NEWS: Hunting David Foster Wallace

Would it be possible to interview David Foster Wallace for Poets & Writers Magazine? “I spoke with David last night, and he’s not doing interviews for the book.” Could I send him a few questions by e-mail to respond to? “David doesn’t do e-mail.” Are you saying he’s not going to do any interviews at all for Consider the Lobster? “I may talk him into one or two major things.” Can I at least get an advance reading copy of the new book? “They’re all gone. They went like hotcakes.”

In a last-ditch, Woodward-and-Bernstein effort, I stalked DFW at work. I delivered a plea for an interview, in writing, to his office in Crookshank Hall (a name and place straight out of Harry Potter) at Pomona College. Silence.

So, it’s really true. The road that leads to DFW washes out.

Luckily, there is a precedent for this kind of journalistic profile sans interview, and it comes from the work of DFW himself. In the same way he never spoke directly with David Lynch, but wrote about him (in the essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) and never actually talked to Michael Murphy, John McCain’s senior campaign strategist (for his essay on the senator’s 2000 bid for the GOP nomination for president, in Consider the Lobster), I never actually spoke with DFW.

I’m forced back to his work, the words—and there are plenty of them. I’m forced back to the clues you can buy at the bookstore and read on the Internet and in the papers. And nearly everyone has an opinion, something to say, about DFW. Everyone, it turns out, except David Foster Wallace.

jake_lex said:
Looks like he's ripping off Thomas Pynchon in many, many ways.