Tax Advice From David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace in 2006. "If you are immune to boredom," he wrote, "there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
Photographer: Suzy Allman/The New York Times via ReduxAs shocking as it sounds, some people deeply love taxes, and David Foster Wallace was among them. After publishing his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, and winning a MacArthur Foundation grant, Wallace enrolled in three years of advanced tax courses at Illinois State University; his final novel, published after his suicide in 2008, is set in an Illinois IRS office and includes long footnotes about obscure tax provisions and the history of the agency.
“Tax law is like the world’s biggest game of chess with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and the consent of the governed built in,” Wallace wrote in an email to his friend, the novelist Jonathan Franzen, in 2007. “For me it’s a bit like math: I have no talent for it but find it still erotically interesting.”