2008 is definitely proving to be an unkind year to the arts. I had barely come to terms with the death of George Carlin, when Isaac Hayes and Bernie Mac both took their exits in one weekend. And yesterday, I found out that the author of one of the most mind-blowing books had hung himself. David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

A year ago, I was roaming the shelves at a local bookstore, when I stumbled upon a heavyweight monstrosity: Infinite Jest. I had heard of neither the author or the book, but for something written in the mid-90s, it seemed obscenely enormous. Weighing it at 1000+ pages, I knew my A.D.D and impatience would never let me finish the book. I walked over to the register, and the gentleman working the counter chuckled, saying “Good choice. Ambitious, but good choice. The footnotes are just as entertaining as the book.”

I chuckled back, pretending to know what he meant, paid for the book and walked out. I couldn’t fit the damn thing in my bag, so I had to carry this ogre of a book around for the rest of the afternoon.

I can’t even begin to imagine how to describe the book. The time-line is just as convoluted and haphazard as the characters. The only thing that seemed to string the whole thing together was a theme of sadness. Even when addressing sports victories, it’s sad. Academics, still sad. Parenthood … yup, you guessed it. Sad.  Alcoholism and substance abuse? Definitely sad. But not in a way that’s over-run with melodrama. No, it’s more humorous and otherworldly. The kind of story-telling one could expect from a literary madman whose elocution and quirk know no bounds, erupting volcanically onto the paper, and possibly leaving the reader gasping for air. Or the nearest bottle of Excedrin.

In an interview he did with Salon, he says:

I wanted to do something sad. I’d done some funny stuff and some heavy, intellectual stuff, but I’d never done anything sad. And I wanted it not to have a single main character. The other banality would be: I wanted to do something real American, about what it’s like to live in America around the millennium … There’s something particularly sad about it, something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whether it’s unique to our generation I really don’t know.

After battling with depression for more than two decades, Wallace hung himself at 46, on Sunday September 14, 2008. He will be missed.

For fans of writers like Jay McInerney or Dave Eggers, I highly recommend the book. I also highly recommend a pen, notepad, and maybe a dictionary by your side as you read it. And probably patience as large as the book itself. But it will all be well worth-it.  Of course, I still have nearly a third of the book left.