Book Review : D.T Max - Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (2012)
Order Every Love Story is a Ghost Story here
Everyone has an opinion on David Foster Wallace. Even people who have never read him. That opinion implies that you’ve read his novels, which implies that you’re a sophisticated person who enjoys reading difficult books. In the years following his untimely passing, he was the yardstick of intellectual sophistication for young, anxious people. Wallace was Kurt Cobain for MFA students and overeducated baristas with too many creative side projects.
I have an opinion on David Foster Wallace too and it’s not that original. I loved the guy and I mostly love the writing. It’s not that original, but it’s not that popular anymore. The publication of 2012 biography Every Love Story is a Ghost Story revealed a darker side to Wallace, which rewrote an important part of his cultural reception. His abusive relationship to author Mary Karr made it suddenly OK to call the guy pretentious and Infinite Jest unreadable.
One thing that fascinates me even more than David Foster Wallace is the cultural perception of him. It’s complex, contradictory and very much alive. So, I finally read D.T Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story to test my own perception of him.
The truth about mental health
This is not a particularly well-written or revealing biography. It’s a competent, factual account of David Foster Wallace’s forty-six years on this Earth. One of the biggest thing I’ve learned is how severe and debilitating his mental health issues were. Anxiety and depression played a big part in the romantic revisionism Wallace’s legacy benefited from after his death, but it really, really crippled his emotional and social development. The man suffered.
We’re not talking about crying fits and call-for-help suicide attempts. We’re talking psychiatric hospitals and moving back with his parents, like four times. I can’t imagine how humiliating it must’ve been to constantly go through the same fucking ordeals without having any control whatsoever on himself. There were the eighties or the nineties. Mental health was so ridiculously taboo back then, he didn’t even know what was wrong for many years.
Wallace’s behavior did get out of control when he dated Mary Karr (he even planned to kill her husband), but whoever is casting the first stone at him for that are the same people who chastise Kanye West for having bipolar disorder episodes in public. Mental health problems are not sexy. That shit takes control over you. It’s not Mary Karr’s fault either. They were two people trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, hurting each other in the process.
Their relationship was a normal failed relationship. But it was lived by extraordinary people.
Perception is reality
The greatest failure of Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is not giving an accurate emotional portrait of David Foster Wallace. I still don’t know who he liked better and what was most important to him. For example, Wallace left a treasure chest of correspondence but it was used to draw a linear narrative of his life instead of trying to understand him better. What drove him to write letters like this? How did he choose who to write to? I wanted to know that.
I wanted to know how people who knew him, perceived him. Because they knew him. There isn’t an objective truth to David Foster Wallace, but they were close enough to it and these people: Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, Mark Costello, are rarely (or never) asked about their relationship to him. I did not necessarily wanted what happened. I wanted to know what the perception of the real guy was and Every Love Story is a Ghost Story didn’t deliver that.
One of my old bosses once told me: perception is reality. How you interact in society is how you exist in the world. He proceeded to deny me a raise afterwards, but the lesson was valuable nonetheless. Wallace would’ve hated it, but the cultural perception of him is more important than the real him. There was a real opportunity to give the most accurate portrait of David Foster Wallace as a person and it was not seized by D.T Max, hence the telegraphic nature of his book.
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I believe it’s fair to say a majority of people loved David Foster Wallace for who he was better than for what he wrote. It’s fine. It doesn’t make you less sophisticated. There are writers who I like better than the sum of their work. Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk are two. They are just very magnetic, smart and entertaining guys, like Wallace was. But it was different with him and he had no control over that. Neither do I.
Things means what we want them to mean. Because of Infinite Jest and because of everything else that made him important (but mostly because of the big book), David Foster Wallace will be whoever we need him to be in these weird, trying times. We’ll build monument to him. Burn these monuments down and build them back up. Once someone dies, that person continues to live but only through people who need him or her to.
There is no real, hardwired-into-reality David Foster Wallace. That’s why we keep changing our minds about him and why Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is ultimately a failure.
6.1/10
