Why do all the writers I like kill themselves?

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest and a lot of other things, as well as one of the most ferociously intelligent and talented writers I have ever had the pleasure of reading, hanged himself on Friday, September 12.

Wallace, who wrote with an explosive, ironic, but deeply serious passion about subjects ranging from tennis and politics to mathematics and cruise ships, was found dead by his wife in his home Friday night, according to the Claremont, Calif., police department. The 46-year-old author apparently hanged himself.

“He was the best of our generation, and his death is a loss beyond describing,” Richard Powers, winner of the National Book Award in 2006 for the novel The Echo Maker, told The Associated Press on Sunday.

He really was a fantastic writer. I still haven’t had the guts to get through the 1’000+ page Infinite Jest, but his essay collections are some of my favorite nonfiction, bar none.

There is one notable falsehood in AP’s report, though:

Asked what Wallace had been working on at the time of his death, [longtime editor Michael Pietsch] offered no specifics, but said: “He was always writing something. He was always doing something ambitious.”

I distinctly remember reading that Wallace was working on his next big piece of fiction (not short stories like Oblivion, but more like Infinite Jest). I know he probably has lots of unfinished writing that may eventually be edited and released, but this still sucks.

I’m prompted to revisit these feelings because the father of an old acquaintance died on Saturday, relatively suddenly of a brain tumor, and being at the wake today made me think once again of my own experiences in May. The friend’s father was 53, a scant two years older than my father. It doesn’t help that I dreamed last night I visited my father just before he died, and called him on the day it happened, warning him: I have no idea how the dream ended, but clearly I know how things transpired in real life.

There’s a lot of talk about moving on with life, and I’m doing that. But there’s a certain level of guilt associated with doing so, because every action of mine is now existing in this “post-” era. My puns evoke memories of long-winded punning matches with my father at dinner; talking about the student module of our administrative computing system at work invariably leads my co-workers to say “Well, when Eric was here…”

The difficulty, then, is coping with the invasive nature of this “post-” era, wherein the idea of death so morbidly taints everything we do. Dad’s death, and every death since dad’s death, reminds us selfishly of our own mortality. It was easy, by comparison, to accept my father’s death when I imagined him as a superhero, as an übermensch, who solved our childhood ills and occasionally lost his temper as superheroes are wont to do. It is infinitely more difficult to imagine my father as a grown-up version of me, and I suddenly worry as I never did before that maybe he was scared or lonely; that maybe he was frustrated, angry, or anxious. As long as I kept my father in the abstract, apart from the vagaries that are life as Ben, he was impermeable, even in death. He was more like a viking, sailing off in a burning boat, his sword laid across his chest; it was only us poor schlubs in the land of the living who were dealing with sleepless nights and inestimable sadness, the coal-dark periphery of a dream which persists into breakfast.

So what of life after catastrophe? I am not the first person to deal with it; certainly my loss was even minor by comparison to some of the choice bits on the highlight reel of human misery. “Post-” Ben realized rather swiftly that any remnants of childish behavior had to go; he realized with some bewilderment that he is 23, gainfully employed, with a 403(b) and independent investment accounts. He is an uncle, a beloved cousin; he is a loving boyfriend; he is a brother to two siblings with whom his relationship has never seemed so important as now. He is a son to his widowed mother—the close son, and hence the primary means of aid; the tool-wielder, the dinner-maker, the technology-fixer, and one of the most important available means of emotional support. This from one of the least-demonstrative, most inward-turned people you’ll ever meet. Post-catastrophe living is something strange and jarring.

Dad’s death gave birth to all these epiphenomena. I find myself somewhat adrift, prone to fits of melancholy. I do not know how to effectively comfort my mother when I internally rail against the injustice of it all; that constant presence of loss provokes me to despair. The very act of contemplation, post-catastrophe, is painful, even funereal. I dwell on the new physics imparted by death, which casually remove the laws of permanence to which we so naïvely subscribed; they steal the very gravity of our beings, and we sit bereft of locii or control, noting only absence in every aspect of things.

But the world has no time for death: it ushers us forward from the moribund, threatens us with statues of salt for our remembrance. My brother looked at Dad’s bare new grave and recalled Whitman, who called grass “the beautiful uncut hair of graves,” and I have not been back to check the progress of dad’s metaphorical beard. I suppose I could fault my schedule. In truth, I dread it; I cannot stand graveside and pontificate, I cannot derive any comfort from flowers or slants of sunlight or picturesque butterflies. Every entity in this universe speeds away from his grave and toward its eventual own, and I along with them, a stunned bird pointed forward by instinct and flapping dumbly in the sun.

