But if you read that novel, that character was so memorable. And then when you see what he was doing with her at the IRS office, the way she became this kind of two dimensional, almost hieroglyphic, bland, Cathy-like character, and then you think of the brilliance of what he was going to do with the juxtaposition of those two? That’s amazing. We lost so much, with him. That novel is just a window into how much, because it would have been really magnificent. It has really stayed with me.

RM: You start out your review of The Pale King with some of your similarities as writers: your mutual love of tennis, that you worked for the same magazines and were asked to write the same stories, etc. But then there’s that mention of him being sent off to profile Barack Obama on the eve of the Democratic convention, and how he wanted to be “away from the glare,” secluded with a speechwriter. And that made me recall this moment in Blood Horses, I think it’s at the Belmont, where a horse trips and takes another horse down with it, and as they’re getting carried off the course you immediately go down to the stables to see what happens next. You describe it as stemming from some “morbid desire,” but of course it’s something more than that: as a reporter, you knew that that’s where life’s being lived most intensely. So you go down to see it, awkwardness be damned. That’s not something DFW would have done in a million years…

JJS: That’s just something that I find impossible to separate from my father. I can even feel that rhythm of being there at the end of a baseball game, and as soon as they call the game, having to rush down to the locker room, because in order to get in any decent questions you had to be right there. Physically forcing yourself into a scenario like that, into a place of exposure. You’re not even thinking.  You’re not even framing questions. You’re just putting your body in a place. I don’t even feel like I have a right to talk about it in that way, though, because the people who interest me in that way are the people who go to war zones. 

RM: You ever thought of going off and doing something like that, your own kind of Dispatches?