David Foster Wallace: Prophet of American Loneliness

David Foster Wallace claimed that people in the rural Midwest are alienated even from the land. They live, he said, enveloped by emptiness, marooned in a void that transcends the mere physical. “It is not just people you get lonely for,” the author explained in a 1993 essay on the Illinois State Fair. “You’re alienated from the very space around you, in a way, because out here the land’s less an environment than a commodity.” Wallace cautioned against a Marxist interpretation of this assessment. “So many IL farmers still own their own land,” he explained. “This is a whole different kind of alienation.”