The subject of the novel is boredom, as confronted by workers at an IRS center in Illinois. The blog Howling Fantods assembled a list of what turn out to have been "Pale King" excerpts going back to 2006, many of them online. The most recent excerpt is the one published by the New Yorker alongside this week's profile (partly typeset and party as a photographic reproduction).

Little, Brown released a statement that the novel runs "several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines and other material." Wallace left the manuscript in the garage, to be discovered by his wife. He apparently did not feel the material ready to publish. But the work, like the New Yorker's epic, "intimate" and ultimately difficult profile, would seem befitting the "maximalist" postmodern author at least in its (hopefully glorious) sprawl.

(Photo by Steve Rhodes on Flickr)

One of many intriguing things about Mr. Ziegler, though, is the contrast between his deep cynicism about backstabbing and the naked, seemingly self-destructive candor with which he'll discuss his life and career. This candor becomes almost paradoxical in Q & As with an outside correspondent, a stranger whom Mr. Z. has no particular reason to trust at those times when he winces after saying something and asks that it be struck from the record.

He then goes to explain how everything bad that ever happened to him in his life is because of O.J. Simpson. Ziegler has some, uh, issues with race.

Ziegler is, obviously, a nut, though Wallace paints him as a largely sympathetic nut, and a talented one. But he has, of course, been pushing the "everyone in America is a moron" line for some time, so we really can't fault him for lack of consistency.

The most striking new detail in the autopsy report is that Wallace bound his wrists together with duct tape to prevent an aborted attempt. Yes, this note is on the macabre side, but the Rolling Stone portrait makes Wallace's act all the more considered choice, one echoed by Wallace years earlier when he said after a friend's suicide attempt, "I just, just — I knew that if anybody was fated to screw up a suicide attempt, it was me." To prevent that, he went all the way.

We already knew from David Lipsky's Rolling Stone article that Wallace had undergone twelve electroshock treatments, and there was mention of other drugs Wallace had been taking in an attempt to balance his neurochemistry. At the time of his death, the autopsy report says that the other other drugs working actively in his system besides Nardil were Clonazepam and Temazepam, neither of which is in the same class as Nardil.

Whatever treatment Dr. Jodi Rawles had Wallace on, it appears she was reluctant to stray from Nardil, which was reconfigured to be less strong by Pfizer in 2003, and eventually discontinued by the company in that form before another pharmaceutical company picked it up. More investigation into the properties of this drug is badly needed.

Then there's a detail that friends of David Foster Wallace might have known, but most of us didn't:

Why is all this important — why obsess over the details of what exactly happened? It seems inescapable that Wallace's battle with Nardil, which he took for decades, was the principal cause of his death. In that fight, Wallace had every treatment available to him and still succumbed. Maybe it was going off Nardil in the first place that doomed him, and maybe staying on the drug wouldn't have changed anything, either. But whatever did occur, whatever medical and therapeutic treatment he received, could conceivably tell us how to save another depressed genius. This one we already lost.

Excerpts detailing Wallace's difficult time fitting in at Amherst were already released, but the longer print version reveals that Wallace had a similar reaction to pretty much everything that happened in his life.

His instructors at The University of Arizona MFA program didn't help:

He wanted to write the way he wanted to write — funny and overstuffed and nonlinear and strange. The teachers were all "hardass realists." That was the first problem. Problem two was Wallace. "I think I was kind of a prick," he said. "I was just unteachable. I had that look - 'If there were any justice, I'd be teaching this class' - that makes you want to slap a student." One of these stories, "Here and There," went on to win a 1989 O. Henry Prize after it was published in a literary magazine. When he turned it in to his professor, he received a chilly noise back: "I hope this isn't representative of the work you're hoping to do for us. We'd hate to lose you."

When Wallace sent out The Broome of the System to agents, he got back notes that included the line "Best of luck in your janitorial career." When success finally did come, same old Wallace:

He worked at a health club in Auburndale, Massachusetts. "Very chichi," he said. "They called me something other than a towel boy, but I was in effect a towel boy. I'm sitting there, and who should walk up but Michael Ryan. Now, Michael Ryan had received a Whiting Writer's Award the same year I had. So I see this guy that I'd been up on the fucking rostrum with, having Eudora Welty give us this prize."

