Wrestling with Genius: On Reading David Foster Wallace

I first encountered Consider the Lobster in the drowsy thickness of late summer, during one of those afternoons that arrive heavy with the possibility of reflection but make no demand upon it. The kind of temporal space that opens like a door you didn’t know you were looking for. I wasn’t searching for anything in particular, just wandering through the stacks of a bookstore with that familiar ache of a reader between books, when Wallace’s collection found its way into my hands. I remember finishing the first essay and sitting there in the waning light, letting his words settle like sediment in still water. Wallace doesn’t write to be consumed quickly, like most contemporary literature that slides down the throat with the ease of processed food. He writes to be wrestled with, grappled with, turned over, and examined from multiple angles until you understand that understanding itself might be beside the point.

His sentences loop and fracture and then double back on themselves with the complexity of human thought made visible on the page, each clause demanding your complete attention, asking for it again, and then again, until you realize that this asking—this relentless, almost desperate reach toward genuine communication—might be the most honest thing about the entire enterprise of writing.

That was my introduction to a mind that would fundamentally alter my relationship to language, to thought, to the possibilities of what literature could accomplish in an age that seemed increasingly hostile to both depth and genuine human connection. Since then, I’ve read most of his work, though not everything; some books I’ve started and set aside like promises to myself, knowing I’d need to return when I possessed more patience, more capacity for the particular kind of emotional labor that reading Wallace requires. Reading him is less consumption than collaboration, a process that demands you reread, pause, consider, then reread—again. Sometimes you get lost in the labyrinth of his consciousness. Sometimes you discover something you didn’t know you were searching for, something that feels like recognition.

I was drawn to Wallace because he writes the way I aspire to write, and not necessarily in style—for his voice is entirely his own and inimitable—but in intention, in the fundamental approach to what language might accomplish when wielded with both veracity and wild ambition. He circles a thought like a hunter tracking prey, refuses to let any idea settle into comfortable simplicity, doesn’t resolve contradictions so much as reveal them in all their uncomfortable complexity. Wallace’s biographical details feel almost beside the point; however, they probably matter. Wallace was the son of two college professors, graduated summa cum laude in both English and philosophy from Amherst, and earned a master’s in creative writing from the University of Arizona. I possess none of these credentials, none of this formal grounding in the apparatus of literary education. But I recognized something familiar in the way he moved through a sentence, the way he refused to accept easy answers to difficult questions.

Wallace’s work explores the territories of isolation, addiction, and the quiet violence of modern life with a clarity that feels almost invasive. He was introspective, philosophical, and possessed of a capacity for empathy that seemed to extend even to his own worst impulses. Like so many who live inside the spaces carved out by depression and anxiety, he developed the kind of vision that comes from prolonged suffering. Wallace saw people clearly, wrote with an emotional veracity that didn’t always feel safe, either for him or for his readers.

I only recently learned about Wallace’s history with women, the allegations of stalking, manipulation, and physical violence that emerged after his death, particularly Mary Karr’s account of his behavior toward her, including attempts to buy a gun, physical assault, climbing her house at night, and following her five-year-old son home from school. I didn’t want to write this meditation without acknowledging these shadows, these uncomfortable truths that complicate any simple narrative about artistic genius. It troubles me, and it should trouble anyone who has found meaning in his work. I was surprised and saddened when I first learned these details, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been. The same intensity that produced his extraordinary prose may have manifested in other, darker ways. This knowledge doesn’t erase the impact his writing has had on my own development as a writer and thinker. It doesn’t undo the way his work has shaped my understanding of what literature might accomplish. However, it does complicate my relationship with Wallace, the person, adding layers of moral complexity that cannot and should not be ignored.

Wallace’s opus, Infinite Jest, sprawls across more than a thousand pages, including endnotes that function as their own narrative universe. A monster of a book that seems designed to exhaust and transform its readers in equal measure. It remains one of my greatest literary influences, a work that dared me to be not just a better writer but a more thoughtful person, more attuned to the ways language can both reveal and conceal truth. I’m rereading it now, approaching it with different eyes than I possessed when I first encountered it years ago. I haven’t yet read The Pale King. Wallace’s unfinished novel about the IRS was compiled from manuscripts and notes after his death, though I think about it often. A meditation on boredom, bureaucracy, and the search for meaning told through the experiences of tax auditors in Peoria, Illinois—a subject that in Wallace’s hands becomes something approaching profound.

David Foster Wallace died on September 12, 2008, succumbing to his long and difficult battle with depression, a struggle that shaped much of his work and deepened the empathy he carried for others, even as it may have blinded him to the harm he caused to some of those closest to him. His death was a profound loss—to the literary world, and to anyone who found clarity, comfort, or challenge in his writing, who recognized in his work a kind of honesty about the difficulty of being human in an age that seems designed to make genuine human connection nearly impossible. And yet his legacy endures, complicated and troubling as it is, in the sentences he left behind, in the questions he refused to answer neatly, and in the quiet ways he taught some of us to think more deeply, to read more slowly, to notice more honestly the world around us and the world within us.

Wallace blurred the boundaries between fiction and philosophy, between humor and grief, between intellectual rigor and raw emotional truth. He didn’t write to be liked, a quality that becomes more significant when considered alongside his apparent need to be loved in his personal relationships, often in ways that became destructive. He wrote to be understood, to forge genuine connection through language, and perhaps that fundamental contradiction—between the generosity of his artistic vision and the selfishness of some of his personal behavior—is itself part of what made him matter, what made him human in all the complex and troubling ways that humanity manifests.

If you’ve never read Wallace, I would suggest beginning with A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. The title essay in a collection was born from his experience spending a week on a luxury cruise ship. The essay and the collection are among the funniest and most revealing pieces of nonfiction I’ve ever encountered. A masterpiece of observation and self-awareness that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and deeply moving. Reading Wallace is never easy and requires the kind of attention that our age seems designed to discourage. However, the difficulty is worth it, not because he was a perfect person—clearly, he wasn’t—but because he was trying, always trying: to understand, to connect, to live with greater awareness and honesty. In the end, perhaps that’s what we can take from his work: not a model of how to be, but an example of what it means to keep trying, to keep wrestling with the fundamental questions of existence, even when—especially when—the answers refuse to come easily.