i can't find the words

Yesterday was dreary enough with Hurricane Ike attacking Texas, but hearing that David Foster Wallace had apparently killed himself ruined it for me. We’ve lost the greatest writer of this generation, and for what? We’ll never know.

I wrote about Wallace once, four years ago, in an internship journal that is decidedly overdone. But here is what I said then:

Because I had nothing else to do for the day, I read “Infinite Jest” until I left for home. Although I read this slightly more than a year and half ago, I decided to re-read it this soon partly because it will take me longer than two days and partly because I didn’t attack it vigorously enough the first time. So I’m reading it again.

(The first time I read most of it on a bus (Bethlehem to Boston and back, approximately eight hours each way with a stop in Providence (which by the way is a lovely town (and I won $2 on a lottery ticket (that I have yet to redeem) in the bus station))), which severely affected my comprehension, what with the bouncing and inability to stretch. Plus, the ride back to school involved sulking on top of the reading (because the trip did not go as planned (which is to say it was cut a day short and I have not spoken to the visitee since)) and I am a notoriously bad multitasker. And then there’s the book itself. David Foster Wallace is a master of the English language, a man obsessed with acronyms/initialisms, a veritable encyclopedia on most any topic (including drugs, tennis and math) and an author ever-willing to digress into asides. So this book, this tour de force, is 1000+ pages, with 80 of those filled with footnotes. There are hundreds of characters and dozens of plotlines, and Wallace writes in a style unique to each scene – he dabbles in Ebonics, uses a heavy brogue for a few paragraphs and adopts the quick, jittery speech of druggies on cocaine.)

In short, the book is dense and a very difficult read. (Some call it this generation’s “Ulysses,” but it’s infinitely easier than that, as well as “Finnegan’s Wake.”) It deserves to be devoured, and that’s what I’m going to do this time around.

Maybe the best thing he wrote, or, at least, my favorite, was a piece for The New York Times on Roger Federer. Even if you don’t care about tennis, he is able to draw you in:

It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner…until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does — Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side…and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands.

Long sentences were one of Wallace’s strengths. How sad that he’ll never write another.