This is all to show how deeply Wallace's depression entered every part of him. A bad reaction to his longtime anti-depressive of choice, Nardil, caused him to go off the drug during the summer of 2007, but that would be the beginning of the end:

That summer, David began to phase out the Nardil. His doctors began prescribing other medications, none of which seemed to help. "They could find nothing," his mother says softly. "Nothing." In September, David asked [sister] Amy to forgo her annual fall-break visit. He wasn't up to it. By October, his symptoms had become bad enough to send him to the hospital. His parents didn't know what to do. "I started worrying about that," Sally says, "but then it seemed OK." He began to drop weight. By that fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he had just stepped out of an Amherst classroom.

Twelve bouts of electroshock therapy and an aborted return to the Nardil later, Wallace couldn't find his own level:

"He was just desperate," his mother says. "He was afraid it wasn't ever going to work. He was suffering. We just kept holding him, saying if he could just hang on, it would straighten. He was very brave for a very long time."

Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire, talked. Sally cooked David's favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods - pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. "We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive," his mother recalls. "But my feeling is, even then, he was leaving the planet. He just couldn't take it."

One afternoon before they left, David was very upset. His mother sat on the floor besides him: "I just rubbed his arm. He said he was glad I was his mom. I told him it was an honor."

Wallace's belated funeral happened this past Thursday, and media coverage tended to focus on what a shock and surprise his death was to the literary community. To some, it wasn't a shock at all.

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace [Rolling Stone]

In 1984, Costello left for Yale Law School; Wallace was alone senior year. He double-majored — English and philosophy, which meant two big writing projects. In philosophy, he took on modal logic. "It looked really hard, and I was really scared about it," he said. "So I thought I'd do this kind of jaunty, hundred-page novel." He wrote it in five months, and it clocked in at 700 pages. He called it The Broom of the System.

Wallace published stories in the Amherst literary magazine. One was about depression and a tricyclic anti-anxiety medication he had been on for two months. The medication "made me feel like I was stoned and in hell," he told me. The story dealt with the in-hell parts:

You are the sickness yourself.... You realize all this...when you look at the black hole and it's wearing your face. That's when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they're "severely depressed;" we say, "Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!" That's wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts.... When they "commit suicide," they're just being orderly.

The Lost Years & Last Days Of David Foster Wallace [Rolling Stone]

He'd been clinically depressed for two decades, on "powerful" medication (and apparently also Skoal) that made it possible for him to write — this may be vulgar but I have been too thoroughly inculcated in our compulsive culture of psychopharmacological comparison shopping not to wonder why they never tell you which — but the meds had powerful side effects, so he went off them in the summer of 2007, to apparently disastrous consequences. He tried electric shock therapy and other unspecified meds; nothing worked. He couldn't write or eat, and dropped to 140 pounds. He took a medical leave from teaching. A student is quoted saying his great genius was unrelated to his great depression. That student is wrong.

When David was 5, his mother recalls, he decided that he had two careers to look forward to. He would be a professional football player, for one. In the off-season, while the other players were recuperating or doing whatever it is that pro football players do when they're not running or passing or slamming their bodies into each other, he would be a neurosurgeon. His mother has no idea how, at 5, her son might have heard about neurosurgeons or what they were or did, but he had. The first day of his medical career, he promised his mom, he would take out all of her frayed nerves and fix them. "Somehow he knew about neurosurgeons," she says, "and he knew that my nerves needed fixing."

So let's examine that tranche for a second: here we have Wurtzel, drawn to David and his big, serious, ambitious, meaty, unfrivolous gold standard of a book; David, drawn to Wurtzel by her fucking leotard and perhaps her nebulous promise to impart upon his serious asset some sort of value-unlocking sense of "buzz"…signing onto one of those confusing, fuzzy subprime relationships that were all the rage, still are. The fine print is almost amusing to us now: the hazy fundamentals and wild histrionics and bombastic promises dependent on "trajectories" neither has any clue how — neither is socialized to have any clue how — to redirect toward a soft landing.

Yes, you have done that sort of fucking.

From a 1996 account of his reading at the KGB Bar:

The critics aren't the only ones angling to prove that they get it. Wallace's contemporaries have shown up at his public appearances in force. When he read at K.G.B., Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of ''Prozac Nation,'' claimed a spot near the front of the room. The following night, at another jampacked reading, this time at Tower Books in the Village, Ethan Hawke lurked in the back. And at the official book party two nights later at an East Village club, M. G. Lord, the author of ''Forever Barbie,'' can be seen chatting up another novelist of the moment, A. M. Homes. Between puffs of their cigarettes, many people whisper what Wallace says he does not want to hear: he is the current ''it'' boy of contemporary fiction.

