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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Remembering David Foster Wallace

September 3, 2012 by Scott Timberg

DAVID Foster Wallace’s life was brilliant, tormented, and short — cut off by a 2008 suicide. Because your humble blogger was going through complicated matters of his own — an incompetent gnome had just crashed the newspaper I wrote for, hundreds of colleagues and I were soon out of work — I never entirely engaged with the sudden death of the man who is likely to stand as the greatest writer of our generation.

D.T. Max’s Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, gets into the novelist’s life and death, as well as the ideas that animated him and his times. The tale comes across as a classic generational journey between theory and irony on one hand and sincerity and… something else on the other.

HERE is my long Q+A with Max, on Salon.

Let me put in a plug, by the way, for a lively, recent anthology of work about DFW, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace, which includes pieces by novelists Don De Lillo, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, etc., as well as DFW’s editor at Little, Brown.

I also asked Max a question we did not have room for on the Salon interview. Here it is:

ST: What kind of long-term impact do we expect Wallace will have? My guess is that he opened the door to a certain kind of literary voice: Would we have gotten Dave Eggers and the McSweeney’s empire without him? Anything else, generationally, culturally, or otherwise? Where do we see his influence?


DTM: Wallace definitely broadened the idea of what the “literary” could be in American fiction both in terms of the sentence and the novel itself. How many young writers today pattern themselves after him? But I think literary styles change and what is of the moment today is going to be passe tomorrow. in some ways we are already seeing a backlash. Where DFW continues to grow stornger is in what you might call almost-literary writing, on the web, on blogs, in journals, where he liberated a generation to write more the way they thought.

Filed Under: 90s, gen x, literary, west coast

Comments

  1. JJ says

    September 4, 2012 at 9:42 am

    “Even on a personal level, he taught us how to care about how to live our lives. And in that sense he doesn’t correspond to any literary figure I can think of.”

    Tolstoy?

  2. Scott Timberg says

    September 4, 2012 at 2:23 pm

    That strikes me as right, JJ.

    Tho between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whoever would have thought that this Midwestern boy was secretly Russian?

  3. anum harryson says

    October 14, 2012 at 10:56 pm

    Your got some inspiration from others and you inspire me a lot.so thanks a lot, and wish you can produce more great content.

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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