David Foster Wallace

Very much in line with my famous last works entry, I found that they have retrieved hundreds of pages of an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace and his editor has done his best to piece it together into a novel called The Pale King.  His perspective here: pale-king in guardian

A slightly longer critical take on the novel as it stands (with perhaps too many spoilers for some people's taste) can be found in Slate: Pale King in Slate

I have to say, the Slate piece makes the novel sound like something worth reading, though I probably can hold off at least until this comes out in paperback or is in second-hand shops, whichever comes first.  I have a complicated relationship with DFW in that I knew his early work (esp. Broom of the System) before he broke big, and I think he works best at that scale.  Infinite Jest frankly seems the work of a writer who has lost his way and become far too self-important and self-indulgent.  I doubt I'll ever finish the entire book.  (Which is how I also feel about Bolano -- who may also be worth including in this overall list -- 2666 is a massive book he just barely completed under the wire before suddenly passing away.  I did not find The Savage Detectives at all worthy of the effort it took to read it, and I suspect strongly I would feel the same way about 2666.)  Anyway, for whatever reason, the set-up of The Pale King appeals to me.  I worked for a summer at a survey center where we processed completed surveys, a place nearly as boring as the IRS office that DFW is surveying in this novel.  For a short time, I knew many multiples of 52 by heart, since we would calculate annual earnings from their reported weekly salary.

On the whole, The Pale King sounds like it was close enough to being a solid piece of work that the average reader/casual fan of DFW will be glad it is available to read, not only academics writing dissertations and super fans who will read every scrap he ever wrote.

I don't think I have any other suicides on the list from before, but that does add a different twist.  Not to be too morbid, but the artist is actually the author of his or her own end, as well as having control over what will be their final work as well its level of completion.