David Foster Wallace’s suicide isn’t an easy thing to bear. Peter Sagal put it beautifully. There are writers of great insight, but they tend to be either didactic or obscure. There are writers with shocking beautiful style, but they’re usually shallow or mired in pretense. And there are writers who communicate with startling immediacy and force, but they usually mine sentimentality or aggressively pointless realism.

David Foster Wallace had more insight, style and force than any writer I can think of, and at his best he added to this a blinding brilliance that could make you read the same sentence again and again until it wrestled you to the ground and forced you to take a moment to sit back and think about it rather than plunging forward simply because there was another sentence on the other side of that punctuation mark. And I’m pretty sure that this was the point to his ceaseless footnoting and internal distractions that turned his best work into a kind of hyperlink-rich self-contained web; David Foster Wallace took great pains to make you read, rather than let the act of reading become an end unto itself. Reading’s a drug like any other, and Wallace wouldn’t serve up a soporific, not when he had something to say. Which was frequently.

I don’t think there’s a better novel out there than “Infinite Jest.”

And here I am critiquing his work, basically because I have nothing to say about his death. I can’t decode it. Can I pretend to have seen traces of it in his more recent work? Was he diabolically and infinitely entertained by something that he had no hope of regaining? Did it involve our current political circus and his rather unique connection to John McCain?

No, probably not. Probably not any of that, really. Writers, like everyone, have private lives (well, most do. There are a couple I’m not so sure of). And those private lives are much more important and complicated than anything that hits the page.

I’m angry. I resent this. I don’t want to pick up anything to read right now, because he’s not going to be there. And the bulk of what passes for “good” writing these days is not worth the wear and tear on our constantly-deteriorating eyeballs. Even the so-called best; most of them, at this moment, seem like glib and ungrounded pretenders, glorified campfire entertainers who are prized for their amazing ability to scoff at newfound stereotypes or describe uncatalogued minutia.

Not just them - I include me in that. It’s a bad night. Naturally, I’ll forgive myself and all my fellow writers in the morning. But right now I can’t help but feel that the best of us is gone.

[Note: I wrote this a couple of nights ago, and didn’t post it right away, thinking I’d have more to add. I don’t. I’m still as close to speechless as I ever get….]