john jeremiah sullivan

JJS, that would be John  Jeremiah Sullivan, writes about DFW, that would be David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King, read Death coming for our spirits, in an essay in GQ that hits the target and goes right through it to the other side, leaving you with some  certainty that DFW, who is often called a “generational writer,” (which underrates his importance), has been deciphered, but of course that’s creating another fiction, and this is sounding a bit like DFW so check out the essay here, because it’s a watermark in appreciation. The bits about Cormac McCarthy are interesting, as if DFW saw him as his polar opposite, a writer trying to create mountains in a sea of sand. In sections of the uncompleted novel, DFW pays homage to McCarthy’s high-art prose style, or he recognizes its usefulness in shrouding everything in  nobility. The photograph shows DFW’s jottings on a book from his library, which is now in the DFW collection at the University of Texas.