LOUDON, NH—Shock, grief, and the overwhelming sense of loss that has swept the stock car racing community following the death by apparent suicide of writer David Foster Wallace has moved NASCAR to cancel the remainder of its 2008 season in respect for the acclaimed but troubled author of Infinite Jest, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.... David Foster Wallace's work came to stock car racing in the mid-1990s, just as the sport began experiencing almost geometric yearly growth. But the literary atmosphere of the sport was moribund, mired in the once-flamboyant but decidedly aging mid-1960s stylings of Tom Wolfe, whose bombastic essays—notably "The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!"—served as the romantic, quasi-elegiac be-all and end-all for NASCAR fans and series participants alike. Racing was ready for new ideas, and when a new generation of young drivers like Jeff Gordon arrived on the scene, sporting new sponsorship deals on their fireproof coveralls and dog-eared copies of Broom Of The System under their arms, an intellectual seed crystal was dropped into the supersaturated solution of American motorsports.
"Suddenly DFW was everywhere," said #88 Amp Energy Chevrolet driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., whose enthusiasm for Wallace is apparent in both his deep solemnity and the Infinite Jest-inspired Great Concavity tattoo on his left shoulder. "My Dad was against him, actually, in part because he was a contrarian and in part because he was a Pynchon fan from way back. But that was okay. It got people reading V and Gravity's Rainbow, and hell, nothing wrong with that. But now, to think we'll never see another novel from Wallace...I can't get my mind around it."
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