Some quotes that capture the article's main topic--the peculiar relationship between Wallace and Franzen.
Franzen sat down and channeled his anger over his close friend [Wallace's] death into a fourteen-month sprint to write his sprawling 2010 novel, Freedom, which features a character with a likeness to Wallace. He also published a raw and searching New Yorker essay on their complicated friendship. “The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed,” Franzen wrote. “Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend.”
[Franzen and Wallace's] relationship was beginning to bear some resemblance to the competitive friendship at the center of Freedom, with Richard Katz in a Wallace-like role: “And the eternally tormenting question for Walter … was whether Richard was the little brother or the big brother, the f**kup or the hero, the beloved damaged friend or the dangerous rival.”
