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The pen as downspout for the roiling excesses of mind, connecting sky and earth, roof and rain, thundercloud and gutter.

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Nothing amplifies the natural lucidity of the human organism, the writerly acuities of perception and apprehension, like the deprivations of hunger, exile, illness and isolation.

Writer David Foster Wallace found dead

By Claire Noland and Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
September 14, 2008

David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.

Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.

Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.

Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday.

“What was a party is now a wake,” Ulin said as the news of Wallace’s death circulated. “People were speechless and just blown away.

“He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years,” Ulin said.

“He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s,” Ulin said. “And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything.”

Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in “The Broom of the System,” his 1987 debut novel; “Girl With Curious Hair,” a 1989 collection of short stories, and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments” (1997). In 1997, he also received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

A year earlier he shot to the top of the literary world with “Infinite Jest,” a sprawling, ambitious novel with a nonlinear plot that ran 1,079 pages and had nearly as many footnotes.

Critics marveled at the prodigious talent evident in his imaginative take on a future world, comparing him to Thomas Pynchon and John Irving.

In a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni wrote, “Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone.”

Other collections of fiction and nonfiction followed, including “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men” (1999), “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity” (2003) and “Oblivion” (2004).

In June, to coincide with this fall’s presidential election, he reworked a 2000 essay about Republican candidate John McCain for a paperback published as “McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express With John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope.”

Wallace was born Feb. 21, 1962, in Ithaca, N.Y., and raised in Illinois, where his father taught philosophy at the University of Illinois and his mother taught English at a community college.

A talented tennis player as a youngster, Wallace attended Amherst College and majored in philosophy before switching his focus to writing fiction.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1985 and turned his senior thesis into the basis for “The Broom of the System.”

After earning a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona, Wallace began teaching writing at Illinois State University in Normal in 1993.

In 2002 he was named the first Roy E. Disney professor of creative writing at Pomona College.

Gary Kates, the college’s dean, called Wallace’s death “an incredible loss.”

“He was a fabulous teacher,” Kates said Saturday. “He was hands-on with his students. He cared deeply about them. . . . He was a jewel on the faculty, and we deeply appreciated everything he gave to the college.”

In addition to his wife, Karen Green, and his parents, Wallace is survived by a sister.

A memorial service is planned at Pomona College.

When greed is our inspiration, poverty is our reward.

If I could reach you,
If my fingers could unfurl
Their flag of forgetfulness,
If touch could breach the sea of sheets,
Make for shore.
But, there’s only pointing…

Asleep at last, I dreamt the beast
Stuffed in the chimney,
As in a children’s tale.
We chanted pain at it
And watched it pass
Thru phases of grotesquery,
A myriad of masks,
No end to the procession so long
As our chant of pain abides,
Uninterrupted save
For morning light and birdsong…

Planting my theodolite,
I survey the quilted creases,
A stranger in this land without
His crew, measuring the bed
I lay quietly,
Playing dead.

Random starlight misconstrued as story,
Offertory ink in a pinholed curtain…
Amen to space’s godless vastness where we
Defenseless children glide the blue marble, Earth,

Mammon’s globe, our chimp coup playpen, and
Encapsule the offending tubercular invader, the
Nascent drifter of galaxies. We’re heirs to a faithless
Donation, undeciphered testament, stasis and
Echo, shockwave across the still waters,
Remaindered for a shard of Eternity,
Season to our history’s day, eon to our hour.

Dreams deny gossamer and azure, the easy displacement
Of our everyday eye, when wind and blue and spider might suffice.
They teach us that hulls are shaped by the strangeness of the sea
And that sails are the vegetable equivalent of clouds.

Dreams resist like rock, sculpt like marble, fit like tile, and negate
Ideas no less real than the hopeful swarm of all our objects,
Who wait like bodies malleable in the stretch and reach of slow time.