Books, Deaths, Law Schools, Suicide

On The Anniversary Of His Death: Why Lawyers Love David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace captured the vices and virtues of a certain type of reader, a certain type of writer, a certain type of mind.

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David Foster Wallace died six years ago today, on September 12, 2008. The author of novels such as Infinite Jest, The Pale King, and essay collections such as A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again hanged himself in the garage of his California home. DFW was 46.

David Foster Wallace was a lawyer’s writer, if ever one could use that label without intending insult. DFW was not a lawyer, though he famously became friends and collaborators with legal writing expert Bryan Garner. Garner’s co-author Justice Antonin Scalia is also said to be a fan. Countless attorneys who haven’t cracked a novel in years will brighten at the mention of DFW. Analytical, language-obsessed, and neurotic, he may have captured the modus operandi of many lawyers as well as any novelist or essayist could.

David Foster Wallace, especially for a fiction writer, was logical, analytical. He never quite left behind the mindset of the analytic philosophy student he once was. Wallace’s senior thesis in modal logic was published posthumously. His senior thesis in English became his first published novel, The Broom of the System. He wrote lit for STEM geeks and logic nerds . . . including the many STEM geeks and logic nerds who later ended up in law. (Myself included.)

To a lot of lawyers, Wallace’s voice sounds a lot like their own, in both wonderful and uncomfortable ways. His prose was maximalist. It was gorgeously constructed. It was damned long. Infinite Jest is over 1,100 pages long, 484,001 words, with 388 footnotes. It tries the patience of many. It must work hard to beat the charge that it is needlessly complex, full of itself, too clever by half.

The risks of linguistic excess are greater for the verbally inclined. If you aren’t verbally expressive to begin with, you probably don’t need many externally imposed constraints to rein in your natural inclination to jabber and inflate and self-amuse. If you are verbal — as DFW was, as many lawyers are — you need rules. A dripping faucet needs a bit of tightening. An unmanned fire hose needs someone to take control.

Bryan Garner has built a career on manning the fire hose of legal prose, and teaching others to man their own hoses accordingly. DFW reviewed Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern Usage in a piece that was later published as an essay called “Authority and American Usage” in the Wallace collection Consider the Lobster.

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Introducing the review to come, Wallace writes:

From one perspective, a certain irony attends the publication of any good new book on American usage. It is that people who are going to be interested in such a book are also the people who are least going to need it — i.e., that offering counsel on the finer points of US English is preaching to the choir. The relevant choir here comprises that small percentage of American citizens who actually care about the current status of double modals and ergative verbs. The same sorts of people who watched The Story of English on PBS (twice) and read Safire’s column with their half-caff every Sunday. The sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE — 10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear dialogue used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 Motel chain must surely have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate. There are lots of epithets for people like this — Grammar Nazis, Usage Nerds, Syntax Snobs, the Grammar Battalion, the Language Police. The term I was raised with was SNOOT. The word might be slightly self-mocking, but those other terms are outright dysphemisms. A SNOOT can be loosely defined as somebody who knows what dysphemism means and doesn’t mind letting you know it.

Like lawyers, DFW fussed over language. You can watch DFW complaining the evils of the phrase “prior to” on Garner’s Law Prose website, for example. Like a dowager minding her rose bushes, he tended and pruned. He fretted. He was persnickety about language because he cared about language, though he knew the risk of inadvertently alienating others because of that zeal. If one can be a prescriptivist without being an ass, he tried. Consider how many lawyers you have worked with today who don’t even bother trying, so deep is their SNOOTiness. You might consider this even if you are working alone from home today.

On the same day that DFW died, Hurricane Ike barreled into the Texas Gulf Coast. I was then a few weeks deep into my first semester of law school in Houston. I stocked up on jugs of water, candles, flashlight batteries, peanut butter, apples, and bread. City officials had warned residents that restoring electricity might take a day or two. Mine was out for 12 days.

My storm provisions eventually thinned. In the steamy Houston heat, in a cramped studio apartment with little ventilation and no air conditioning, my bread molded and my apples started to rot prematurely. For the first few days, grocery stores were shuttered, and potable water required a trip to a Red Cross outpost. My cat, Murakami, slipped out a cracked window, never returning after the storm. I briefed cases by candlelight, stripped to my skivvies and still sweating. I was terrified of falling behind in school, paranoid that classmates in other neighborhoods with power were learning the law in comfort. I became convinced that they were transforming into Llewellyns and Holmeses while I was jacking up another opportunity in life, failing miserably, my brain stewing in the heat and dark. I learned of DFW’s death nearly two weeks late, once I had electricity and internet access and a chance to bathe without a Solo cup and a washcloth.

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This experience was miserable way to start off a legal education. But it was an excellent metaphor for my interior life at that time — idealism, perfectionism, self-flagellation, survival mode. I think of DFW’s suicide as I was experiencing the storm. I think of what can happen when words are no longer enough, when ideals collapse onto themselves, when survival mode gives way to defeat. I remember what can happen to an analytical mind when mental illness and strain shift each piece of a logical progression a mite off-center, and even survival itself doesn’t make sense anymore. I think of how this too makes DFW a kindred soul with many lawyers.

David Foster Wallace captured the vices and virtues of a certain type of reader, a certain type of writer, a certain type of mind. It’s a type familiar to many of us in law. So, since DFW’s death six years ago today, the world of lawyers is just a bit darker than it was before.

(Ed. note: The links to books mentioned in this post are affiliate links.)

Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the school’s law review. After graduation, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She currently heads the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science to improvements in legal education. You can reach her at tabo.atl@gmail.com.

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