I’ve just been fine-tuning a new playlist called “SadBastardMusic” on my iPod (a reference to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity). It includes all the moping, brokenhearted, doom-cast songs I could think of and totals 125 as of this writing. On there, you’ll find Candy Says by The Velvet Underground, How to Disappear Completely by Radiohead, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today by Randy Newman, Fruit Tree by Nick Drake, lots of stuff by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Red House Painters, a little Joy Division and The Cure, and of course Elliot Smith. In fact, it’s Smith’s cascadingly sad Everything Means Nothing to Me playing as I write this.
It’s not a remedy for sadness that I seek, creating such a playlist. There is something about ineffable sadness that needs to be understood, if not nurtured. Because it’s part of being human. When I heard that 46-year-old novelist David Foster Wallace committed suicide in California last week, there was shock, but also understanding: a constant theme in his work was how people — specifically, Americans — deal with recurring sadness, or its clinical term, depression.
I don’t know what manner of depression Wallace dealt with, though clues were scattered throughout his early story collection, Girl with Curious Hair, and his 1,079-page opus, Infinite Jest; but more pointedly in the short story collections that followed — Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion.
Jarring to hear that he hung himself, a writer who seemed to finally articulate something about my generation in a really ambitious way, though I can’t put into words what that “something” is. He was, to be honest, the first writer of the Gen-X batch that I felt I could almost trust — I never really connected with Doug Coupland, Donna Tarte, Alex Garland; Jeff Noon seemed too whimsical, Zadie Smith too Dickensian, Chuck Palahniuk too high-concept; Rick Moody shared Wallace’s exhaustiveness, though he is less fun and generally more exhausting; perhaps Michel Faber contains a trustable quality.
But with Infinite Jest, you could tell Wallace was staking out his own territory, something he felt the need to explore through endless (infinite) variations: the question of why people become sad in life, and why this leads to addiction, and why this leads to more sadness, and so on. There are few things in postmodern literature as unexpectedly moving as the novel’s final image: recovering addict Gately’s memory, while lying in a post-operative hospital bed, of waking up on a cold beach, alone. (“And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”)
Infinite Jest also conjured up, back in ’96, an economically crippled America that sells off sponsorships for each calendar year to surviving conglomerates and brands (most of the novel takes place during “The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment”); and it imagines a society that relies on downloading videos from a shadowy entertainment industry called Interlace — Hello, iTunes!
Then, of course, there are the final 100 pages of footnotes — one last jest from an author who had an inexhaustible need to explain things. The footnotes help take the chill off the decidedly sad topic outlined in the novel, because Wallace, among other things, was known as a funny writer, one who had won the Paris Review prize for humor.
Those who picked up A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, his 1997 essay collection, got the Full Wallace — unedited ruminations on calculus and tennis, exhaustive notes on David Lynch’s filming of Lost Highway, several teeth-grinding weeks aboard a luxury cruise liner, several days at the Ilinois State Fair. That Wallace could shift into such distinctively postmodern riffs on our surrounding culture and what it all meant with such sure footing, and be effortlessly funny at the same time, made many readers believe he would perhaps “go the distance.” You know: end up writing the Great American Novel (though the last person who championed that idea was Ernest Hemingway, and he ended up swallowing a shotgun barrel instead).
Wallace took some cues, maybe, from Thomas Pynchon, who wrote (and continues to write) mammoth doorstops about whatever subject takes his fancy — exploring through history, song, jokes and various literary styles topics such as quantum physics in World War II (Gravity’s Rainbow), pioneer America (Mason and Dixon), Jacobean tragedy and entropy (The Crying of Lot 49).
Pynchon was surely a model, as were William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, maybe Kurt Vonnegut (who also attempted suicide in 1984). Wallace was a well-liked English professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, but had been taking medication for depression for 20 years. I would like to believe that the increasingly dark, obsessive stories he put out in Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion were simply part of “The Entertainment” — which is how he described our overarching cultural need in Infinite Jest, a need met by a certain lethally entertaining video that renders its viewers catatonic. Certainly, we live under a technocultural veil that has an obsessive need to turn everything into “infotainment,” even death and its consequences.
But I must conclude that those lengthy short stories following Infinite Jest — detailing anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure) in “The Depressed Person,” or profound estrangement from one’s offspring in “On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand” — contained more personal concerns, with less of the comfortable distancing buffer we’ve grown accustomed to in postmodern literature. In short: he meant it.
In truth, as much as I respected its intent, I bailed after Interviews with Hideous Men; I couldn’t imagine reading another 40-page rumination on deep-down ennui or bone-thrumming dread, so I skipped Oblivion. (Though Consider the Lobster, 2005’s essay collection, was said to be a return to form.)
It’s very strange to hear that someone whose words you’ve followed for some time now — whose mind you have been invited inside of, in a real sense — is no more. This is probably the first writer of my generation that I am aware of committing suicide. We’ve had celebrities and musicians popping off like fizzled firecrackers in our midst; but a writer — someone who made a living through words, or could only seek expression through the page — that’s a little closer to home.
I put my “SadBastardMusic” list on shuffle a while back. It’s still playing. I will probably switch to more upbeat sounds in a while. It’s really only a small space, a small chunk of memory devoted to stuff that reminds me what sadness is about. But I’m glad I reserved a tiny little corner of my iPod for remembering.