David Foster Wallace

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This morning, while I was reading the NYT on line, particularly the long piece dedicated to Sarah Palin, I was disturbed by the news of the suicide of David Foster Wallace- I liked him as a writer. I was especially hit by one of the stories of Oblivion "Good Old Neon" whose character commits suicide because he reaches a point where he realizes that he has been all his life a "fraud", he spent all his energies in trying to please the people he had some intercourse with. He felt his "emptiness" in all its unbearable weight (or "lightness") and can't stand this void anymore. While there his no chance I would take the "shortcut" his character chooses to take, I must say that reading Wallace's story I felt something like "That's me" and started a path to understand what autism is and how much it concerned me.
This is the review of Oblivion published in "Salon" when the book appeared in print.

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review ... html#share

This sad news hit me bad too this morning. Two years ago I was really crazy for Wallace, the epitaph I put at the beginning of my final University essay was taken by a novel of his. I know the novel you're talking about, it got me thinking too, for the same reason (it actually scared me). Lately I didn't read him anymore, partly because I felt his writings were certainly beautiful, but at the same time deeply sick. In a post a long time ago I suggested the possibility of him being an Aspie, probably not, but he certainly had a tragic vision of reality, no matter how covered of irony. Now it's too easy to say, but I've always thought that he had to be a very sad person. I'm sorry this happened but to a certain extent I almost expected it. He was certainly a genius, but a sick one. RIP

Edit: hypotesis: maybe the protagonist of the novel you talk about was a projection of Wallace himself. All of his writings were a stile exercise, always trying to reach new heights of beauty and perfection...to what end ? Be liked seems a quite educated possibility.