Writer's talent for empathy

DAVID Foster Wallace, widely regarded as one of the most brilliant writers of his generation, was found dead in his California home on Friday evening. He was 46.

Wallace's novels, short stories and essays were characterised by their comic inventiveness, their philosophical depth and the garrulous energy of his distinctive prose style. His first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), and his next book, the short story collection The Girl With Curious Hair (1989), gave an early indication of his prodigious talent and earned him considerable praise.

But it was his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), that marked him as an important writer. At more than 1000 pages, it was an ambitious work that combined technical virtuosity with a painfully acute diagnosis of the despair at the heart of modern America.

Comparisons to high-postmodern writers of an earlier generation, such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and William Gaddis, though not entirely misplaced, belied the originality of Wallace's talent.

The sometimes flamboyant comedy of his fiction was combined with a profound sense of the hollowness that was engendered by the superficiality and narcissism of modern society. Though his subject and style were decidedly American and contemporary, his work displayed thematic affinities with the European existentialism of Dostoevsky and Kafka. The great theme of Wallace's fiction was the alienating effects of self-consciousness, which he saw as a pervasive symptom of a materialistic, entertainment-driven culture that encouraged passivity and solipsism.

The cyclical narrative of Infinite Jest developed an implicit analogy between compulsive or addictive behaviour and the reflexive distancing of irony that denied sincerity and obstructed genuine communication. In an early essay, he wrote that "irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks."

Wallace's characters often found themselves trapped by their own subjectivity, their inability to convey the reality of their private experience. His literary project was to rediscover some form of empathetic human connection through his writing.

The range and complexity of his fiction, in which he used a host of different styles, including frequent footnotes, was an attempt to overcome isolation and emptiness, to break through the logical impasse and give voice to the reality of private pain and suffering.

He continued to write powerfully about the paradoxical, self-destructive logic of depression and addiction in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999).

His final book of fiction, the short story collection Oblivion (2004), featured several long, intricately constructed, intense stories about loneliness, suffering and suicide that confronted the problem of communicating the reality of subjective experience.

Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, on February 21, 1962, but grew up in the midwestern state of Illinois. The son of academics, he was a gifted student and, as a teenager, became a junior-ranked tennis player. He was educated at Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he majored in English and philosophy, before attending the University of Arizona, where he completed a masters in creative writing in 1987.

He later began, but did not complete, graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard University. He taught in the English department at Illinois State University from 1993, and in 2002 accepted a position as professor of English and creative writing at Pomona College, California. He was awarded a prestigious MacArthur fellowship, known as a "genius grant", in 1997.

Wallace's nonfiction writing, no less than his fiction, displayed the scope of his inquiring intelligence. He wrote long and penetrating essays on subjects as diverse as talk radio, ocean cruises, pornography and English grammar, which he collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster (2005).

His interest in logic and mathematics informed Everything and More (2003), a study of the work of mathematician Georg Cantor. He also co-wrote a book on hip-hop with Mark Costello called Signifying Rappers (1990). His last published work was a long report on presidential hopeful John McCain.

To all his writing Wallace brought a unique and personable style, a sense of openness and a formidable intelligence. His life's work was a sometimes desperate search for genuine empathy and compassion.

Wallace apparently killed himself. His father said in an interview on Sunday that he had been suffering depression. Wallace is survived by his wife, Karen Green.

Comment:"I have observed that depression is the common cause of suicide.Talking with families and friends about our problems can greatly help. I am saddened by news like this because most of the people that commit suicide are talented, promising and can still do a lot of things for the world."

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