By the time of Wallace’s suicide, after an attempt to go off Nardil in favor of a new antidepressant (or nothing), “emotion” was what Wallace was prescribing himself—reading St. Paul, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky, studying Zen, and contemplating opening a dog shelter. Love more, feel more, be more—this is the perennial sermon of realism, which modernism responded to with cynicism, postmodernism with irony. Wallace had been too disabused of both to respond at all, save with a rafter, a lawn chair, a belt.
