Prior to his suicide, David Foster Wallace gave an interview to Ostap Karmodi for the New York Review of Books. The interview, which has just been published by the NYRB, concentrated on consumerism and its effects on culture. Here is the opening excerpt:
Ostap Karmodi: Do you feel we’re living in an age of consumerism or is that just a media concept that doesn’t have any real meaning?
David Foster Wallace: This question, as you know, is very complicated. I can give answers that are somewhat simple and I can really talk only about America, because it’s really the
only society that I know. America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and
consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.
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