Column by David in The Times.

This is an article about David Foster Wallace. I began it about ten minutes ago, and then I stopped, realising that I didn’t know what tense to use. The problem became clear when I wrote this sentence:

“Wallace was one of those writers whose fans are very evangelical.”

There seems to be a mix-up of tenses there, with the “was” and the “are”. The obvious answer to this is to use a tense that might be described as the writer’s present – the tense a critic uses when he or she says “Joyce is modernism’s greatest son”. It is irrelevant to this tense whether or not the writer is living or dead. But when I changed that sentence to “Foster Wallace is one of these writers whose fans are very evangelical”, that felt weird. It felt like the present was just incorrect; that I was simply using the wrong tense for a man who died two weeks ago.

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Column by David in The Times.

Some time ago, I wrote a column suggesting that, in the restaurant of literature, non- fiction is the fish; the grown-up choice, in other words, the one you’re supposed to come to like as you get older, and, obviously, the dish I never order. Despite the passing of the years since then, it remains the case: however childish it might be, I need a story – and a few other bits and pieces found more often in fiction than non, notably jokes, lyricism and piercing observations about the human condition – to pull me through a book.

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Column by David in Esquire.

Adultery involves so much effort. My “affair” lasted one week before, exhausted, I called it off.

I’ve never had an affair. Now I know this must come as a shock to those of you who think of me as a home moyen sensual, a lover of transgression, a connoisseur of the illicit, a cross, perhaps, between Russell Brand and Henry Kissinger (or is that just what I look like?). Well, sorry to disappoint you. The good news is that I have, of course, been unfaithful. I’ve just never managed to make unfaithfulness last.

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