
David Foster Wallace’s Pen Pal - apollinaire
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/09/david-foster-wallaces-pen-pal/
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atorodius
Beautiful piece. What a lucky person to be able to correspond with DFW. Now I
wish letters would be more common still.

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joenot443
How do others feel about her decision to sell the letters? Personally I'm a
bit perturbed by it, but in the same position, I'd have a hard time turning
down $75,000.

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hluska
If I look at it reasonably, I share being slightly perturbed though like you,
I don’t know that I would turn down $75k. If I look at it with my romantic,
fictional eye it almost seems like a DFW plot device. You’ve got a talented
letter writer who adopted an unending stream of identities in college, found
herself in a difficult marriage and began writing an author in the midst of
his struggles with powerful demons. They never met and the author terminated
their relationship about a year before killing himself.

Years later, her house burns, her husband finds the letters intact and they
sell them. Heck, if she bought a sailboat with the money and toured the
Mediterranean, it would be a hell of a pitch...

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ykevinator
Is infinite jest good?

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character0
There is a certain amount of absurdism that you need to buy into, but once you
do there is so much to the book (it's also quite funny). DFW dives into themes
of addiction, mental health, modernism, etc. He clearly struggled with a lot
of these ideas in his own life, and he captures it so well in the cast of
characters he creates. I personally found the first 250 pages a little tough,
but once I got through that it became hard to put it down.

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krishicks
It’s a book that really needs to be read twice, if only to fully appreciate
those first 250 pages. They go from not making sense at all to being quite
good.

