D. T. Max's Biography of David Foster Wallace It is highly likely that while reading "Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story," D. T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, you will experience both of the following elbow-y, oxygen-consuming thoughts, or perhaps we should call them emotions. The one is that you find it painful, frightening and, yes, gripping, to read about someone in chronic and severe emotional distress. In writing a chronologically narrated, thoroughly researched, objective-as-­imaginable biography, Max has created a page turner. Despite knowing that Wallace lives until his suicide in 2008 at age 46, you find yourself worrying the whole way through the book - through hospitalizations, rehabs, electroconvulsive therapy treatments and, at one particularly low moment, Wallace's serious inquiry about obtaining a gun to murder his lover's husband - that he will end his life much earlier. The other thought/emotion, differently unwelcome and yet nearly as ineluctable as the first, is that you find yourself preoccupied with the judgment that you just don't find Wallace all that nice. Yes, you remind yourself that everyone is a complicated mix of vices, virtues, taste in flannel, etc., but you still find yourself thinking that you wouldn't have wanted him as your brother or lover or close friend, though he would probably have been a very good neighbor, course instructor or A.A. sponsor. Still, you feel, to be honest, repelled. Then, as you are reading along, dominated by these noisy inchoate emotion-thought hybrids, at some point, because the recursive and self-reflexive and aw-shucks mixed with Kier­kegaard and Stanley Cavell and higher mathematics voice of Wallace is infectious - weirdly, this is the case even if you have never read him! the voice has permeated the culture! - you begin to ask yourself if the liking or not liking of the author as a person is really interesting or illuminating, aesthetically or ethically, as a dominant question when reading a literary biography. Maybe you were a bit quick to straighten that miter you now realize you were wearing and, of course, speck-of-sawdust-in-your-brother's-eye, etc., and also, as Alcoholics Anonymous would put it, Whoever is upsetting me most is my best teacher, and as Wallace put it, in his novel "Infinite Jest," "It starts to turn out that the vapider the A.A. cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers." But still, ack, he freaks you out. And you wonder if something productive can be made of the error of being detained by what you feel is the totally wrong and unfair thing to be detained by. You know that's going to be work. David Foster Wallace wrote three novels, three story collections, two collections of essays, and other things too, but his reputation still rests mainly on "Infinite Jest" - the 1,100-page novel published in 1996 and set alternately in a tennis academy and a rehab center - and on his sui generis now-nearly-a-genre long-form journalism about topics ranging from lobsters to dictionaries to John McCain to the Adult Video News awards for pornographic films. Wallace's best work, perhaps by far, is "The Pale King," an unfinished novel about I.R.S. employees that was assembled posthumously by Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch. Wallace has given as much to literature as any contemporary American writer. Whether you like him or not, you hear American language, and experience American thinking, differently because of him. Wallace's ­oeuvre is internally varied but also of a piece. It reminds me of what an amateur deep-sea diver once said to me about why he liked diving solo: If you stop concentrating for even a few seconds you might die, he said, and I have a hard time concentrating, and so, well, I like to dive. Wallace had a problem with distraction, too; likewise, he converted it into a ferocious attentiveness. His aesthetic is not the only thing that made him famous, though. There was also his bandanna, which was as misinterpreted as so much else about him. As the Max biography explains, Wallace started wearing the bandanna as the least embarrassing solution he could think of to obscure the intense sweating attacks that overcame him without warning. In high school, he had taken to carrying around a tennis racket and a towel as a tacit cover story for the sweating. The acutely self-conscious, anxious, addicted and at times showy characters in Wallace's fiction were not, Max helps us recognize, wildly difficult for Wallace to imagine - the characters were iterations of himself. Wallace had lifelong troubles not only with anxiety but also with alcohol, anger, impulsiveness, obsessive love, pursuit of rejection, extreme self-­consciousness, abysses of depression and lying even more than the rest of us. Any diagnoses seem as unilluminating as saying that the "reason" someone is short is because he is 5-foot‑1. About Wallace's problems it seems worth noting simply that his A.A. attendance coincided with a long period of relative wellness, and that getting off the antidepressant Nardil, which he had taken most of his adult life, coincided with a serious crash in mood that ended in his suicide six months later. Rivka Galchen is the author of the novel "Atmospheric ­Disturbances."