Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max

Sep 03, 2012 Moira Russell rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-50-new-books-challenge

Yeah, this was just. Terrible. I don't even really have any smartassed thing left to say here after the inchoate spew of status updates - it was just sort of depressing to read the last anemic thirty pages or so. It's a little heartbreaking how very terrible this was. The NYorker article was great (its Q&A wasn't: a possible warning?). His participation in the Lipsky round table was great. I was really looking forward to this book. I was disappointed by the excerpt but thought, maybe that wa...more

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Sep 02, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: david-foster-wallace

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is the book we did not want written or published in 2012, no more than we wanted “An Unfinished Novel” in 2011. No one should be happy that we have a biography of David Foster Wallace. But its publication was inevitable. And some of us are compelled to purchase it, read it, and object to its existence.

For those of us who have followed Wallace these past two decades, D.T. Max’s book is one part refresher of what we already know from Wallace’s books and interviews...more

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Apr 10, 2013 Stephen M rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: tears-of-beautiful-laughter, idiot-heart, diet-dfw, 3-cheers-4-complex-characters

An excerpt from one of DFW's first undergraduate stories entitled "The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster", a post-modern spoof on a Hardy Boys-type novel:

"Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the brothers!

Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.

'Crikey!' exclaimed Joe. 'It's a good thing we're characters in a highly implausible children's bo...more An excerpt from one of DFW's first undergraduate stories entitled "The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster", a post-modern spoof on a Hardy Boys-type novel:

"Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the brothers!

Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.

'Crikey!' exclaimed Joe. 'It's a good thing we're characters in a highly implausible children's book or we'd be goners!"

I remember the first time that I was exposed to DFW was through a creative writing class in which we read “Incarnations of Burning Children” and it piqued my interest enough to search for his name on youtube. There I found his interview with Charlie Rose that I’ve, as of today, watched some seven times all the way through. I was struck, first of all, by his complete discomfort and what seemed to be, total aversion to social interaction. More importantly, I left the interview in complete awe of his intellect. I couldn’t believe that a person could be as intelligent, articulate, and well-spoken as he was. The combination of intelligence and emotional damage seems to be the entire focus this biography, and the focus that many take towards him. Although there much more to DFW than just that, no Bio could be a complete compendium of a person’s life, and when I’m honest with myself, these two traits are what has made me feel so close to him—the combination of deep genuine emotion and mind-bending intelligence. No author has made my “head throb heart-like” to quote DFW himself. It was these two things that I noticed when I first saw him through the screen of my computer and it was these two things toward which I felt an immediate pull. I vowed, at the time I first discovered his work, that I would some day, far off in my maturation as a reader, conquer the mammoth beast that Charlie Rose flipped through and referenced in their interview.

Flashforward nine months later, to when I gave the book a first go. I set out the goal of reading thirty pages a day, and with that rate, I figured I would finish the book in about a month. Oh, how naive I was then. I found the book to be not so much challenging and overly-difficult as it was time-consuming. The thirty pages a day challenge seemed modest (I’d surely read more than that on most days), but I soon realized it was too many pages. And each day I dreaded having to dive back into all those disparate plot-lines, hundreds of different characters, and page-dominating prose blocks. It was something of a mental workout routine to get through some of the sections. In desperation I reached out to online resources which provided full length descriptions of each character and plot line (I ended up spoiling some of the “reveals” later on in the novel in the process), but even this was not enough to keep me motivated. I soon gave up and moved on to other books with the promise that I’d return to the book some day.

Leap forward another six months, and I had found myself, once again, feeling the call of the Jest. A friend of mine had begun reading the book and singing its praises, mostly of the sections just beyond where I had left off (beyond the 200 page mark). I read chapter summaries of the sections that I had read in my first go-around, and started the book again from about page 140. With this new resolve I charged forward through doubt and occasional incomprehension. It took me about a month and half to get through it this time, but I actually finished it. The book had hit me like no other had—with the full-immersion experience, brought about by the intense concentration that I had to have in order to really get into its pulse. That, coupled with a new-found ability in my own reading, turned it into quite a powerful experience. Every time I sank into the book, I felt as if I had completely lost myself in another world, even if only to glean a small sense of what DFW was after with his fractured, broken story about addiction and entertainment. It also helped that I had recently found myself in the throws of a severely debilitating mental condition that I had thought was far behind me. I grew extremely attached to the book as it seemed to totally get everything that I was going through, had gone through and what I would go through. There’s something about the mere fact that another human being has experienced what you have that makes everything that you’ve gone through so much less terrifying and abstract; it made the whole thing feel so more human. And that’s what the book did for me, anyway.

I read Infinite Jest at the exact time I needed to and that was essential for making the experience what it was. And even though the timing of IJ was perfect—as far as who I was as a person and as a reader—I, of course, discovered DFW long after he had given up the ghost. There was no real reason for me to ever grieve over his loss—the knowledge of his death underlay my coming to be a fan of his work. But there was always a vague sense of disappointment and sadness that I hadn’t known about him while he was alive and thus, would never have the chance to meet him. But upon reading the final four pages of this biography, the reality of his suicide, what it must have meant for those close to him, what it must have meant for his fans, and what it meant to me as such a devotee to his work, hit me then and I became a huge mess, wailing into my shirt sleeve; it was pretty ugly.

