Ricordo di David Foster Wallace (The New Yorker)

Deborah Treisman sul New Yorker:

Great literature, Wallace once said, made him feel “unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.” He was one of the few satirists able to avoid meanness; he was moral without being judgmental. He took on the absurdities of modern life in an attempt to understand or to parse them, not to mock them.
Debating the tone of the title of “Good People,” he noted, “My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?”
Gleefully compacted as his language could be, it was designed to be unwrapped—and there was always a gift inside for those who took the trouble.