DFW would have hated this book. With absolutely certainty this I can say. I should read through the sources in the back to get a better idea of the sourcing maybe, but I was not impressed with the depth of the analysis of the character of David. On the one hand I think DFW left it all out there much ink he spilled and the interviews, but on the other hand I'm left a little confused by things. For example: the relationship with the mother? The mother in general? I was left wondering around page 180 "what the fuck happened?" I remembered that David got this idea into his head about his mother being the nexus of all his issues but it was written in a way by DT Max (our fearful author) that made me think that DFW was simply out of his mind about it. But ... was he? In the final analysis? I have a tendency to side against (or at least skeptically approach) the man with the significant and well documented mental issues over the seemingly loving mother.

And but so we have this question of what did we learn that we didn't get from the fiction and the essays and the interviews etc. I'd say we learned a little about the true depth of his despair (although it'd be hard to miss this in the fiction -- Good Old Neon eat your heart out) and maybe we learned about his commitment to AA and continuous alcohol and drug issues (again -- did you miss this?) and so in the final analysis I'm left wanting. I did appreciate learning about the autobiographical elements of Infinite Jest, I suppose, but again... hardly missable?

DT likes DFW too much is my meta-read of the book. Some Straussian reading of this biography (i.e. esoteric reading, what is DT really saying) is that DFW was a sort of tragic hero (comparisons to Kurt Cobain in the text) and that his wrongs were not thaaatt bad. A throw away line here or there about how DFW tells his friend that he slept with a minor, a lack of moralizing (am I asking too much?) on the issue of the women coming and going (one AA meeting DFW looks around and finds he's slept with four or five of the ten women, and tried with one or two more). DT said in an interview that he had loved Broom of the System and was upset when David distanced himself from it ("could be written by a smart 14 year old" said DFW). That's maybe all the evidence one needs.

So we have this book that gives you some details about DFW's life and friends, but seems to be missing the sort of critical analysis that I desire. The Costello friendship was deep and abiding, the Franzen correspondences were sometimes interesting, the Mary Karr relationship was good reading but of course cast DFW in a poor light, DFW as a teacher was good reading and inspiring, and there are other things I'm forgetting to mention.

My read of DFW is that really he might just have had that one great book in him, not having read The Pale King I can't quite say, but his biography indicates that the deeply in recovery DFW who wrote IJ might have been the only version to do it all. He needed Don Gately (based on the real life Big Craig) to counteract the Orin and the Hal in his soul. His nonfiction stands forever as hilarious and incisive American critique, but his constant meta-meta-meta-irony and meta-selfconsciousness to me became a little tiring in the short fiction (haven't read The Girl with Curious Hair or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men yet but I doubt if I will-- maybe Interviews when I miss him... (which I will)). I guess he gives you, the reader, the self conscious anxiety that plagued his entire life.

P.S. I asked Claude what I missed and it gave me this short list on which I'll comment: tennis, Wittgenstein, the sincere essays as self-prescription, and that maybe the Kurt Cobain should be taken more seriously.

In order: tennis - DFW was good. He wasn't strong or fast, he played with his head. You know this if you've read IJ, right? Wittgenstein - yes he loved Wittgenstein. He was moved deeply and changed deeply by the Wittgensteinian recognition that we were all stuck inside these worlds of linguistic creation. That maybe (a la Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson) when you open the window, that's a linguistic act, not a physical one. There's a whole confusion herein that obsessed DFW. Self-prescription - probably correct. Thanks Claude, correction noted. Kurt Cobain - I'd just observe that “We should not idolize earlier ages as a time when the common man heard only Shakespeare, red only Byron, and listened only Beethoven. Masterpieces usually arise in a climate full of pulp and trash.” (from In Praise of Commercial Culture by Tyler Cowen). And I'd acknowledge that TV took irony, as DFW says in "E Pluribus Unum", but we (artists-- they?) need to move forward or maybe backward -- either way ONWARDS to the next domain. As DFW did with IJ. There's a way, always.