I apologize that this isn’t really a review of the book itself, but I’m not very good at those kinds of reviews.

You can take the star I docked from the otherwise five-star rating and file it under the part of the review labeled “D.T. Max’s clunky writing/numerous typos/bad transitions and other things that I don’t really give a shit about”.

 I hope I’ve written enough now. (less)

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Nov 01, 2012 Christopher rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 21st-century, american, non-fiction

Outline for review of D.T. Max's Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

I. Introduction

A. Witty opening line. Grab everyone's attention.

B. Thesis statement: There is no reason to read this book.

II. Body ¶1: My thoughts on/knowledge of DFW pre-this book.

A. He was a tortured genius, suffering from major depression.

i) Among other personality maladies - crippling anxiety.

B. His brilliant novel Infinite Jest has influenced everything I've read since I read it six months ago...more

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Nov 02, 2012 Lee rated it 4 of 5 stars

A complicated chap, this DFW: capable of Aspbergian selfishness and more than semi-noxious competitiveness, an explicitly excellent writer who posits concern for readers yet nevertheless once dropped from a great height "Mr. Squishy" upon our poor heads, an arch-grammarian thanks to his mom capable of making usage stuff look like calculations intended to trap infinity in a jar, maybe sort of a wonky weany despite his size and high-protein breakfast vomit, apparently helpless around the house bey...more A complicated chap, this DFW: capable of Aspbergian selfishness and more than semi-noxious competitiveness, an explicitly excellent writer who posits concern for readers yet nevertheless once dropped from a great height "Mr. Squishy" upon our poor heads, an arch-grammarian thanks to his mom capable of making usage stuff look like calculations intended to trap infinity in a jar, maybe sort of a wonky weany despite his size and high-protein breakfast vomit, apparently helpless around the house beyond changing bulbs in his many lamps, a mama's boy who liked the ladies and the ganja when young, no apparent deep interest in fine art or music or food (beyond blondies and poptarts) or footwear (beyond untied workboots), psychopathically obsessive about Mary Carr in an unambiguously creepy way, worried about media's affect on American morality in what amounts to unattractive moralizing at this point maybe -- his intelligence and humor and perception and sentences are undisputed champs of the world but the overarching media-saturation sadness stuff and his obsessive insistence on sadness/suffering/darkness etc only seem to fight half the thematic battle (ie, what Milton called "light and darkness in perpetual round"). But I'm not here to judge the dude -- this is an impression of a biography that lays the foundation for better ones to come but which is very readable and steady and an excellent start. I admired how it mutes for the most part its judgments, how it presents the facts, the quotations, the timeline, the memories of friends etc and always lets us see the lies as much as the kindness. Typos and misused words (passify, skein) didn't overly distract me but I did find recaps of all work other than Infinite Jest not so fun. Would've LOVED 25+ glossy insert pages of photos (at least the obligatory elementary school class portrait with young DFW, top left, eyes bright but mercurially averting direct contact with camera) and facsimiles of handwritten manuscript/journal pages and college transcripts and samples of his teaching syllabi! Generally, a serviceable bio studded with Franzen and DeLillo correspondence, with juicy bits about his total insanity for Mary Carr, plus details w/r/t his obsessive showering . . . Loved that he could write 22K words in a day. Loved that he brushed his teeth for 45 minutes every morning and night in college. Loved that the opening college interview freakout in IJ was based on real events at my (and Lenore Beadsman's) alma mater. Loved that he turned down inexpensive Iowa on financial grounds as though he couldn't get loans and teaching jobs -- or have his parents pay his way through his MFA. Mentions unrepentantly parochial books I'd heard he'd loved like (the unfinishably slow for me) Catholics by Brian Moore and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. After a point I couldn't put this down and it was a fine companion while cooped up sick as Superstorm Sandy devastated everything -- there's something asssociable about reading a long-awaited bio about the recently deceased DFW (a man known for his overwhelming intelligence and outsized novel) and the recent Frankenstorm that churned slowly up the coast. There's maybe something alternately devastating and underwhelming about both, too, depending on where you live (literally/figuratively). Ultimately, this more than sufficiently suggests what it felt like to be the FHB (fucking human being) known as DFW -- and it answered lingering WTFs w/r/t his life and superfucking heartbreaking death (surprised there wasn't a post-death chapter about reactions and a lot more about his final days than first appeared in the New Yorker article). Worth it if you've ever wondered about the guy's story, his high school history, his grades in the second semester of his sophomore year in college (spoiler: A+ across the board), how much action he got after IJ came out, how many students he slept with, etc, how many friends from recovery groups he helped out financially, etc, and have read the interviews and Lipsky thing and want to live in DFW World awhile more. It's a charismatic, virulent, thought-colonizing place but, again, thematically, I feel like it's maybe partially pathological and reliant on therapy/recovery-related simplicities restated in overeducated serpentine slipstreams of high/low language -- not all of it, just some of it, I'd say. What I mean is: what once was a literary marriage between author and reader built on unabashed love has changed its status to "it's complicated." Anyway, RIP DFW, although through IJ and your essays you'll live forever. After Both Flesh and Not: Essays is published next week, let's hope for a bit of silence -- at least until the collected letters, emails, responses to student stories come out.(less)

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Sep 13, 2012 switterbug (Betsey) rated it 4 of 5 stars

All my adult reading life, I waited for a young contemporary writer to transport me to the prose-rich playgrounds of Nabokov and Pynchon. ADA and GRAVITY'S RAINBOW were my torches, but they were, arguably, emotionally sterile. When I read INFINITE JEST ten years ago, I knew I had finally found an author who, besides giving words an elastic, carbonated buoyancy, was a vigorously palpable storyteller, altogether tragic and heartbreaking.

