "driving aimlessly through Wyoming and
the Dakotas for the purpose of being aimless, he heard the news of the
Cataclysm the same way he heard all the news that year, on the car
radio." The nub of...
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