Friends Remember David Foster Wallace at New Yorker Festival

By JOHN WILLIAMS

Last weekend was a busy time for bookworms who wanted to make the most of the annual New Yorker Festival, which featured appearances by Marilynne Robinson, Zadie Smith, George Saunders and many other literary luminaries.

Saturday afternoon, D. T. Max moderated a panel titled “Rereading David Foster Wallace.” Mr. Max, the author of “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story,” the first biography of Mr. Wallace, was joined by the poet and memoirist Mary Karr, the novelists Dana Spiotta and Mark Costello, and Deborah Treisman, the fiction editor of the New Yorker. The discussion was most remarkable for the frank and revealing exchanges between Ms. Karr and Mr. Costello, who had close personal relationships with Mr. Wallace.

Mr. Costello told the crowd that Mr. Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, judged his own work by how it made him feel while writing it, often favoring passages that had made a day go by easier. “ He's thought of as such a smart writer, but it's really more like an animal in a cage,” he said.

Ms. Karr felt Wallace's approach was sometimes to the detriment of the final product. “You should be writing for a reader, not to calm yourself down,” she said. Mr. Costello responded that telling Mr. Wallace “you ought to figure out how to write differently” missed the fact that writing for him was “more of a desperate enterprise” used to “stave off collapse.”

“I never said to him, ‘write differently,' ” Ms. Karr countered. “I said, ‘cut out some of this [stuff].' ”

Like Mr. Max's biography, the panel gave a picture of the author as a lovable but difficult person to know. Mr. Costello said his friend would make it hard to recognize what he was feeling. “He would compartmentalize what he would tell you,” Mr. Costello said. “It was like dealing with Richard Nixon in many ways.” Ms. Treisman drew dark laughter from the audience when she said it was “much easier” to edit the famously fastidious writer after he died.

The panel ended with Ms. Karr reading an excerpt from a poem that she wrote in memory of Mr. Wallace, in part expressing her anger at those who commit suicide. “There is a good reason I am not God,” she read, “for I would cruelly smite the self-smitten.”

A panel on Friday night at the Directors Guild Theater that featured the fiction writers Julian Barnes, Lorrie Moore and Junot Díaz struck a happier note. The writers discussed how themes of love and marriage function in their work and the work of others. Early on, Mr. Díaz said he envied writers of earlier centuries, like Tolstoy and Flaubert, because for them divorce was a far more dramatic plot point. Mr. Barnes agreed, saying that was even true of the years of his youth. “Divorce was less common than twins when I was growing up,” he said.

Ms. Moore, who has been div orced, saw things differently. “Divorce is still a story,” she said, “and the fact that it's common conceals the trauma of it.”

Mr. Diaz, 43, has never been married, and said that dating at his stage of life - if you want to date someone more or less your age - means encountering many people who are divorced. He spoke of the jarring amount of acrimony that he heard about failed marriages, and said it was an “extraordinary thing to be an anthropologist in Divorcelandia.”