I remember the exact moment when I heard that Wallace took hi...more All my adult reading life, I waited for a young contemporary writer to transport me to the prose-rich playgrounds of Nabokov and Pynchon. ADA and GRAVITY'S RAINBOW were my torches, but they were, arguably, emotionally sterile. When I read INFINITE JEST ten years ago, I knew I had finally found an author who, besides giving words an elastic, carbonated buoyancy, was a vigorously palpable storyteller, altogether tragic and heartbreaking.

I remember the exact moment when I heard that Wallace took his life (as I suspect did everyone who is reading this book, who read DFW before his death). It was like a brother or best friend had died. He was my rock star--my John Lennon, Peter Gabriel, and Bob Dylan all rolled up into literature. He wasn't yesterday's insurgent Kurt Cobain, he was today's voice--the insurrectionist of the insurrection, the anti-ironist and seeker of exigent summits.

D.T. Max evinces respect, compassion, and objectivity toward this now lionized author he has never met, in his biography assembled from the contributions of friends, family, lovers, AA comrades, colleagues, fellow writers, and epistolary confidants.

"Fiction is what it's like to be a fucking human being," Wallace said, and Max shows us the utter turbulence of this writer's life, a man who lived inveterately with the howling fantods (a phrase from his mother, the grammarian, used potently in INFINITE JEST).

David was a depressed, addicted, chaotic genius, a man who felt that he never lived up to his lofty ambitions as a writer or a person. He was both fascinated and repulsed by the TV culture and how media hijacks and propagandizes public and private minds--his constant themes in his essays, short stories, and of course, IJ.

As many know, he was hospitalized several times for breakdowns and overdoses, and struggled with pervasive suicidal ideation. Max does a virtuous job of giving the reader a candid view of the complex nature of DFW; the generously endowed writer was often a captious, violent, and tormented soul. He was also a passionate, outstanding teacher, and a patron to his companions in AA. Moreover, he was an enthusiastic dog lover, especially drawn to dogs with an abusive past.

The parts of the book that describe Wallace's years writing INFINITE JEST were not just revealing, but like a fourth wall nakedly exposed. Max captures the line between author and material with authenticity and revelation. It is almost surreal, as Max brought me back to the narrative of IJ while manifesting Wallace's actual art and pain of writing it. I don't want to spoil it for readers by dropping tidbits of information--reading about it is thrilling and gripping, the most page-turning part of the book.

The letters Wallace wrote to Franzen, DeLillo, Costello, and his editor, Michael Pietsch, at Little, Brown, and Company, (and many others), will prickle the skin of any DFW aficionado. He was self-conscious, and self-conscious about being self-conscious, and communicated that in his letters.

"I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am...self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests...but then I countenance the fact here at least here I am worrying about it; so then I feel better about myself...but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to imagined Others...I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am--so where does that put me."

This book is a valuable companion to David Lipsky's journalistic book, ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF, a biography of Lipsky's five days spent with Wallace on his IJ book tour. It is hard to compare them, as Lipsky's is an echo and interpretation of his actual time with DFW, and this book is compiled from sources outside of the biographer. Both have poignant insight into the ephemeral but perennial figure of Wallace.

I award four stars, rather than five, although the quality of writing and extensive research is first-rate (despite being almost devoid of familial testimony, and despite errors that I think are typesetting errors, not copy-editing, errors). It's personal. Something is missing, some essence that cannot be filled by a biographer, or hasn't yet-- the unnameable, soulful reflectiveness that I ache for. The closest way to that is through the Harry Ransom Center, which is fortunately only a few miles from my home, which houses David Foster Wallace's entire archive at hand. You can feel the pages while you read what he wrote, with just a slip of a glove separating you from his words.

There is something about Wallace fans--it is as if we are all in the same karass, isn't it? But Wallace wanted to relate to us on a cosmic scale, not like an exclusive club, yet he appeals to only select (not elite, but select) readers. If you become a lover of Wallace's work, you feel almost mystically connected to all other lovers of his oeuvre, and however fantastical a presumption, we also feel connected to Wallace, the person. It is apparent that D.T. Max understands this, and that he is bonded to Wallace, also. That is why (I think) he wrote this bio, about the ghost of David, who keeps on penetrating our literary dreams.(less)

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Oct 19, 2012 Juan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: dfw

This biography, useful as it is in providing some needed context, feels flimsy.

