David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.

Photo by Suzy Allman

David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, has passed on.

David Foster Wallace, 46, a novelist, essayist, teacher and story writer whose effort to come to grips with the America of his time resulted in the huge and hugely successful novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif.

Wallace’s wife found that he had hanged himself when she returned home about 9:30 p.m., said Jackie Morales of the Claremont Police Department, the Associated Press reported.

Literary observers recognized Wallace for his intellect and energy. They saw a confident willingness to tackle the largest issues, to search for the deepest meanings, to extend inventiveness to its utmost, and to employ the traditional tools and techniques of fiction in service of an unapologetically modern sensibility. His notable humor was often of the dark variety.

So sad. The NYTs did a good job of capturing his talent:

A prose magician, Mr. Wallace was capable of writing — in his fiction and nonfiction — about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humor and fervor and verve. At his best he could write funny, write sad, write sardonic and write serious. He could map the infinite and infinitesimal, the mythic and mundane. He could conjure up an absurd future — an America in which herds of feral hamsters roam the land — while conveying the inroads the absurd has already made in a country where old television shows are a national touchstone and asinine advertisements wallpaper our lives. He could make the reader see state-fair pigs that are so fat they resemble small Volkswagens; communicate the weirdness of growing up in Tornado Alley, in the mathematically flat Midwest; capture the mood of Senator John McCain’s old ”straight talk” campaign of 2000.

He was also a gifted teacher. May you rest in peace, Mr. Wallace.