A moralist of hope

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) gave clarity to modern life's tumult

Author David Foster Wallace, whose best-known novel was ''Infinite Jest,'' with friend. (MARION ETTINGER)

I never met David Foster Wallace. Nor was I part of his cult, those who had read every word of his sprawling, 1,088-page novel "Infinite Jest," including the footnotes. I was more like a spotty but ardent admirer, who looked to his short stories and especially his essays for inspiration.

It goes without saying that his death a week ago, at age 46 and at his own hands, was a crushing loss. But it's worth articulating precisely what made Wallace important. And by important, I don't mean in the "cultural" or even "canonical" sense. His importance was essentially moral.

Wallace wrote, with agonizing beauty, about what William Faulkner called "the old verities and truths of the heart" -- love and hatred and pity and pride. But he also sought to make sense of the peculiar chaos of our time.

In his reeling and exquisitely controlled sentences one finds an almost eerie transcription of modern consciousness: its coy multiplicity, its fragmentation, its blizzard of marketing messages and self-help mantras, its easy hatreds and insoluble confusions and towering loneliness.

I can think of no other writer who comes close to Wallace in the ability to convey how it feels to be a human being in this era, how our minds struggle to forge meaning against the onslaught of excessive information, frantic buy messages, and unrequited feelings.

The astonishing feat is that his prose never feels showy. It is precise and meticulously observed and wildly innovative. But the tone (of his nonfiction in particular) is without self-regard. As a correspondent, he is curious, occasionally delighted, and frequently anguished. Oh, and funny. It's easy to forget how funny Wallace was because his books were crammed so full of ideas. But he had a nose for the absurdities of late-model capitalism, and the good sense to serve his humor black.

Consider this line, from his magnificent essay about the Adult Video News Awards, published in his 2005 collection Consider the Lobster: "Some of the starlets are so heavily made up they looked embalmed." He goes on to observe, "It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you've seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise ... size, angle, and vasculature are known to you." He's not just playing porn for laughs, though. His piece is ultimately concerned with the desperation and pathos that drives the industry.

As a literary tour guide, Foster Wallace was on a par with Mark Twain. Every subject he chose to explore - luxury cruises, the ethics of eating lobsters, his boyhood obsession with Tracy Austin, the seductive animus of talk radio - was illuminated.

Critics made much of his style, the deadpan irony, the footnotes. He was called "post-modern" a lot, whatever that means. What mattered wasn't his nimble wordplay, but his ability to immerse himself in the madness of a specific world and emerge with vital insights into human motivation.

In 2000, he spent a week covering John McCain's failed presidential campaign on behalf of Rolling Stone. Wallace didn't write from the perspective of a hellbent political junkie, like Hunter S. Thompson, but as an innocent, a guy honestly baffled as to why the ritual of choosing a leader had become so tangled and corrupt.

Wallace didn't agree with McCain's policy positions. But he identified the senator as somebody who might "help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own." The piece is haunting to read today, precisely because it casts McCain as a heroic anticandidate, the sort of guy whose personal sense of honor would never allow him to run a dirty campaign.

But Wallace's real subject is what he calls "a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe" is bogus, "that there's nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen."

This is the crucial question of our historical moment: whether our citizens can rise above their doubts and anxieties and express a genuine idealism. And it's the very reason we should mourn Wallace's death. He was one of the few popular writers who threw himself into the maw of American life and challenged the reflexive cynicism he found there. He was a moralist of astonishing clarity and hope.

"It would probably be better to call our own arts culture now one of congenital skepticism," he wrote, in his appreciation of Fyodor Dostoevsky. "Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level."

"For me," he observed, "the really striking, inspiring thing about Dostoevsky isn't just that he was a genius; he was also brave. He never stopped worrying about his literary reputation, but he also never stopped promulgating unfashionable stuff in which he believed. And he did this not by ignoring (now aka 'transcending' or 'subverting') the unfriendly cultural circumstances in which he was writing, but by confronting them, engaging them, specifically and by name."

Wallace deserves the same praise. His death shouldn't just provoke sorrow, but distress. We have lost one of our most powerful imaginations, a man whose works provided us a means of rescue.

Steve Almond's new book of essays is "(Not that You Asked)."