Conversations with David Foster Wallace

Spanning Wallace’s 20-year career, from 1987 until his suicide in 2008, this collection of interviews and profiles sheds light on a man as intricately constructed as his fiction. While thematic repetitions are inevitable when the subject matter overlaps—many of the interviews concern Wallace’s ambitious and critically lauded 1996 novel, Infinite Jest—on the whole each encounter with the author provides another piece of the puzzle. Larry McCaffery’s 1993 interview from the Review of Contemporary Fiction is the most in-depth and also the most academic, but its discussion of the writer’s struggle to balance the story’s needs with the writer’s need to be admired (“Hey! Look at me! Have a look at what a good writer I am! Like me!”) is fascinating. Despite his eloquence, Wallace often underscored his distaste for interviews, touring, and practically anything else that made him the center of attention, a fact that curiously correlated with his insistence that good writing acts as an “an anodyne against loneliness.” About himself he said, with some chagrin, “I’m an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.” The final, posthumous Rolling Stone profile, “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace,” is even more heartbreaking when read as both the coda of the book and of a life. (Apr.)