On the film-related website The House Next Door, Glenn Kenny, a former editor at Premiere, reminisces about working with David Foster Wallace on three articles for the magazine. One of those pieces, about the Adult Video News awards, also appeared in Wallace’s 2005 essay collection Consider the Lobster. As Kenny recalls:

We worked very hard on the cut, and then there was the whole matter of legal, which was very weird, because there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s invented, starting from the dual pseudonym which he then expands into a conceit of first person plural narration. There are the characters of Dick Filth and Harold Hecuba, who were invented characters that were also composites of myself and Evan. Legal was like, “Oh-kay … Harold Hecuba’s trifocals winding up in cleavage of Christy Canyon and then never being seen again?” Obviously, that’s not what really happened. It was more like, Jasmine St. Clair got Evan into a choke hold at a party one night. But we said they should let it go because: “Neither Evan or I care about the fact that we’re Dick Filth and Harold Hecuba and … the writer’s a very big deal!”

Er, the piece was billed as non-fiction in both the magazine and the book, right?

Perhaps Quillblog is too much of a purist, but it’s disheartening to learn that Wallace apparently subscribed to the David Sedaris view that strict truthfulness is for lesser mortals. It’s also pretty dismaying to see a major magazine knowingly allowing falsehoods as long as (a) nobody’s likely to sue, and (b) “the writer’s a very big deal.”

“I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff.” So wrote the late David Foster Wallace to his editor during the composition of the mammoth novel Infinite Jest. Part mission statement, part expression of his dissatisfaction with what he viewed as the staid and outmoded realistic novel that had come to dominate American fiction, Foster Wallace’s comment, and the writing that proceeded from it, helped breathe new life into a form that was in danger of becoming unrelievedly moribund.

Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12 of last year, leaving an unfinished novel behind. The New Yorker has published an excerpt from the final novel, along with a long appreciation of the author by D.T. Max:

Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony – the prevailing tone of his generation. But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”

Wallace himself needed no reminding of “how dark and stupid everything is”; he struggled with depression for much of his adult life, and was in the grip of a deep depression when he died. What is so remarkable about his fiction is that it is such a vibrant testament to life in all its passion and vitality. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he said in an interview. Hear, hear.