The most obvious missing piece in this bio is an exploration of David Wallace's relationship to his mother. It is quite clear even from Max's work that this relationship was central both to who David Wallace was and to the stylistic and thematic choices in his work. The difficulty of such an endeavor is clear. In unveiling whatever that relationship might have been like, Max risked offending Wallace's family, a risk t...more This biography, useful as it is in providing some needed context, feels flimsy.

The most obvious missing piece in this bio is an exploration of David Wallace's relationship to his mother. It is quite clear even from Max's work that this relationship was central both to who David Wallace was and to the stylistic and thematic choices in his work. The difficulty of such an endeavor is clear. In unveiling whatever that relationship might have been like, Max risked offending Wallace's family, a risk that can derail a biography. The qualms of writers of biographical material, both tactical and borne out of common courtesy and compassion, are well exemplified in the first piece that actually touched on the matter of Wallace's relationship with his mother. In Maria Bustillo's Inside David Foster Wallace's Private Self-Help Library, comment after comment on the self-help books he owned point to the crippling influence of his mother on Wallace's life. After this article was published, revealing something that reader's might have been gleaning from pieces like Suicide as a sort of present, Present Tense... and character's such as Avril Incandenza, a total of 21 out 320 books from the library of DFW on display at the Harry Ramson Center in Austin were removed from public access by Wallace's Estate. There is no question that family members should be spared the grief of seeing their intrafamilial relationships dissected in public in a biography. Also, arguably, no biography of David Foster Wallace can be complete without an extensive exploration of this relationship. This conundrum probably means that we will have to wait for a definitive biography of Wallace for a few years.

Further, there is extensive research done up until after the publishing of Infinite Jest in 1996, at which point Max makes a mad dash for the finish line as if the main objective of the bio had already been accomplished. It takes Max until page 220 to get to the publication of IJ and he then proceeds to wrap up the next 6 books, Wallace's final crisis and all material and analysis of Pale King in 80 pages. This approach left me with the feeling that Max unspoken conclusion for the biography was that Wallace is a failed writer, that published an astounding but essentially unfollowable book in IJ. This would be a massive underestimation of Wallace's work. It is also, however, possible that Max simply ran out of time. This was widely expected book and there must have been a lot of pressure to put it out fast. One would assume that if heavy research was put in at the early stages, it would have had to be sparse at the end with the deadline approaching.

Max's style provides evidence to support the rush theory. There are, for example, sentences that must originate in transfer from subject to biographer and that patient editing might have weeded out, such as in the inadvertently funny: "He knew that he had to write for himself and not think about the reader, but that was easier to enunciate than to enact." One is reminded of Wallace's video about "puffed up words", as well as his penchant for renovating clichés with smart word play; in this case, however, "easier to enunciate than to enact" is not an improvement on the equally lame cliché "easier said than done". The book is not badly written, but there are a few of these little surprises lying around in it.

The biography also fails to transmit what Wallace aptly called his "psychic pain". In Max's bio Wallace will be feeling depressed in one sentence and then hospitalized in the next and out of the hospital by the next paragraph. There is a feeling that Max felt that dwelling on unsavory topics such as what it actually feels to be severely, clinically depressed was somehow offensive to his subject, or that his journalistic principles kept him from approaching the more subjective aspects of "how it felt" for Wallace. This, of course, can all be found on Wallace's work, but one would think it necessary in a book that is supposed to provide context for his own life decisions.

Is this DFW first bio worthy of your attention, then? Yes, despite its shortcomings. It provides much needed information and context. There are no incredible insights from Max himself, it feels rushed and skips important topics, but it is in all a worthwhile read.(less)

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Sep 17, 2012 Cheryl rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, psychology, favorites, philosophy

"BEWARE WHEN THE GREAT GOD LETS LOOSE A THINKER ON THIS PLANET. THEN ALL THINGS ARE AT RISK." Ralph Waldo Emerson

D.T. Max has written a biography of David Foster Wallace that avoids the usual bookends of ancestors and the aftermath of his death. Instead, in three hundred pages, the story of the gifted author's life is told from confessions of his contemporaries, writings from his notebooks, and well researched information from his employment decisions to his episodes in rehab. This reads like a...more "BEWARE WHEN THE GREAT GOD LETS LOOSE A THINKER ON THIS PLANET. THEN ALL THINGS ARE AT RISK." Ralph Waldo Emerson

D.T. Max has written a biography of David Foster Wallace that avoids the usual bookends of ancestors and the aftermath of his death. Instead, in three hundred pages, the story of the gifted author's life is told from confessions of his contemporaries, writings from his notebooks, and well researched information from his employment decisions to his episodes in rehab. This reads like a comprehensive biography with multiple threads of Wallace's brief life addressed. The evolution of his literary thinking alone could support another writing. Bravely, the questions that could be asked at this time were addressed, even though there may not be answers.

A conflicted, desperate man is portrayed near the end of his life. Wallace was "temporizing" while trying to finish his last novel, THE PALE KING. He had so many ambitions. "It had to show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life. It had to be emotionally engaged and morally sound, and to dramatize boredom without being too entertaining." His insightful and observant mind set the highest standards for his work, but he struggled with what to filter to make his points.

