Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
Author: D.T. Max
Rating: 5/5 Stars
Reviewer: Lydia
This
is the most comprehensive work to date detailing David Foster Wallace’s life,
career, and masterpieces. While many people only know him as the author of the
1200+ page behemoth known as Infinite
Jest, Wallace was also a master of short stories and nonfiction essays.
Wallace was best
known for championing a distinctive maximalist style, similar to Thomas
Pynchon, Jonathan Franzen, and Don DeLillo, that is overloaded with
information, pop culture references, and footnotes (some of which are as long
as three pages). He was witty and extremely smart, a student of both philosophy
and literature who was interested in literary theory, mathematics, and
philosophical problems. Although D.T. Max never met Wallace, he consulted
family and friends, Wallace’s letters, and even his own novels to discover the
man behind the writing. D. T. Max shines as a biographer willing to tell the
truth instead of embellishing or exaggerating his subject. Wallace emerges from
the pages as a charismatic genius, yet still deeply flawed and wholly human.
Sadly,
Wallace committed suicide in 2008, after struggling with depression and
addiction for more than half of his life. This biography exposes the real
Wallace—good and bad—who desperately kept seeking the answer to that elusive
question: “what, exactly, does it
mean to be a human being?”
