His later fiction is crammed with the technical jargon of the modern professions.
His early stories feature sentences beginning “and but so” and “yes and but,” which mystified critics and comforted young readers. Wallace had several narrative voices, all fashioned out of contemporary idioms. Though he once complained he could “never seem to get the clarity and concision” he wanted, this failure held the key to his fiction’s uncanny impersonation of the educated American mind-a mind choked with manipulative jargon and self-conscious prattle. Likewise, Wallace’s prose rambled over and through meaning like a sputtering motor trying to compensate for some broken inner part. Articulate to the point of catatonia, they seemed incapable of saying what they meant. His characters, like his readers, were educated, affluent, dissatisfied and lonely.
Of all the people writing fiction in the Nineties, only Wallace spoke directly to us. He saw how we despised ourselves for being persuaded by the same advertisements we parodied and ridiculed how we settled for pleasure in lieu of fulfillment how our achievements tended to multiply our dissatisfaction. This was especially true for the young and jaded readers of literary fiction, a demographic whose acute discomfort with meaning, emotion and value Wallace considered symptomatic of a broader unease in the culture. His moment was late capitalist America, which he knew from his own life manufactured nothing so surely as a sense of fraudulence and despair. Wallace’s method was rooted in the conviction that literature ought to address the paradoxes and confusions of its moment.
Confused, alienated and inauthentic though it might be, subjective consciousness still existed-and it was still the business of the novelist to describe it. For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, his fiction was a relief and a gift. Against what he believed to be the outmoded theoretical commitments of his predecessors and contemporaries, he labored to return literary fiction to the deep problems of subjective experience. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce. It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all.
David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in his home last September, wrote about authenticity, self-consciousness and the pursuit of happiness in America.
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