...join in with the hagiographers. Suicide is, among other things, an act of stupendous selfishness. It is also a failure of imagination, something not hard to believe of a writer as bad as Wallace.

Yes, BAD.

Considering his distaste for irony, I find it ironic that so many are proclaiming that Wallace was some kind of genius. Anyone who was old enough to remember watching Borg, McEnroe and Connors, and then write glowing praise of a plodding cannon-wall like Roger Federer wasn't even particularly bright, let alone brilliant.

Oh yes, the writing. Infinite Jest is one of the worst novels ever to be proclaimed great. Like too many others in the modern era, it is filled with ridiculous tropes and outright flim-flammery, like those infuriating footnotes, that cry out "Oh look how NICE I'm writing, Mommy!"

I think the reason Wallace offed himself is because, at middle age, he had enough insight to realize that he was a fraud, a genuinely hollow man that T.S. Eliot - a real writer - would have recognized instantly. I can't really blame Wallace for being so horrified by this revelation that he decided to end the life he finally recognized as being so empty.

No, wait, yes I can blame him. The bastard had everything that most writers dream of: An excellent career in academia AND a robust career as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. He was married. He had lots of money and, because of his tenured position at Pomona, complete economic security. But then I suppose it is still hard to live with the knowledge that you're a fraud, especially when you are so celebrated. What a literal embarassment of riches.

Please spare me your so-called "human decency." Where is that decency for all the writers - including your's truly - whose careers were squashed before they could even begin because they refused to drink the post-modernist, creative writing workshop Kool-Aid? Where's your decency for all the kids in this bankrupt, post-literate culture who, thanks to the ascendancy of non-entities like Wallace, can't string together two coherent thoughts let alone two sentences?

For the record, I bashed the living hell out of Wallace when he was alive and working, for many years. Ditto David Eggers (what is it with the Davids nowadays?) and the other literary poseurs. It has been painfully embarassing to have critically ensconced morons bray about the likes of Wallace in the same breath as the likes of Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner. I can only imagine how enlightened writers and thinkers around the world must chortle at us.

I'm not glad that Wallace is dead, and his family and friends have my sympathy. But as with Ronald Reagan I will not sit still as the evil perpetrated by the dead while living is lauded, besmirching REAL, GENUINE decency.

No, Wallace didn't kill anybody, but his career, and Eggers's, and Gaddis's, and Carver's, among many others, did kill off the hopes and dreams of many real writers over the last twenty-five years. The influence that such writers had - even when unintentional - on Creative Writing faculties across the country led to the discouragement of countless real, talented writers. I myself saw this at San Francisco State University in my last year there, '87/'88. Thank God I had instructors and professors like Leo Litwack, Irving Halperin, Stan Rice, and Jesse Ritter to guide and mentor me. But I - and they - could see and smell the shitstorm that was coming, and none of us liked it. Halperin explicitly warned his students that "bad days are upon us. Frauds will abound. Be careful." Old Irving couldn't have been more right, but sadly he was unaware of the wave of new, young and very stupid literary agents, likewise influenced by the crap pumped out by the likes of Wallace and Carver, who were taking over the major (and most minor) agencies.

And this last I address to both you and gmoses (by the way, moron, "your's truly" is a possessive phrase, hence the apostrophe). I have been a writer all my life, since about the age of seven. Like most truly talented writers I have a gift for oral communication, for empathy, for seeing people as they really are (it's not an accident that so many detectives turn out to be very good writers of genre fiction). I write very good fiction. Not great, but eminently publishable. Despite twenty years of trying, I have not had a single story or novel published. And I'm not the only one. Within my circle of friends - and beyond it - there are many, many writers who, like me, still write because they love to but have given up trying to get published. There is an entire, better, finer shadow culture of people who, if given the chance, would electrify readers. But all most of them ever hear from literary agents and publishing house editors is some species of "Couldn't you write more like [insert fraud's name here]."

I have come to realize that my tiny audience of friends, acquaintances and rivals is all that I'm ever going to get, and all that I will ever really need. When my generation of writers passes away this country will most likely be culturally barren. And all those alive then, assuming they even notice or care, will have "writers" and "artists" like Wallace to thank for it.

So no, he's not good with the house.