In 2005 Wallace wrote in one of his notebooks, "They're rare, but they're among us. People able to achieve and sustain a certain steady state of concentration, attention, despite what they're doing." But by 2005, Wallace's failure to write THE PALE KING was truth-telling to his unstable mind. "He wasn't an adept, an immersive, even after more than a dozen years of sobriety and recovery and sitting. He was not as far as he wished to be from the defective young man from Urbana who had arrived at Amherst in 1980. Work, he wrote Jonathan Franzen in December 2006, is like shitting sharp stones, still." Even with the approbation of his novel, INFINITE JEST, Wallace lived with the regressed side of himself that was insecure, anxious, self-critical and depressed.

A mental health diagnosis, treatment and subsequent timed recovery can be more detrimental to a person's view of himself than if no change in functioning had occurred. Wallace experienced periods of high productivity, levels of contentment, and satisfying intimacies with his wife, literary friends and his animals. Having closely observed how his mind worked, he knew the devastating void of his altered state, depression.

As a participant in the mental health field for many years, it became real that mental pain far outweighed the physical for some. Today there are limitations of understanding the mind, predicting lethality, and preventing suffering. Wallace, it seems to me, crowded into his few decades striving toward the heights of being that are most admirable in human beings, especially when anchored down by mental disadvantages beyond his control. Highest Recommendation! FAVORITE!

(less)

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Nov 04, 2012 Eileen rated it 3 of 5 stars

So... I didn't purchase this book because I read a clip on amazon.com and hated the writing style, and when I read the reviews on the site, they backed me up.

I HATE HATE HATE the way this author writes. Terse, declarative sentence after terse, declarative sentence, it feels like it was written by a sixth grader. Just awful. In addition, it doesn't make sense in parts. In explaining how DFW and his college roommate are different, he mentions that DFW's roommate "doesn't even drink." But literally...more

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Sep 05, 2012 Webster Bull rated it 4 of 5 stars

Now that I've finished the first major biography of the author of Infinite Jest, I have reduced my rating from 5 stars to 4.

First, if my previous posts don't make this clear, I am a big fan of David Foster Wallace. My daughter has just agreed to read it with me, in a two-person one-book kind of club, and I am thrilled. It will be roughly my 4th read-through. "Roughly" because I dip into it even when not reading it. I'll review the novel here when I finish reading it again.

But the biography: a b...more

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Sep 30, 2012 Grace Liew rated it 2 of 5 stars

Best parts of the book by far are the flurries of DFW's quotes copied wholesale, albeit they still suffer from DT Max's flimsy attempts to give context. The book wades only in shallow waters and rickety theories, with no cutting insights whatsoever. Why did DT Max even write this, then?

Another reviewer already said very succinctly my overall impression of this book: it reads like a long wikipedia article. Personally, I'm a huge wiki fan. I wiki all sorts of shit. I glean biographies of my favori...more Best parts of the book by far are the flurries of DFW's quotes copied wholesale, albeit they still suffer from DT Max's flimsy attempts to give context. The book wades only in shallow waters and rickety theories, with no cutting insights whatsoever. Why did DT Max even write this, then?

Another reviewer already said very succinctly my overall impression of this book: it reads like a long wikipedia article. Personally, I'm a huge wiki fan. I wiki all sorts of shit. I glean biographies of my favorite famous people on wiki. The main reason wikipedia entries work so well for my procrastinatory casual research purposes is that wikis are non-emotive—you can read the blurbs of factoids any time of the day or night and you are never changed for the better or worse, just heavier with whatever information you came for, meh, and life goes on.

Sounds like DFW's biggest nightmare? But then again, I'm just projecting. Did DT Max take DFW's later fascination with boredom (and its perceived zen-like benefits) as an endorsement of it?

Read the book for more than 30 pages in one sitting and you can feel the effects of the marked lack of direction. A gander at the chapter titles tells you nothing...which goes back to the directionlessness of this whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I bought the book the day it came out, full sticker price, read it diligently and delighted at the bits of facts and DFW's witticisms, and, I suspect like many others, I bought the book because I couldn't not buy it. There were things about DFW's life that I wanted to know, felt I had to know. But I'm not about to conflate my love for DFW with my feelings about his biography—the weakest link here is DT Max.

His formula seems to be: throw in what I know about what DFW did and then construct concepts around them, however vague. The result is a lot of mundane info (some of which I did love), but each mundane tidbit follows the pattern of trailing...off...into...a dead end, a great void unconnected with anything, then another tidbit surfaces out of nowhere, before trailing off again...then another...and another...

Somewhere in the middle of the book it is intimated that DFW fell out with his mother. No further exposition is given, which is incredibly unsatisfying, since the book opens with plenty details about how close the two once were.

Finally, the way the book ends shocked my socks off. Not that I was expecting a final bow to tie it all up, but this hurricane that terrorized the final 5 pages of the book? In a few pages DFW goes abruptly from a content/stabilized person struggling with his novel (as he's perpetually doing all his life) to someone who goes off his regular medication, attempts suicide, vows to never do it again, returns to shock therapy, and finally ends his life? It made me cry.

