Make People Feel Stuff

This week the impeccable D.T. Max yields to us the life and thoughts of author David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker story "The Unfinished." My friend Ivy Goodman made certain that I saw and read the piece; as soon as her note came in, I stopped all else and did.

The story of Wallace, who took his own life at the age of 46 last year, is the desperately sad story of a man so committed to his craft that his own impassioned brilliance was, in the end, defeating. He could think through and past himself, but that wasn't enough. Indeed, as Max reveals, nothing but an utter reinvention of storytelling would suffice for Wallace, and since he'd done that at least once with his massive novel "Infinite Jest," attempts to write his third novel required an act of even greater transcendence.

"I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff," Max quotes him as saying. And: "It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies...in be(ing) willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don't seem to have yet."

Make living people feel stuff. Yes. Isn't that it? Isn't that, in the end, what books are supposed to do? And why is that so hard (because, oh, goodness, that is hard)? And has it become increasingly irrelevant in a world that honors and rewards It books and Twitter books, quick tricks, sleights of hand, ideas that can be captured in a sentence?

We write our books, and then we rewrite them. We make them new every day to ourselves, and the moment they become flat in our eyes, overly familiar, known, processed—well, that's the moment they have died. That's the moment when we must put them away until something stirs in us again. Because if we cannot make ourselves feel stuff, we sure as heck aren't going to move others. The story of David Foster Wallace is a tremendously tragic one. It has the wrong ending. But his life, as told by D.T. Max this week, serves as a reminder about this writerly enterprise of ours. It puts us back in our seats with a whole and right directive:

Make living people feel stuff.