CLAREMONT, CA.
MORE about David Wallace has been printed in the last year
than ever before, and more is to come, including a full-length
biography and the unfinished novel the author worked on for
more than a decade, starting shortly after the publication of
his last novel and stopping the night he died, September 12,
2008.
No one who has not written a book has the right to critique
someone who has, let alone an author of books another
author called “capable of anything.” Yet it was hard not to
want more as the memoriams, public services, and two
hedged magazine profiles following his death revealed two
discrepant constants: his story’s end was no surprise, and up
until that end the California years were the best of his life.
Wallace moved here from Normal, IL in 2002 to fill the first
Roy E. Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing and Professor
of English chair at Pomona College. It was a rockstar-in-
residence job, a straight-to-tenure position teaching one
class a semester, which Wallace held in the English
department’s basement. A McSweeney’s editor told me he
was granted $1 million, though the college says he wasn’t.
Pomona sits at the east edge of LA County and the bottom of
the Angeles National Forest. From LAX, it’s a two-hour drive
in brisk eight-lane traffic, then off the Foothill Freeway and
through the small paved city of Claremont, past the
skatepark, then left across Harvard Avenue and into the
college. Crookshank Hall is at the edge of campus, a low
white building with French doors and a tile roof that faces a
fountain, where a black lab is shaking off in the sun.
His name and number are gone from the directory over the
big table just inside in the building’s foyer, but Wallace’s
office is still here, at the end of the hall next to a long wood
bench, office 101. The rubber stopper at the bottom of the
door is beginning to peel, bending out over the blue carpet,
but the nameless door mostly l