ellauri072.html on line 487: It is highly likely that while reading “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” D. T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, you will experience both of the following emotions. The one is that you find it painful, to read about someone in chronic severe emotional distress. The other emotion is that you just don’t find Wallace all that nice.
ellauri072.html on line 548: But yes, Wallace was extremely competitive, even to the point of competing about not being competitive. One of the wincing pleasures of Max’s biography is reading excerpts from Wallace’s correspondence, especially with his close friend and combatant Jonathan Franzen, but also with just about every white male writer he might ever have viewed as a rival or mentor. Aggressive self-abasement, grandstanding, veiled abuse, genuine thoughtfulness, thin-skinned pandering — it’s all there. As the correspondents compete about who is making genuine human connections and who and what is really nice and good, they seem to be in some realm far from most kinds of human connection save for that of heated testosteronic battle.
ellauri072.html on line 562: One of the main criticisms of Wallace’s work is that he simply mirrored decay and malaise instead of moving through and beyond them. This was, not infrequently, one of his own main concerns. But the more nattering and pervasive complaint, which takes on more dimension in Max’s biography, is that he is just too brainy and aggressively difficult — just too, well, mean.
ellauri082.html on line 54: When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, it was clear he had been profoundly depressed. But the first major biography of the writer, D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, out on August 30th, reveals an even more troubled mind than anyone realized. From the time he was in college, the brilliant author of Infinite Jest was in and out of institutions as he struggled with depression and addictions to alcohol and marijuana. But the book is also full of all kinds of other strange surprises, painting the most complete, and warmest, portrait of Wallace yet.
ellauri144.html on line 698: When Allura learns that Max, who was her rival for the directorship, is to marry Lana, Allura’s little sister, she swears revenge. Max’s confidence is shaken, and on his next all-night shift at the station, an accident causes the meltdown of one of the reactors. In the ensuing catastrophe, the region and its people are poisoned, and the survivors are forced to evacuate their beloved town.
xxx/ellauri075.html on line 469: “Reading D.T. Max’s bio I continue to find David Foster Wallace the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation,” Ellis tweeted. “David Foster Wallace was so needy, so conservative, so in need of fans – that I find the halo of sentimentality surrounding him embarrassing.” In several more tweets, he continued, “DFW is the best example of a contemporary male writer lusting for a kind of awful greatness that he simply wasn’t able to achieve. A fraud.”
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