Oblivion

I live on books, but I’ve never really been into writers. I’ve never wanted to contact them, never wanted to meet them, never thought much about what I would say to them if I bumped into them on 78A, with one or two exceptions.

One of the exceptions died last week, and I have been trying to put my finger on what it was about his writing that made his death hit me. Because hit me it did. He died the same week as a childhood acquaintance. Both died young, but it is his death that I keep finding my thoughts returning to when they wander off without me noticing until with a jolt I realise where they’ve gotten to. I wish I cared more about the death that should really matter to me, but somehow the death of a writer actually matters more. That worries me. And it probably means something. He was the kind of writer who could have told me what it means. It was his specialist subject – the place where real emotion and real meaning intersect with modern culture.

When I read I often get the shock of recognition. I find myself momentarily stunned by a character or situation that rings true, perfectly true, so true that something I thought was uniquely personal and internal suddenly becomes universal.

With David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, it went a step further. Yeah, characters and situations rang true, but what stunned was a meta-shock of recognition, a feeling that the text was constructed by a person who reflected my thoughts and preoccupations and concerns, who took them all and wrote the novel I would write if only I could write.

I feel like a pseudo-intellectual hipster douchebag for admitting this, but Infinite Jest is one of my favourite books of all time. It wasn’t just the book that I wished I’d written – it was the book that I would write if I was the best writer in the world writing a book based on all my beliefs and concerns and experiences. It was the book that an uber-me, a super-me, a me but with unbelievable talent, would write.

Maybe it is just a mirror-to-me-and-my-generation thing. The thirties had Fitzgerald, the fifties Kerouac, the sixties Mailer, the eighties Easton Ellis or McInerney, the nineties Coupland, and we have Foster Wallace. Sorry, had.

I have just seen the subtitle of the New York Times article about his death, and it sums it up for me. He got it, on so many levels. I even find myself filtering his death through his style, his message. He would have been able to take the obituaries and the memories, the press coverage and the internet reaction, the glorification and the martyrdom, and he would have had them filleted and measured and served up to the likes of me on a platter of self-referential pop-cultural analysis before I’d have even gotten around to thinking about blogging about it.

A collection of his short stories lies by my bed, started about a year ago, lost and then refound about a month ago. He was always a good man for the titles, he was. Before he went and topped himself.

It’s called “Oblivion”. Yeah, he got it alright. An Infinite Jest, ha ha ha.