I know DT Max mentioned before that he vowed not to write a "sad" book, but the paltriness of this text is like a meta-sad, sadder than sad because your original desire to not be sad tried too hard to be not-sad.

:((less)

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Jan 09, 2013 Chris Packham rated it 5 of 5 stars

The first line is so terrible! Wow, that's a bad first line. But: Max knows Wallace's writing back and forth, and he's unfuckwittable at intertwining Wallace's personal life with his development as a writer. Lots of interviews with people who were close to Wallace during particular periods of his life.

It also does away with the gentle-saint hagiography that settled in after Wallace died, and portrays him honestly: a good guy who was still a standard-issue human — capable of being a dick, but wh...more

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Sep 17, 2012 Max rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

Mixed feelings about this. D.T. definitely did his homework, and I'm glad someone took the time to follow up on all the loose strands DFW left behind, because one of the most interesting things about this book is finding out the extent to which DFW misrepresented and exaggerated aspects of his life in his published work (and even in his correspondence).

Still, this book has a distinctly rushed-to-press feeling, especially in the second half. The book revolves around Infinite Jest (much like DFW's...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Adam rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, 1970-present

A basically very good intellectual biography, if critically dubious at times, but also filled with unnecessary amounts of detail re DFW's personal life, which sadly is probably what is getting this book to sell as well as it seems to be.

We knew enough about DFW's personal life (depression, addiction, major relationships, etc) before this book came out. All I found out from this book were some personal details about DFW that were of interest to me in that I related to them/was to some extent hap...more A basically very good intellectual biography, if critically dubious at times, but also filled with unnecessary amounts of detail re DFW's personal life, which sadly is probably what is getting this book to sell as well as it seems to be.

We knew enough about DFW's personal life (depression, addiction, major relationships, etc) before this book came out. All I found out from this book were some personal details about DFW that were of interest to me in that I related to them/was to some extent happy to know I shared some interests I wasn't aware I'd shared with DFW: his appreciation of P.G. Wodehouse, his turning to "sad Springsteen and Neil Young" when in bad shape, his writing while listening over and over again to Born in the U.S.A., his taste for M*A*S*H*, The Wire, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files, his well-hidden liking for U2 (oops).

But even these are obviously things I didn't need to know; they are only of mild interest to somebody interested in his writing, and could've been guessed at. Wallace's comic descriptions bear enough resemblance to Wodehouse that I could've guessed that he'd read Wodehouse. His appreciation for Springsteen is predictable given Springsteen's lyrical sincerity and emotional poise in dealing with serious issues re being a human being+American life, etc. etc.

these are only minor details in the book, of course. Unfortunately, much of the book is given to long and detailed accounts of DFW's love life, nearly all of which are totally unnecessary and totally, creepily voyeuristic and hence disrespectful, though some are funny, like the anecdote on his hour-long attempt, in a lobby, to convince Elizabeth Wurtzel that letting him fuck her would constitute a "therapeutic favor." His fiction shows an extensive discomfort with masculinity and its implications re women and the relationship (especially the distance) between men and women. That is enough. Nobody needs to know, especially not in such detail, that DFW was a pussy hound, struggled to keep serious relationships going, but yearned for a serious, adult domestic existence.

All that said, the book does give a good account of Wallace's intellectual development and ideas on what fiction ought to do and how one should live her life. As an intellectual/literary biography, this book is perfectly competent. Max's sketch of Wallace's personal side is the problem; it borders on the distasteful, and ironically will likely have the effect of further romanticizing Wallace and his tragic death, which seems to be the opposite of what Max at least ostensibly wanted, which was to write an account of a very mortal, very troubled, but intensely compassionate man who wrote some good and important fiction and non-fiction. (less)

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Jun 09, 2013 Gil D. rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Il titolo è tra i più belli (e appropriati) che io ricordi. Per chi vuol saperne di più (del titolo e del libro) ho scritto qui:
http://scarabooks.blogspot.it/2013/06...

Mi limito ad aggiungere che per chi ama DFW è una lettura imperdibile. Per chi non lo conosce, un modo per avvicinarsi.
Il suo merito maggiore è tentare di dissolvere l'alone di tristezza e di "pesanteur" con cui si tende ad avvolgere la vita e l'opera di quest'uomo. Qualcuno sarà sorpreso nel leggere che lui invece la pensava così...more

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Nov 17, 2012 Allen Adams rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: published-reviews

http://www.themaineedge.com/buzz/a-bi...

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “genius” thusly:
- A single strongly marked capacity or aptitude.
- Extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity.
- A person endowed with transcendent mental superiority.

The late writer David Foster Wallace was an embodiment of all of these definitions. The author of the seminal novel “Infinite Jest” – along with a wealth of beloved work both fiction and non – died in September of 200...more

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Jun 10, 2013 Darwin8u rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

A good solid biography of David Foster Wallace. For a writer who was so hyped, celebrated and written about, it was a nearly impossible task to bring anything large or significant to the table with Wallace. D.T. Max did a good job. He didn't write a hagiography or sycophant's biography, but also avoided sinking into a loop of cheap theatrics that might have tempted another biographer. It wasn't a revolution as far as DFW was concerned or as far as biographies of writers either.

