Trespasser

I don't understand David Foster Wallace. The last summer I spent at home I walked the half-hour's worth of ancient housing developments and strip malls between our condo and the tiny, pied North Clairemont library, and picked up a set of Wallace's short stories. In reading it his sentences blundered about my skull like frantic birds which I could neither calm nor marshal nor bat from my mind. I picked up a plot but no pleasure, and I understood that for me Wallace could not be the little patron god of modern literature that other people held him as. Yet I couldn't help but be fascinated by the way he affected the people his writing actually resonated with. Somehow Wallace induced people to access parts of themselves and air out parts of their minds that they would surely rather keep hidden-- he made them write about him in relation to themselves in a way I haven't seen with reviews of other writers. Take the recent "review" of Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King on BoingBoing. This is not a story about the book or even the novelist-- it is an account of one man who attempted suicide and his relation with another man who succeeded. The success of Wallace's writing is the way it not only resonates with the reader, but in that it in turn compels the reader to talk about how they found parts of themselves within and around its lines. In Wallace's own words "... there's a certain set of magical stuff that fiction can do for us... one of them has to do with the sense of, the sense of capturing,  capturing what the world feels like to us, in the sort of way that I think that a reader can tell 'Another sensibilty like mine exists.'" He's given voice to something within each one of his fans, and it must be heard. An anonymous comment for the above review read "DFW's passing sent me into a depressive tailspin. I didn't even know him, but I felt like he was a part of me. Or gave voice to an essential emotional core that I didn't even know was there before I started reading his work. It wasn't even the subject matter. It was more his style, his tone. It rang in me like a bell."

What it is, I don't know. I'm merely a voyeur, fascinated by this fascination.