Julian Gough

David Foster Wallace is dead. He appears to have hung himself in his home in California, aged 46.

If you've never heard of him or read his stuff, nothing to see here, move on. But on the small, strange, planet (or, more accurately, asteroid) inhabited by novelists doing their best to re-invent the novel, this is the death of Kurt Cobain. You are going to be reading agonised analyses of who he was, how he died, and why he mattered, in every books section of every newspaper, on every major anniversary of his death, for the rest of your lives.

Well, OK, not for the rest of your lives, because newspapers won't have book sections in another six months. But you get the gist.

I liked some of his stuff very much. The last of his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (in his short story collection called, ah, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) is extraordinarily moving, effective, and technically tricksy. It is, I think, one of the greatest short stories of the past couple of decades. In it, Wallace tells a story of a man telling an unnamed listener a story about a woman telling him a story about a man raping her. All those frames within frames should push the pain far, far away, but they don't, they pull it closer. The story is post-modern and emotionally direct at the same time, and that's really hard to do. It is magnificent and you should read it.

But mostly I disagreed with David Foster Wallace, with his attitude to his style (comedy) and his content ( America). I had just finished writing a long essay about comedy and the American novel when I heard of his death. So the last thing I wrote about him while he was alive was negative, which seems very sad now, today, because the only reason I included him was because I thought he was important, and good, but could be even better.

What I would have liked was a long conversation with him, a few emails over a few months perhaps, wrestling with the big, fun, important stuff that nobody off our tiny asteroid cares about.

And now that won't happen. I thought about not printing my recent thoughts on David Foster Wallace, because they aren't positive, and it seems so mean to say something harsh about a guy who has just tied something around his neck to cut off the air to his brain because being conscious has come to hurt too much.

But he's dead, it won't hurt him. And if there is truth in it, then better to say it.

The essay is several thousand words long, I'll spare you. But this is the bit that mentions David Foster Wallace. Bear in mind that for every vice I mention here, he had a bigger virtue. He cared, he tried, he died. We can't do more than that.

"Meanwhile, much American writing is still comic. But something has gone terribly wrong with it.

Potentially great comic writers like George Saunders and David Foster Wallace use comedy as their weapon of choice. But they have been unplugged from electric, living America by lives spent inside the university, first learning, then teaching. (The immensely influential George Saunders is a tremendously talented writer who, at 49, has never left school, and never written a novel.)  Disconnected, they have, like so many academics, become obsessed with the white whale (or pink elephant) of the authentic.

Thus they spend much of their time attacking forms of language of which they disapprove (advertising, television, military jargon, corporate PR) This is literary criticism disguised as literature. These are grenade attacks on a theme park. Frequently, and disturbingly, they put this dead language in the mouths of aggressively outlined “ordinary Americans” foolish figures without college degrees and therefore without self-awareness. Bums. Thus they end up mocking those below them, not those above. The gun is pointed in the wrong direction. Shooting at the bums, they have become the Establishment.

In the absence of suffering, in the absence of a subject, American literary novelists again and again waste their power attacking America’s debased, overwhelming, industrial pop-culture. They attack it with the energy appropriate to attacking fascism, or communism, or death. But that pop culture (bad TV, bad movies, ads, bad pop songs) is a snivelling, ingratiating whimpering billion dollar cur. It has to be chosen in order to be consumed: so it flashes its tits and laughs at your jokes and replays your prejudices and smiles smiles smiles. It isn’t worthy of satire, because it cannot use force to oppress. If it has an off-button, it is not oppression. Attacking it is unworthy, empty, meaningless. It is like beating up prostitutes."

Well, at the last, he found a moment that was unironic and authentic.

I wish he hadn't feared America so much. But then again, if we were able to ask him, he would probably say America killed him.