For me, it was lik...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Joel Feil rated it 2 of 5 stars

The subject matter is fascinating and the prose is readable, but poor old D.T. didn't come through on the promise of his excellent New Yorker piece. The almost comical lack of examination of DFW's relationship with his parents (particularly his mother) suggests that Max simply lacked the material and access for him to even be able, at this point, to write a good biography.

His mishandling of the ending, particularly, and the clunkiness of his analysis generally, suggests that Max simply isn't the...more The subject matter is fascinating and the prose is readable, but poor old D.T. didn't come through on the promise of his excellent New Yorker piece. The almost comical lack of examination of DFW's relationship with his parents (particularly his mother) suggests that Max simply lacked the material and access for him to even be able, at this point, to write a good biography.

His mishandling of the ending, particularly, and the clunkiness of his analysis generally, suggests that Max simply isn't the man to write the thing properly anyway. The ending deserves particular note, as it ends abruptly at DFW's death with no discussion of the posthumous publication of The Pale King, and no real discussion of the repercussions of his suicide. Even worse, the leadup to the suicide itself is handled remarkably quickly--again one wonders if this was another period of DFW's life where those closest to him weren't opening up all the way, or whether Max was just mishandling his material. Perhaps worst of all is his clunky and tasteless attempt to make a parallel to DFW's death and the abrupt ending of his books. The last line (from memory, "It wasn't the ending we wanted, but it was the one he had chosen") is frankly repugnant--I wonder how on earth it wasn't excised in an early edit. But seriously, it is puerile reductionism to equate DFW's suicide with his work.

I may in fact being going too easy on the book, because I really know very little about Postmodern Literature, and haven't read much Dellilo or Pynchon or even Franzen, so I take Max's analysis of their importance and relationship at face value. But does he deserve this trust? When Max's strays into things I do know about, half the time he flubs them--e.g. his ridiculous comment about the tritone being banned because it was too sensual. And his analysis , or lack thereof, of the importance of various themes in DFW’s work is often equally lacking. Luckily a lot of this stuff is just Max presenting what DFW says in his letters, so Max stays relatively in the background.

I learned a lot about DFW and his work from this book, but all too often despite the author, and not because of him.

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Sep 07, 2012 Jessie Uchat rated it 5 of 5 stars

If you are into literary fiction, Wallace's books are a must read.
His was a life full of turbulent and dramas.
At a very young age he was had already published a bestselling literary fiction.
He died at the age of 46.

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May 10, 2013 Courtney Gustafson rated it 4 of 5 stars

I read this book in one long stretch of nine hours, not because I wanted to or because I had the time but because once you dive into the life of David Foster Wallace you (I) can't stop, even though you know the ending and you know that it will make you cry. Reading this threw me into a weird mental circle of anxiety and worry and depression and loneliness and sadness and restlessness and dissociation which has yet to entirely dissipate, which is to say that it is a very good book.

To be clear: A...more

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May 03, 2013 Joshua Buhs rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, non-fiction

I was impressed.
I came into the book not really liking biographies, and being skeptical about biographies of the recently passed, but curious to know more about DFW so willing to take the plunge. It was good!
Max was able to gain access to some very insightful correspondence between DFW and other writers, which really helped him tell his stories, as, apparently, did some interviews.
He provides a strong intellectual history of DFW and offers an interesting reading of Infinite Jest based on this hi...more

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Apr 02, 2013 Paolo Latini rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: good-old-david-g-o-d

Non amo le biografie e credo, con Calvino e Proust, che di un autore contino solo le opere. Al massimo, e nel caso di autori contemporanei che godono di una copertura mediatica, le interviste (e ci sono già un paio di libri che raccolgono le interviste che ha rilasciato Wallace a giornali, radio e tv). Tutto quanto si può leggere su questa biografia non aggiunge e non toglie nulla all'opera di uno degli scrittori che tanti altri scrittori (DeLillo, Franzen, Saunders, Zadie Smith...) hanno ricono...more

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Mar 23, 2013 Ailsa rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

I feel somewhat conflicted about this biography of David Foster Wallace. As someone who loves his work (even though reading Infinite Jest over the course of five months near killed me) D.T. Max managed to offer a compelling enough portrait of the man behind the fiction and essays to keep me engrossed in this book, allowing me to exercise a kind of ghoulish desire to reanimate Wallace, at least for the duration of this book.

But I'm ultimately not sure if the book actually serves any purpose beyo...more

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Mar 21, 2013 David Hallman rated it 5 of 5 stars

The “to be or not to be” of David Foster Wallace

“This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen.”

The closing sentence of D. T. Max’s exemplary biography “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story – A Life of David Foster Wallace” is succinct and devastating.

