David Foster Wallace and the Campaign Trail

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Art Credit: Philip Burke

David Foster Wallace, the late author of novels like the epic Infinite Jest and The Pale King, is still a modern force in the modern-literature game apart from Palahniuk and Eggers. A really challenged mind, that made you consider the unconsidered, and then becoming lost and unable to remember what you were like before you read him. I always struggled to have a real grasp on the idea of the post-modern art form until I read him. He was a journalist as well as a novelist who seemed to practice a form on gonzo journalism that was less driven by his experience than the experience of which he is a part. A neurotic, sweet soul that took his life, but who breathed energy into many writers today. I finally had the chance to read his observational journey titled Up, Simba about the week he spent on the road with John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2000. If your looking for me to recount snarky comments from a left-wing intellectual, I won’t, because neither did DFW. The political reporter did his job, showing no lean, so little in fact that he makes the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal look like papers set out on the fringe. During this really thoughtful and hilarious piece of work, he breathes some levity into the seriousness with which we take politics and campaigning. 

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