The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch

My reading The Undertaking is all Lauren‘s fault. I had, surprisingly, never heard of Lynch until she mentioned him, and then I was struck with a morbid curiosity for what a third-generation funeral director (they prefer that term to the antiquated “undertaker,” despite the appropriateness of the name, and to the rather called “mortician”) would have to say. Add to this that Lynch is a semi-celebrated poet, and you have the makings for either an excellent book about death and dying or an overly maudlin piece of smarmily-constructed prose better left for brochures and sympathy cards.

The good news for everybody is that Lynch usually stays pretty solidly in the former case. Only occasionally did The Undertaking stray into sentimental weeping and wringing of hands, usually when it took on the aires of the self-righteous and unforgivably saccharine Paradox of our Time. Thankfully, those moments are few and far between, and Lynch spares us the creative nadirs of the truly obnoxious.

The crux of Lynch’s book, and I quote, is this: “The dead don’t care.” He says it a number of times. “The dead don’t care.”

This is important, and it’s a theme that runs throughout the short essays of the book. The funereal process, from the body preparation to the ceremonial rites to the lowering of the body, is done entirely for the benefit of the living. The attendant rituals of death are merely a process by which we assign meaning to the departed and signify in some way their relationship to us. The body itself can be fed to dogs, and it wouldn’t materially affect a damn thing.

This all sounds quite crass so far, I’m sure. But let me assure you that Lynch—used to, I’m sure, being delicate—treats the topic with a bit more poetry and dignity. Some of it is the nuts and bolts of the mortician’s life, and much grand theororizing about the nature of humanity as it pertains to our imminent demise. Most, though, is Lynch sharing with his readers what a lifetime of obsequies has taught him about people. The most touching, perhaps, is the very last chapter, when he muses rather sadly about his own death, planning his rites of burial, and then catches himself, remembering the advice of his own father, and decides to leave the details to his own children—he, after all, will not care one way or the other.

At 200 pages, this won’t take you very long to read. While the musings of a mortician are not perhaps what you would consider enjoyable reading, I stress that Lynch is actually an excellent writer, and that the vast majority of the work is a pleasure to read. Give it a try. And hattip to Lauren.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling

The following review may contain minor spoilers. It will likely contain more severe spoilers for readers who have not yet finished Book 6. Read on at your own risk.

And so it ends. It seems like a lifetime ago that I stumbled upon Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on the “New Young Adult Fiction” shelf at the public library and picked it up on a whim. Millions of people would do the same, and that whim would inspire six sequels and a franchise that would net its creator more than a billion dollars.

I’m going to be brutal right off that bat and say that this is by no means the best Harry Potter book. If you want the truth, it lulls terribly in the middle; in fact, it’s not particularly interesting at all until the last 150 pages or so. Rowling seems to have invented another arbitrary piece of magical lore (Deathly Hallows) that, while it ends up becoming a focal point of the book (of the entire series, really) is unsuitably fleshed out and not particularly interesting in the first place.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is remarkably different, in many ways: it retains the very dark style that has become the norm since Book 5; there’s a lot of death and Cruciatus curses; finally, there’s very little mentioned of Hogwarts at all (until the very end). As Harry announces at the end of Book 6, he drops out of Hogwarts in order to pursue Dumbledore’s assignment. Speculation has flown wildly ever since the twists of Book 6, and Rowling manages to more or less do exactly as predicted. This includes including several mutually exclusive plot directions at once. And no, it’s not as impossible or difficult as it sounds.

Thus, on its technical and literary methods, Deathly Hallows ends the series with a whimper, but my guess is that no one will particularly care, since everyone is merely slavering for its conclusion—which, though a tad confusing, and probably reaching a bit, is rather conclusive enough. Add to that a brief and maddeningly unspecific epilogue, and I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that 6 large books worth of carefully chronicled canon was so casually and insufficiently wrapped up.

It does, however, finally strike me how was it was for Rowling to specifically limit the length of the series from the beginning: the breadth of her invented world could have carried on ad infinitum, but the opera’s would have petered long before. It’s unfortunate that Rowling’s previous works opened so many jars that she had to break a few this time around instead of closing them.

Kurt Vonnegut has passed away at the age of 84.

Kurt Vonnegut, the satirical novelist who captured the absurdity of war and questioned the advances of science in darkly humorous works such as “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” died Wednesday. He was 84. [...]

The author of at least 19 novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays, Vonnegut relished the role of a social critic. He lectured regularly, exhorting audiences to think for themselves and delighting in barbed commentary against the institutions he felt were dehumanizing people.

I recall seeing him on The Daily Show last year and marveling at how feeble he seemed–and how sad it was that one of the sharpest literary minds of a generation was beginning to lose it.

As my brother quipped: “And so it goes.”