Foster Wallace is a huge loss
It is a shame that superlative terms of praise have become so exhausted, because this author genuinely deserved them

David Foster Wallace. Photograph: Steve Liss/Getty/Time Life

David Foster Wallace's death, at the age of 46, is a grotesque shock. He was still young, and still brilliant; his gargantuan novel, Infinite Jest, and his remarkable short stories, displayed a startling originality in an age of increasingly predictable literary gestures. He was a comic writer who could also incorporate tragedy, satire, horror and philosophical enquiry.

He set the bar so dizzyingly high with each new piece of writing that I cannot imagine where he might next have taken his art; and it hurts that I will never know.It's normal when a gifted artist passes away to reach for some off-the-peg hyperbole and easy tributes, and I find myself reaching for them too; "greatest writer of a generation" and so on.

But at a time when superlatives are scattered so widely and freely for marketing reasons, it is difficult to take the debased coins and polish them up into something like their original value. That was a concern of Wallace's, too: how to restore to language a value and truthfulness eroded by irony, propaganda and self-interest.

Wallace really was that good. His style spawned imitators, fans and outraged (or bored) detractors. Byzantine sentences combined a neurotic hyper-attention to detail with anxious self-corrections and hesitations, in the edgy stammering surface of human speech. It created, as only great writing can, a space to think about language as well as its content, and to see freshly how inextricable they are. So, above all, his was an ethical style, pressed into the service of a greater truthfulness and affection, not a peacock display of mere cleverness or self-regard.

Read the full tribute at the Guardian online.

And the NYT report.

And from the LA Times.

And this obituary from the Guardian.