David Foster Wallace and the Current Malaise

Over the next few days, I will probably tumbl a bunch of quotes from D. T. Max’s excellent biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story. It’s the most interesting literary biography I’ve read in years. I’d never really thought of this before, but we usually say of a great or important author that s/he “captured the voice of a generation” or whatever, but this make it sound like the voice has been found and placed in a Zoo for Voices from the Past, where we can all gawk at it. Wallace’s work gave voice to contemporary experience. 

And we are still using the gift. Wallace invented (or at least popularized) a colloquial way of writing about ideas that has become the defining characteristic of most of the best contemporary YA fiction (…he said with bias) and most of the best contemporary literary fiction for adults (…he said, choking on the words literary fiction).

Right, so anyway, here is an observation from the book that struck me as very important:

“For Wallace, the great flaw of most fiction was that it was content to display the symptoms of the current malaise rather than to solve it.”

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