I attended the Brooklyn Book Festival to say hi to my former editors. The atmosphere among the writers was (to quote an NYT obit) like a wake. After my editor introduced Jonathan Franzen to the audience, Franzen got onstage and said "I really don't want to be here right now; one of my best friends passed this Friday."
The director of Helvetica walked out later and said Franzen was being a primadonna.
On the subway towards Brooklyn, I was reading DFW's essays. A couple came up beside me and said quietly "what happened this weekend was really sad," and I nodded. They asked me if I was reading in tribute.
(I'm still trying to understand, in a weirdly Wallaceian way, why this hits me so hard and I think it's because DFW reminds me of Ms. McDowell, my high school mentor, who passed away after I went off to college. Both of them had an intense and often un-hip humanist moral seriousness that made you feel distinctly that someone very compassionate, thoughtful and incredibly smart wants to see you become the best damn human being you can be, and what drives you is knowing that someone out there would rather you be a decent, thoughtful, meaningful person rather than a rich/powerful/famous one.)
Franzen is an amazingly witty author as expected. He later apologized for saying that he didn't want to be here. It was just... fuck.
After Franzen, Russel Banks read like Colonel Sanders narrating the intro of Transformers or Planet Earth. "In the beginning, there was a cube....
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