A few days ago I finished D.T. Max’s Every Story is a Love Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace.   The book is both eminently readable, a kind of psychological thriller of one brilliant author’s mind, his ouvre, and ultimate self-destruction.  At the same time, I found myself queasily putting it down for rest stops–perhaps because I knew David very slightly, from Yaddo, and thus his ghost brushed past on the page; perhaps because this was the first time I had read a biography of someone who is a contemporary.  The effect is oddly dizzying, even nauseating (is it nauseated? Wallace was a hard-ass on grammar and nausea was one of his pet peeves).  It’s like being in a Tilt-a-Whirl of one’s own times, lurching a bit too close to one’s cultural moments, veering away as we watch his particular struggles and demise.  In the end, the book is also terribly sad and moving.

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Throughout the summer I’ve been slowly making my way through Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, in preparation for our project on Robert Capa and Gerda Taro and the Spanish Civil War.  I’ve never been a great reader of Hemingway–he was most certainly the obligatory guy author for me back in high school, and I’ve never been a fan of minimalism.  Its language constraints irritate me; the dialogue at times seems peevishly forced.  Prior to beginning the novel, I read the two biographies of Martha Gelhorn–the second, which was unauthorized, provides a rather damning portrait of Hemingway the mean and vindictive ex-husband, so I was hardly inclined toward him as an author. Continue reading