Saturday, July 12, 2014

My hero / David Foster Wallace by Colin Barrett

David Foster Wallace by Hannah Agosta



My hero:

David Foster Wallace by Colin Barrett

Infinite Jest, a novel brimming with compassion and empathy, left me euphoric and burdened, and made me want to be a better writer

 Saturday 12 July 2014

I

was in the long, sullen afternoon of my early 20s, contentedly directionless, occupying an office cubicle from Monday to Friday and writing gruesomely mannered and mercifully short poems, hungover, on Sundays. I wanted to be a writer, but was worried I only wanted to be a writer because I wanted to be a writer.


David Foster Wallace


I read Infinite Jest on my weekday tram commute over a summer. Just over 1,000 pages long, heavily influenced by the dense, formally daunting works of Pynchon, Gaddis and McElroy, Infinite Jest is a crypto-apocalyptic, science-fiction-tainted satire and tragedy. It's about a great many things, from tennis and addiction to roving packs of giant feral hamsters and militant Quebecois wheelchair assassins, but beneath its almost defensively elaborate postmodern conceits is a novel brimming with extraordinary compassion and empathy.

The two main characters, teen tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza and recovering addict and ex-con Donald Gately, have stayed with me as few fictional entities do. Like Ulysses, Infinite Jest is a book that seems to echo and anticipate many other books. And it's no accident that its two central characters are a gifted, vulnerable but insufferably snide little prick, and an older, wiser, fundamentally decent man; or that the narrative hinges tantalisingly on the prospect of their exasperatingly deferred, but surely inevitable, connection.

The book left me euphoric and burdened. Here it is, it seemed to say: here is the torrential spate of the mind talking incessantly back to itself, the bottomless aporias and fleeting ecstasies that you, as a human, must suffer alone, like everyone else. Here is the head that pounds like a heart.

Infinite Jest gave me back to myself, and left me with nowhere to hide. I stopped writing my brittle, evasive poems. I began to wonder how on earth you do something like this.


THE GUARDIAN






2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
054 My hero / Michael de Montaigne by Liyun Li
055 My hero / Michael Donaghy by Maggie O'Farrell
056 My hero / Richmal Crompton by Louise Crompton
057 My hero / Edward Thomas by David Constantine
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
059 My hero / Sefton by Jilly Cooper

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 My hero / Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 My hero / Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson

102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
111 My hero / Arnold Lobell by Julia Donaldson (23 December)

2012 (PAGE 9)
115 My hero / Nadime Gordimer by Tessa Hadley (27 January)

(PAGE 8)

2013

(PAGE 5)
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman (13 September)
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer (1 November)

(PAGE 4)



(PAGE 3)

2015
250 My hero John Bayley by Richard Eyre (22 January)
2016


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