Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
A Life of David Foster Wallace
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)
In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the portrait of a man, self-conscious, obsessive and struggling to find meaning. If Wallace was right when he declared he was “frightfully and thoroughly conventional,” it is only because over the course of his short life and stunning career, he wrestled intimately and relentlessly with the fundamental anxiety of being human. In his characteristic lucid and quick-witted style, Max untangles Wallace’s anxious sense of self, his volatile and sometimes abusive connection with women, and above all, his fraught relationship with fiction as he emerges with his masterpiece Infinite Jest. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of unpublished letters, manuscripts and journals, this captivating biography unveils the life of the profoundly complicated man who gave voice to what we thought we could not say.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reviewed by Gabe HabashThe success of the first "big" biography on David Foster Wallace depends on your expectations. If you are looking for a straightforward depiction of a life's events, Max's take covers all the principal mile markers of Wallace's life. Expectations for more than that, however, may result in disappointment. The book begins with Wallace's childhood and ends with his suicide, detailing both the highs (his marriage to Karen Green) and lows (his string of breakdowns that began in college). There is the mutating public and critical opinion of his work, his troubled history with women, and his tendency to roam for much of his life while he struggled to balance writing and relationships, and writing and well-being. A substantial amount of the text is spent on Wallace's correspondence with family and friends, including Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen, whom Wallace confided in and used as sounding boards for his writing difficulties and his broader life fears. But the dialogue presented in the book is vastly one-sided in Wallace's favor, and no one else is given enough space to become more than a supportive acquaintance his father and sister are scarcely mentioned after the first chapter. The facts are all there, but Max (The Family That Couldn't Sleep: Unraveling a Medical Mystery) often seems in a hurry to report them, rarely stopping to explore Wallace's struggles with his social identity or his creative evolution. The book's "slowest" moment is perhaps its strongest: a small chunk of pages devoted to Wallace's shift to "single-entendre writing" as a reaction against the pervasive irony of the '90s the turning point that became the beating heart of Infinite Jest. Distancing and destructive by nature, irony, as Max writes, "got dangerous when it became a habit." Suddenly for Wallace, "sincerity was a virtue and saying what you meant a calling." One wishes Max would have spent more time on such insights. Instead, the quick pace becomes the book's central flaw, with the potential for immersion quashed by the book's own need to finish. While this will certainly satisfy those curious about Wallace's chronology, it's hard not to expect more from a biography on a writer of Wallace's stature. Gabe Habash is a news editor at Publishers Weekly.
