David Foster Wallace

I'm sorry to hear tonight that David Foster Wallace is dead, having hanged himself at age 46.

Wallace will be most remembered for his novel, "Infinite Jest," which contained 1,000 pages of narrative and an additional 100 pages of footnotes. Like all his other writing, "Jest" couldn't just be read on its own; you needed a second bookmark, to flip back to the footnotes -- which were very important -- and a dictionary, to look up words that Wallace, and only Wallace, used in his writing.

It's been more than a decade since I read "Infinite Jest," (and yes, I read the whole thing) and while I remember it as being perhaps too precocious -- it's been a doorstop in every literary hipster's home since its publication -- some images stand out. Oddly, they're the deaths:

• A character commits suicide by cutting a hole in a microwave oven door, sticking his head through the door and starting it up. The result: Think a hotdog in the microwave. Wallace compounded the awfulness of this by having the character's son arrive home thinking something smelled good.

• Another character with a cold dies because he's been tied up in his home, the victim of a robbery, tape placed across his mouth. His sinuses already filled, he suffocates horribly on his own mucus.

Wallace's own death -- as far as we can glean -- was relatively pedestrian.

"Jest" and his other fiction was inventive and, well, daunting to the average reader. It was his reporting and other nonfiction, though, that was really stunning: Penetrating, thoughtful, incredibly detailed and, often, very funny.

The best of his reporting can be found in two books that I recommend you buy: "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," and "Consider the Lobster." The centerpiece of that second book is a controversial essay that, well, considers whether lobsters feel pain when cooked -- and thus, whether it's ethical to eat them. One can disagree with his conclusions and still be fascinated and amazed by the thoughts displayed and how they're expressed.

He could write about cruise ships and dictionaries and tennis and, yes, pornography with amazing skill. And he sometimes turned off readers because, in his displays of virtuosity, he didn't slow down to let them catch up. In coming days, you'll likely re-read his reporting of John McCain's 2000 campaign -- a classic on par with Timothy Crouse's "Boys on the Bus" -- with a fresh and amazed eye.

It's cliché to say we've lost a singular talent, but it's true -- I can't think of anybody else who does was David Foster Wallace did, much less did it so well. Because of generational similarities, it's tempting to say that writing has lost this generation's Kurt Cobain, but that's too easy. Instead, I think of Hall of Fame tight end Kellen Winslow -- about whom I once read: "He was so much of a revolutionary that he changed the way the position was played; and when he retired, it went right back to what it had been before."

Rest in peace.