Endnotes: David Foster Wallace

In 2011 I recorded a programme for BBC Radio 3 on David Foster Wallace. Here it is.

I had written and presented occasional programmes for BBC Radio 3 before, for example on Henry David Thoreau, the father of environmentalism, and HP Lovecraft, the dark prince of the horror tale. But this one on David Foster Wallace meant the most to me, and as it has notched up nearly half a million hits on YouTube, seems to have touched a chord elsewhere. Wallace is playful, surreal, postmodernist, cool, aesthetically self-reflexive (The Pale King, his final novel, features a character called 'David Foster Wallace') - in sum, all the things that put middlebrow readers off from reading highbrow fiction. At the same time, he was passionate, ethical and empathetic, searching for a politics that would bring US communities shattered by inequality, race issues and addiction back together. As he says in the programme, trying to use writing and reading fiction as a way to 'leap over the wall of the Self.'

Wallace suffered from depression, about which he wrote openly at a time when others did not, and tragically died by his own hand in 2008. My pitch to make a programme for Radio 3 in New York was put on hold first by that, then by ash clouds emanating from a volcano in Iceland that put a stop to air travel. That, I think, would have amused him. Wallace would have hated Donald Trump, but would have been the perfect satirist for this discordant era in US politics. And in the age of COVID-19, he would have striven, as he always did, to write a better book so that he and his readers could come together and make a sad world better.