David Foster Wallace’s meteoric writing career took the brilliant young American philosopher-turned-author to the pinnacle of acclaim as “the leading light of his generation” and then just as abruptly stall...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Chris Michel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

My review from the Brooklyn Rail

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was published my freshman year of college, just as I was discovering the world of contemporary literature and my own desire to participate in it. I remember reading magazine reviews hailing Wallace as a genius, and being much too intimidated to read what was described as a dense and complicated tome 1,104 pages thick. Over the next 10 years, through my matriculation into two creative writing programs (the last in Syracuse, New...more

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Mar 03, 2013 Aaron Miller rated it 5 of 5 stars

This got me re-interested in Wallace's work, or at least interested in rereading 'Infinite Jest' in the near future. Max provides extensive material from letters Wallace wrote to other authors (esp. Jonathan Franzen and Don Delillo) and to his close friends in order to give the reader an idea of the high standard Wallace set for himself as an author and how difficult it was for him to meet that standard.

I rarely read biographies (I think the most time I have ever spent reading them happened in m...more

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Feb 28, 2013 Bob Wake rated it 4 of 5 stars

D.T. Max’s solid biography of American writer David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, portrays with emotional force Wallace’s successful struggle to stay sober for the better part of his adult life. From roughly 1989 up until his 2008 suicide (resulting from a recurrence of severe depression that plagued him on and off since his Midwestern adolescence), we learn that he worked a rigorous recovery program, attending regular support group meetings (even when on the roa...more

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Feb 24, 2013 Colleen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, biography

This is primarily for pretty serious DFW fans. Although the book definitely covers aspects of his personal life, it struck me as primarily a biography of his writing. There’s a lot of detail on the writing process and content (too much? probably depends on what your interests). But it felt like the veil was still up a bit when it came to his personal life and particularly his depression. For instance, Max notes that early on at Amherst DFW broke down and had to go home—there are no real details...more

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Feb 07, 2013 Mattpfeff rated it 3 of 5 stars

Why did I read the whole thing? I'm usually not willfully optimistic about a book. Biography can't be easy, and D.T. Max of course chose as his subject a writer many people feel strongly about; any lack of faithfulness to the truth would inevitably have been discovered and punished. But the rigid chronological structure doesn't make for compelling narrative or for consistent insight; there's no real synthesis to grab a hold of. It feels like, in striving for completeness, the book overfilled wit...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Ben Dutton rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

David Foster Wallace had problems. Everybody who knew him admitted it, and even those who read his fiction when he was alive suspected something was not right. Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself in September 2008, at which point the literary establishment proclaimed him a genius, despite all evidence being there from his literary beginnings two decades before. This is not to say that people did not read Wallace before his suicide, many did and he had many fans, but that after his death...more David Foster Wallace had problems. Everybody who knew him admitted it, and even those who read his fiction when he was alive suspected something was not right. Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself in September 2008, at which point the literary establishment proclaimed him a genius, despite all evidence being there from his literary beginnings two decades before. This is not to say that people did not read Wallace before his suicide, many did and he had many fans, but that after his death his work has come to signify a seismic shift in American letters in the late twentieth century. He is seen as being ahead of his time.

The critical assessment of Wallace and writing has been gathering steam since his death, but perhaps the first book that has reached a wider audience is this, D. T. Max’s biography, ‘Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace’. Max, who had only tangential connections to Wallace, has written what must be considered the superlative biography. He has clearly read all of Wallace’s work – the fiction and the non-fiction – and spoken to as many people involved with Wallace’s life as he could; even if some are notable by their major absence in this work, as if they didn’t want to be quoted and give up their personal correspondence, such as Jonathan Franzen (though some of Franzen’s recollection is here).

Max takes us from Wallace’s early years, to his troubled adult life, and shows how it shaped him and his work. Through close-reading, he is able to show how personal experience altered the fiction, and through his battles with editors and publishers is able to show how much more deeply Wallace understood his own work in relation to those paid to sell it for him. The portrait reveals a man very much disconnected from contemporary American life but who absorbed himself in it so thoroughly nobody ever realised how much pain he was in, and how much this disconnect hurt him. He seems constantly frustrated that people did not understand the world like he did, and that they failed to see the world correctly.

Anybody who has read Wallace’s work, particularly the lengthy Infinite Jest, will gain significant new insight into the work through Max’s considered deconstructions and the connections he makes between the fiction and Wallace’s real life. He pulls off the great literary biographers trick of understanding his subject and their work without becoming reverential or overly critical (too many literary biography’s suffer because of this), but maintains a balanced judgement throughout. He presents the last days of the man’s life with a critical calmness, and simply explains. It marks this biography out as something very special indeed.

Max, then, has done a good job of summarising a life that cannot have been easy to live. It is a fine introduction to David Foster Wallace and to his work, and a fascinating insight behind the curtain for those already enamoured with Wallace’s work. (less)

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topics	posts	views	last activity
Brain Pain: DFW biography by D.T. Max	5	51	Mar 06, 2013 11:26pm
Infinite Jest – D...: Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace	17	42	Nov 30, 2012 08:12am
21st Century Lite...: Issues of Composition	18	42	Oct 30, 2012 04:51am
21st Century Lite...: A Love Story or a Ghost Story?	32	37	Oct 24, 2012 07:24pm
21st Century Lite...: Manageable Vices	14	18	Oct 24, 2012 10:19am
21st Century Lite...: Generosity	9	17	Oct 24, 2012 09:15am
21st Century Lite...: Just the Facts	1	11	Oct 01, 2012 02:56am

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