There’s a long article in this week’s New Yorker about the life and death of David Foster Wallace. As I’ve written about before, I love Wallace’s writing. Thinking about him takes me back to the summer when I was 23 and living at my parents’ house in New Jersey, feeling like a lonely, empty vessel, reading Infinite Jest and not knowing what to do with my life. Wallace’s words just make me want to write. He makes me feel that it’s okay to embrace the chaos in my complicated head and get it down in words.

Wallace committed suicide in September at age 46. He suffered from depression his whole life, but nobody outside his immediate circle knew about this until after he’d died.

In his senior year of high school, he began carrying a towel around with him to wipe away the perspiration from anxiety attacks, and a tennis racquet, so that no one commented on the towel.

A few years ago, after struggling with depression and addiction and directionlessness, he got some things sorted out, and he fell in love and married a visual artist named Karen Green.

Wallace was thrilled that his personal life was in order: he took it as evidence that he had matured. He teased Green about what a good husband he was. She remembers him saying, “I took out the garbage. Did you see that?” and “I put tea on for you when you were driving home.” Green was a good partner for Wallace, too—supportive and literate, but not in awe of her husband. “We used to have this joke about how much can you irritate the reader,” Green recalls. He could be needy. At night, he would beg her not to get sick or die.

He was working on another novel when he died, which he was calling The Pale King. He’d “only” written a few hundred pages. The unfinished novel is going to be published next year. It is apparently about boredom — or, rather, about how to get past boredom:

The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

The magazine also includes an excerpt from the novel. It portrays mind-crushing dullness, but as I was reading it, I felt fear. Soul-crushingly boring work is scary, because (1) how do you get through it? and (2) at the end of the workday, you are one day closer to death and have nothing to show for it.

The Pale King seems to be the other side of Infinite Jest. IJ is about modern American unhappiness, addiction to entertainment, and isolation. Addiction is the child of boredom (of course, it can also be genetic); isolation and boredom can turn into addiction, as we desperately look for things to distract us from the pain of being lonely. Or just from the pain of being sad. Apparently The Pale King is about how to get past the pain of boredom.

The last few paragraphs of the New Yorker piece are sad themselves. This part wounds me:

Green believes that she knows when Wallace decided to try again to kill himself. She says of September 6th, “That Saturday was a really good day. Monday and Tuesday were not so good. He started lying to me that Wednesday.”

He started lying to her — not sharing his terror and sadness. Isolating himself emotionally. Betraying the person he loved — not because he was a bad person but because he just couldn’t communicate what he was feeling. As he wrote in his short story “The Depressed Person”:

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.

When I really think about it, I find it hard to trust Wallace’s view of the modern American condition, because he extrapolates from his own subjective experience of living. His depression and agony were not caused not by modern American life; they were caused by a chemical imbalance. But there are essential truths in what he writes about: boredom, isolation, the fear and desolation that result from the inability to connect with other people emotionally.

I’m looking forward to the published novel.