Wallace was no saint, Franzen (literally) says. In its most controversial section, Franzen takes aim at the “adulatory public narrative” he says has arisen around Wallace and his death. “ Farther Away” yokes together Franzen’s reading of Robinson Crusoe, a thumbnail history of the novel, thoughts on the internet, and a journey to the island of Masafuera, where Franzen searches for rare birds and a good spot to scatter his friend’s ashes. Franzen has confessed that he couldn’t help seeing the suicide as a dirty trick-something that violated the rules of their writerly competition: “I was just settling down to work again when Dave killed himself … It was like, man, if you’re going to do that? Be the heroic, dies-young genius? That’s a low blow.” Two years later, having finished work on his fourth novel, Freedom, Franzen would begin work on his New Yorker essay, which he described as an attempt to “deal with the hideous suicide of someone I’d loved.” Wallace never wrote another novel after Infinite Jest-merely several collections of short stories and journalism, and a gathering of fragments published posthumously, earlier this year, as The Pale King-and he hanged himself in the backyard of his California home in September of 2008. In April of 1996 Wallace publicly defended Franzen’s long and controversial Harper’s essay, “Perchance to Dream” for offering “honest and intimate descriptions of how it feels to try and make good, serious art in a culture that doesn’t seem to value it very much.” That same year, Franzen recalls being roused from his “dogmatic slumbers” by a manuscript version of Infinite Jest, which “got me working, the way that competition will get you working.” The result was his breakthrough third novel, The Corrections. Wallace’s substance abuse problems-although in person their meetings were “much less intimate” than they had been through the mail, with Franzen “always straining to prove that I could be funny enough and smart enough” and Wallace “gazing off at a point a few miles distant which made me feel as if I were failing to make my case.” The two continued nevertheless to exchange letters and compliments. The two writers didn’t meet until 1990, “for reasons that became clearer later”-i.e. L-R: Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallaceįranzen has described his relationship with Wallace as one of “compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete.” It began when Wallace wrote Franzen a fan letter in the summer of 1988, after reading his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City.
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