And here's how Wurtzel remembers it:

For some stupid reason, no one ever had the sense to separate the truly desperate from the merely decadent, we were all doing too many drugs together at the same time, the people who could handle it with the people who were going to end up dead and worse, and we were too young to see where all this was going to lead. And into this mess walked David Wallace one spring evening, do-rag and all. I don’t think he exactly told me that he was a genius, but I must have gotten that impression, because I believe I was instantly impressed by something about him. Maybe it was just the way he was so open and curious, or the way he was so taken with the silver lamé leotard I was wearing.

And here's Wallace, probably a year later:

"I like not being part of the literary community in New York, particularly in the last year and a half," said Wallace. "[There's] a bizarre pecking order that nobody cares anything about except people who are in that world."

And that was true, and it is true, and it's not just the literary community, but a whole throbbing island that longs and yearns and bleats for the fucking pecking order of it. And as soon as the pecking order is established, it longs to cheat the order, whether it be with scotch and sex and lame leotards or phony credit-default swaps. At some point it became possible, in industries including but surely not limited to literature, to unload one's darkest, most distressed assets — addiction and narcissism and numbness and contempt and incuriosity and selfishness — at a handsome profit, so long as you packaged it all with naked pictures and quippy quotes, and that is exactly what Wurtzel did, again and again, until she finally got sick of it quit for law school. For her that was the solution; it's hard to imagine anyone couldn't go far to rehabilitate oneself merely by evacuating New York:

By appearances, it would have seemed to me that David was doing great, living in Southern California, writing terrific books and pieces, recently married, teaching at a prestigious college. I am not stupid enough to believe that depression does not afflict a person whose life is good, but if he could get by in a hovel in the middle of the Midwest, surely these elements of happy life—love, sunshine, stability—had to be a plus. These things are real, genuine, the stuff depression blocks you from even getting close to. Furthermore, I thought David, at 46, was at a safe age, when things are most likely to be okay or okay enough: the mad search for sex and success that consumes one’s twenties, and then leaves a hangover into your thirties, is done with; the sense of failure, the feeling that it’s all been a waste, that hits after 50 hasn’t come yet. Middle age, which might be a crisis, can also be a calm.

But it wasn't. Who knows why. There is no answer to why some self-obsessed cokehead slut could cash out and get clean and get good and re-channel her energies to the point that she felt she had something to live for while such a merited specimen as Dave, with his voracious mind and evident hard-won goodness and doting students and wife and support system and all that deeply-felt regard of the literary community he'd left behind, did not. There is no answer at all, which is why the fucking pecking order is so stupid to begin with. Which brings me to the comment on the website of New York Magazine, where Wurtzel's uneasy remembrance of her hazy fuckbuddyship with Dave initially appeared, that inspired me to post about this at all:

Elizabeth Wurtzel, predictably, is still beating on the dead (flea-bitten) horse of her undergrad depression. What's more, she wants to trot out the well-known fact that by widely spreading her spindley arachnid legs, she may have garnered Dave Wallace's attention over a misspent weekend in the mid-1990s. We can forgive Dave, who probably hadn't encountered much self-involved, desperate-to-stay-in-the-game pussy at that point. But can we forgive this spent harridan or NY Mag for their faux-sepia toned muckraking? Harder to imagine.

To which I can only reply: try to imagine forgiving them all, Wurtzel included, reader. To withhold forgiveness at a time like this, in a town like this, is simply to persist in the cowardly humoring of the delusions born of the propulsive myopia that won Wurtzel the profitable antipathy of all those peckers that chose to pay attention to her in the first place.

It's been reported that his wife found him after he hanged himself. Foster Wallace, longtime darling of grad students and civilian PoMo lit fans, was often very funny in print (see his famous essay skewering the cruise ship experience, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"), but as his 2005 speech at Kenyon College implied, he was not unfamiliar with the heft of existence:

[L]earning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

Very Sad.

[Via Reluctant Habits]

Update: The LAT confirms as well.

OK, so bearing in mind the fact that I have spent a pretty-considerable amount of time in what I consider "good" behavior (although by "good" I'm assuming you already have a pretty good handle on most of the ethical philosophies of like all post-19th C. philosophers— although Hume probably isn't so pertinent; I'll leave this up to you) (By the way, this is probably also a good time to mention that my sinistral phalangeal joint is a little askew due to an unfortunate playground-slide mishap — any dodgy penmanship or unavoidable typos sic), that is to say, not punching my sister or politely asking for more juice instead of just promoting it under stealthy cover of night-time pajama-raid, &c. &c. you may be wondering just what exactly it is I'm up to, like do I have an ulterior motive or whatever.

The rest of Wallace, with footnotes, is here. Other good ones: Terry Pratchett, Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Austen.

Book Mark [Page Six]