The first time I was ever deeply affected by a celebrity death happened when I lately read about David Foster Wallace's suicide. The news was a powerful undertow that pulled me underwater. That I should be so distraught about his death despite never having met the guy wasn't surprising; reading DFW's work was like listening to what my own brain-voice would sound like if I were much smarter. Over the course of two years, I consumed, ate, internalized all his available writings, and though the connection was half-duplex, it was impossible not to feel as though I knew him deeply, as though we were close friends (except he'd never heard of me).

This book is not so much a book as it is a lengthy transcription. In 1996 on the ass-end of DFW's Infinite Jest tour, David Lipsky joined  the author on a road trip, conducting a lengthy interview for a Rolling Stone article that was never published. During the entire journey, Lipsky had his tape recorder running, and this book is an edited transcription of those tapes (exactly how much editing happened between transcription and publication isn't clear, but the impression is that very little was removed). Lipsky and Wallace discuss the obvious things (how the book tour's going, how DFW feels about Infinite Jest's reception, &c.), but they also discuss a range of topics unrelated to Infinite Jest and the tour.

What shouldn't be surprising but is anyways is that DFW speaks and thinks aloud in the same voice present in his journalism. He is a deep thinker, and possibly the most mentally-ambitious person to have lived in modern America. It seems as though nothing that his senses pick up on is left without questioning. He explains frequently the cranial stunt pilotry he goes through examining even trivial details. Example: He read a criticism of him for wearing a bandanna. He explains that he wears a bandanna for purely functional reasons: A man of great perspiration, the bandanna relieves him of having to repeatedly swipe his paw across his forehead. Then someone postulates that he wears the bandanna for reasons of image, that it is an affectation which he somehow calculated would increase his credibility. A lazier person would have maybe said, Screw it, I don't give a shit, and while that's the conclusion he comes to, he does so after examining what he must look like to the critic, how the critic made this assumption, and then as well the various avenues of action he might take in response, and what all of them mean. This over a bandanna.

No matter the topic at hand--television, literature, politics, dogs--DFW exudes startling intellect. And he is always hilarious. His writing often deals with big topics, but I've always read DFW as a humorist of the highest sort. He is genuinely funny.

There isn't anything really sad in this book. If I'd read it before I knew DFW had eliminated his own map, I would have thought it was cool, interesting, great. But in the context of his suicide, the text wrung tears from my reluctant eyes, often during passages that were just downright funny (David's Folger's can spittoon falling over in the car, or David telling his dogs, "Nothing wrong with a little shit on the floor, you guys. Happens to the best of us, hey guys?" when he arrives home to find some shitcoils on the carpet). I definitely enjoyed reading this book, even though the entire time I was immersed in sadness.

Good Old Neon has never read the same. RIP DFW.