Epitaphs

If you're not a David Foster Wallace fan--which, of course, you should be--you most likely won't enjoy this book, although you might find some insights into the creation of his works and his goals, which may or may not alter the hitherto-formed opinion of him: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is the entire transcript of a five day interview with then Rolling Stone reporter now novelist David Lipsky who was commissioned by Rolling Stone to interview the thirty-four year old writer on the last few days of his Infinite Jest book tour. The interview, while completed, was eventually axed and never included in the pages of Rolling Stone. This is a good thing, especially considering the fate of David. This is not an interview and these are not words and passages that should be lost inside the monthly pages of a culture magazine; they belong in a book. These are seminal words by a seminal author from a exquisitely grand, humane mind and heart. 

Already two-hundred and sixty pages in and nearly finished, I was hooked instantaneously. The result here is that we are afforded an extremely intimate and well-handled portrait of David Foster Wallace at his height and can see him at a moment of such hype and infamy, when he himself was beyond a little rattled by all the furor, for who he really was and will be remembered as, and hear him discuss his work, what he wanted for it, and why he made the authorial decisions that he did; beyond that, we get a human rendering of David, who in all the critical commentary and endorsement surrounding him can, I feel, become lost; and it's the human side of David Foster Wallace that is the most important because, as far as avant-garde writing goes, it's the human side of things that he never lost sight of. I can't encapsulate everything they have discussed thus far nor can I summarize what they will go on discuss; they discuss everything, leave it at that. The result here is that we are afforded a passing glimpse into the humanity of a man we are all a little bit lesser-off in not having around anymore. The dynamics of this relationship are wonderful and touching, in being able to watch these two, both young budding novelists at the time, evolve from the stilted roles of interviewer and subject that can at times seem like a tactician match between two tense people thrown together, each trying to gain an upper hand, into an honest to goodness friendship full of warmth and kindness. Knowing the way in which this story ends, not this novel, but this life; knowing the way in which David's life ended, makes this read one of the saddest and most moving things I've read in years.

"If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do that. I know that sounds a little pious."

There are multitudes of moments like the one above, where Dave manages to put together a passage in which he just nails certain contemporary issues that face us as a generation of people, of thinkers, of artists, of writers, or just simply a generation of human beings. He can seemingly wax extemperaneously as well on pop culture and cinema as he can on high art, the power of fiction, and what it feels like, what it means, to be alive in the world right now, to use one of Dave's often repeated expressions, what it feels like on our nerve endings, on our nervous system, to be alive in this world at this moment, a moment in which we are incessantly bombarded by five hundred thousand bits of sensory feedback overload and information-laden bursts from all directions. This is required fucking reading. As is everything DFW ever wrote. 

Addendum:

Book finished. Book swirlingly heavy-hitting and superb. Migratory boatloads of quotes to copy down here. Too many. Too much general goodness. Goodness, quotes on what? Quotes on art. Quotes on love. Quotes on fame. On anxiety. On fear. On pain. On joy. On music. On Alanis Morisette. On Bush and "Glycerine" and how it's a complete rip-off (I knew it!) of a Brian Eno song but still a fairly okay song. On work ethics. On fiction. On the power of fiction. On the things that fiction can do that no other art form can do. 

String Theory is a proposed hypothesis that attempts to be a quantified theory of everything, the world condensed to a unified, understandable equation. Thus far, there's no evidence of this, nor any way to observe it even if there was. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, however, is as close as you can come to a literary String Theory, a conversational theory of everything.