i almost replied a couple times to this, but then didn't. i was going to write that my first reaction to the news wasn't really shock or sadness, but rather relief and an absolute certainty that spiritual work is extremely serious and important, and intellectual work less so. if someone who is smarter than me has an extremely successful literary career and then kills himself at 46, is he not explicitly telling ME not to follow his path in life? NYT critic Michiko Kakutani did sort of a summing-up of DFW's career and life that states at the end that his later fictional work was characterized by a dropping-off of ambition and "claustrophobic solipsism." i think this is meant to insert a subtle theme of intellectual failure into the David Foster Wallace narrative, as if that explains his death. that his early work was so extremely wonderful and his later work showed a failure to keep up the pace he had set, so of course he felt despair. really i think literary critics are so stupid, they tend to write about writers as if the writers only
( ... )
Comments 2
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment