IN DEFENSE OF PHONIES

So there's a lot of this about:

"I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead? Nobody."

And that's fair enough, I guess. I liked Catcher second time around. My first reading was aged 12 or so, alongside a proto-misery memoir called The God Squad. Between the pair of them I decided when you were in your teens you were either an asshole or got treated like one. Later, when I was twenty-one and housesitting for a summer, I read it again.

At that point, I could look at Holden with the rueful eye of one who had known heartbreak, drunkenness and poor grooming choices. Ten years later, with my cataract-beset eyes, I think Salinger's fiction worked best as a hymn to past lives, as a romantic aide-memoire to experiences we had or almost-did and feelings we didn't realise were comforting at the time.

I didn't like Holden when I was 12 because he was such a vivid representation of the sort of kids who tyrannize younger ones - meaning he was like every boy older than I was - and I had no interest in empathising with someone I instinctively knew would have pummelled me for any reason at all. I held fast to that impression even as I inhaled the book over a weekend and called it up every time being intellectually cynical about literature came up in my life in the next 9 years (not enough for my liking but certainly much more than anyone else could have done with - I was the type of teenager who dismissed the Bluetones as 'derivative'. Didn't get away with that). It served me well when I spent fifth & sixth year being sniffily dismissive of Stephen Dedalus, another teenage disaster I would revisit in later youth. Basically, I disliked Holden first because I couldn't be him, ignored him when he informed every part of who I was, then was sucker-punched by a nostalgic reading of him when I was 4 years older than him. A phony, if you must know.

I haven't read Catcher since, but I will fight anyone who says From Esme With Love & Squalor isn't one of the best short story collections ever written (By 'fight', I do of course mean 'write something snarky on the internet but run away if I ever see you on the street').

The thing is, my earliest connection with the Salinger name came earlier and in the soup of my subconscious, could well be just as significant. I first saw it in Oscars, a small video store, when I was 10(?) or so. Never rented it. Which is strange, because normally anything with costumes went straight to the top of my must-watch list. I think even then I must have had some sense of how awful it might be - bear in mind I watched and LOVED Nicholas Hammond's Spider-Man - so I never saw more than the video cover (which I could probably draw from memory, stills and all. I was/am very sad).

So, something more cheerful. Here you go:

He may have been crazy, a shut-in, a Zen Buddhist, had problematic relationships and/or many other things. I don't know. I don't care, really. But his work has stuck with me, for better and worse. And his kid was in a schlocky B movie. What's not to like?

RIP David Foster Wallace

photo by Steve Rhodes

As probably many people already know, David Foster Wallace was found dead on Friday evening at his home in California. That's a link to the LA Times obituary up there. He was 46.

There's a strange wrench when you are faced with the death of someone that you didn't know, nor were ever likely to meet, but who nevertheless had a profound impact on your life. I first came across Foster Wallace's work after university, when I was working a fairly dead-end bookshop job. I had spent the majority of my time in college messing around, pretending to be an actor and living vicariously through whatever fictions allowed me to continue to imagine that future, but then life happened, as it so often does.

My girlfriend and I had a baby at the end of my time in college, and like many young parents before us, panicked about our futures. We were still crazy enough that we spun out our dreams for a year or two, but both of us thought that the bell had rung for a particular period of our lives and now we had to make money, fast. Being Art & Arts graduates meant that all the high-paying jobs weren't exactly banging down our doors and so we (or at least I) found our way to what Sartre might have called the hell of humanities graduates: crappy retail jobs.

Much as I hated it - when you feel like you've failed in life, there's nothing like then having to serve people who you know - working in a bookshop gave me a second chance at hoovering up words and obsessing over writers in a way that I never had in university. I read everything II could of authors that I knew already, however peripherally: Eggers, Stephenson, Rowling, Gaiman, Smith, Banks, Moore, Easton Ellis, Mitchell, Tartt and lots more.

Some authors I decided that I could never love: DeLillo, Pierre, Ellroy, Boyle.There were many authors that I developed crushes on: Murakami, Ishiguru, Safran Foer, Chabon, Roth, Ware, Burns, Clowes, Auster, Martin, Wolfe, Wolff. I read the way book-lovers do when they are in their late teens and early twenties - more or less freely, obsessing on new loves, harvesting up every book I could find, every online interview I could trace. I lived in their heads, as I imagined them, and daydreamed of the day I and they would chat as peers, because that's what you do when you find something you love. I think everyone's like that, whether it's movies, music, sport, politics or stamp collecting. You immerse yourself in your chosen world and identify with it. You adopt those characteristics, so that the world knows you are that person, of that tribe. You are a goth, a punk, you are straight-edge. You're a rugby head. You're a chav. You are tattoos and fixed-gear bikes. You are Grand Designs and a deck in the back garden. You are nu-rave, you love nu-metal. You are SF down to your Star Wars socks, you are horn-rimmed glasses, impeccably tailored clothes and the new McEwan. Usually, you are several of these things at once. But when you are a certain age, one of them takes pole position. I was a book geek. At that time, there was no higher voice, for a certain sort of reader, than David Foster Wallace.

His was an unusual sort of hero-worship. With Gaiman, I looked at his work and thought: "Here's a clever guy, but I understand how his stories work. I could do this." I was wrong, but I've always been arrogant. With Stephenson, there was so much detail, structure and complication that you couldn't begin to imagine getting there. As an English student, it was like a discussion of the LHC given in French: clever, but impenetrable. Other writers, like Roth, were like being mugged by a symphony orchestra, with this wall of knowledge that stood between the lowly reader and The Great Writer. I admired him, but I don't know that I loved him.

What was always special, in the subjective way that these things go, were the moments that I found a writer who was awesomely talented, yet sounded somehow like me, or how I might imagine myself on my best day. The sort of writer that could be honest and passionate about a subject and make that subject your passion too. David Foster Wallace, from about a sentence into Infinite Jest, was one of those writers. It was through reading his work, especially his non-fiction, that I eventually grew up and started to look outside my head every once in a while. It was certainly Foster Wallace who helped me imagine a future in writing things down, because even if my work would never reach his standard, I could at least make it mine and keep it true.

So. That was a very self-indulgent post. I suggest that you go and read this. It's a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon University in 2005. Then, because it's worth doing anyway, go to Amazon or your local bookshop and buy his books.

Normal, snarky and indeed, inane commentary will resume when I feel less depressed about all this.