Learned, witty, strange, arcane - stories of David Foster Wallace

Posthumous story Backbone by David Foster Wallace in the current New Yorker, and it's impossible to tell exactly how to read this: is it part of the apparently forthcoming posthumous Wallace novel (as we know, most New Yorker "stories" these days are not stories at all but well placed promos for forthcoming novels - trailers, really)? is it a story completed late in his life and never published? is it a fragment left behind, unfinished, and published now? Backbone doesn't have the sense of a completed story, no obvious narrative arc and no fully developed characters, and it ends more with questions than resolutions: who is this young man who embarks from earliest childhood on the odd quest to kiss every part of his own body, becoming a contortionist and yoga phenom in the process? And who is his misfit father, a failed salesman, who dubiously observes, or actually fails to observe, his son's bizarre metamorphosis? And who is Dr. Kathy, the chiropractor, who abet this bizarre behavior? Yet aren't most contemporary stories more questions than answers (like this post!) and more enigma than resolution? All of Wallace's writings push boundaries and explore the marginalia of behavior, so this one is very typical of his work - learned, witty, strange, and arcane - not something that I've been drawn to a lot, but a body of work that can't fail to impress any reader: like a towering monument. I loved some of his nonfiction - I remember an account of the Illinois State Fair (in Harpers I think) that was extraordinary, and there's no doubt that it's a tragedy that he didn't overcome his demons and continue to write. So few writers of genius - terrible to lose even one.