As The Pale King is about to conquer and destroy (the novel will be published later this week), DFW is back in the news. Says Franzen: “At the level of content, he gave us the worst of himself: he laid out, with an intensity of self-scrutiny worthy of comparison to Kafka and Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the extremes of his own narcissism, misogyny, compulsiveness, self-deception, dehumanizing moralism and theologizing, doubt in the possibility of love, and entrapment in footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness. At the level of form and intention, however, this very cataloguing of despair about his own authentic goodness is received by the reader as a gift of authentic goodness: we feel the love in the fact of his art, and we love him for it.”
Says his widow: “What do you do when your husband’s autopsy report is on the internet and is deemed a subject worthy of fucking literary criticism?”
