I love this book. I own it both in physical format and electronic and have so far read it twice. One can jeer DFW as much as one wants - which he often did himself - and a lot of that's very relevant, but he was human, and nuanced.
Though Wallace was alert to the interviewees tendency to reverse-engineer explanations of a completed work, his comments on his themes and techniques are often penetrating. The subjects which have magnetically attracted Wallace criticism for fifteen years—irony, his relationship to other writers—are widely represented in this collection. Equally there are also revealing statements about his attitude to MFA programs (especially in the interview by Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk), his negotiations with religious belief (particularly in the pieces by Streitfeld, Gilbert, and Arden), the role of footnotes in his writing (again, the Gilbert interview is illuminating), and his multifaceted conception of his novels’ architecture. Wallace explains to Mark Caro, for example, that Infinite Jest is patterned like “a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the twentieth story of a building,” and then tells Anne Marie Donahue that the same novel is also “really designed more like a piece of music than like a book.”
While he championed Gaddis as a technical influence, there are also moments where he dismisses both Gaddis and Pynchon as “commercial avant-garde” in conversation with Donahue. At the same time, he also recognized that some realist work, as he told Michael Goldfarb, was “really … vibrant.”
The most intriguing essay about a Wallace interview, however, is surely Joshua Ferris’s “The World According to Wallace,” which describes a meeting between the two novelists when Ferris—then an undergraduate at the University of Iowa—interviewed Wallace for the student newspaper.
1991 Though Wallace had made three false-starts on projects resembling Infinite Jest between 1986 and 1989, work on the novel begins in earnest in 1991–92. 1992 Moves to Syracuse, where he lives in an apartment on Miles Avenue. Begins correspondence with Don DeLillo. 1993 The Review of Contemporary Fiction devotes a third of its Younger Writers issue to Wallace. Hired by Illinois State University as an associate professor. Finishes draft manuscript of Infinite Jest, though the editing process continues through to the middle of 1995. 1996 Wallace’s cruise-ship essay, “Shipping Out,” appears in the January issue of Harper’s. In February, Infinite Jest is published to great acclaim, and by early March the novel is in its sixth printing. Research for The Pale King is underway at least as early as this point: Wallace audits an elementary accounting class in the fall, and in the coming years takes more advanced classes and corresponds with tax professionals.
“I’m not interested in fiction that’s only worried about capturing reality in an artful way. What pisses me off about so much fiction these days is that it’s just boring, especially the young fiction coming out of the East Coast that’s designed to appeal to the stereotypical yuppies, with an emphasis on fashion, celebrities, and materialism.” He pauses, realizing he’s been lecturing. “Uh,” he adds with a self-deprecating shrug, “what do I know?” After all, these are just the opinions of a twenty-five-year-old. “I don’t claim to have any special insights into anything that’s going on.” I’m looking for a trace of sham, of disingenuousness, in his voice but it’s nowhere to be found.
WALLACE: I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t start writing fiction until I was twenty-one, and at the beginning we all have to write our requisite amounts of shit, and my shit was basically disguised essays.
But there are a few books I have read that I’ve never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know that much about you as I don’t know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with … I don’t want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. Or really to affect people. I think sometimes what I’m doing, if I try to be particularly offensive or outrageous or whatever, is just being really hungry for some kind of effect. I think you can see Bret Ellis doing that in American Psycho. You can’t make sure that everybody’s going to like you, but damn it, if you’ve got some skill you can make sure that people don’t ignore you. A lot of writers hunger to have their work out there more and to have good book sales, which I used to think was crass materialism, that they wanted the money, but it turns out that what you want is to have some sort of effect. Maybe you’ve snapped to this already. It took me years to figure that out.
GP: Are there any writers now living that really knock you out?
WALLACE: I’m a huge Don DeLillo fan, although I think his latest book is one of his worst. The DeLillo of Americana and End Zone and Great Jones Street, The Names, and Libra I love. Maybe Gravity’s Rainbow is a better book, but I can’t think of anybody in this tradition since Nabokov who’s put out a better corpus of work than DeLillo. I like Bellow, and I really like the early John Updike—The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm,The Centaur, just in terms of sheer fucking beautiful writing. There are a lot of the Latinists too: Julio Cortázar, Manuel Puig, both recently dead. There are young writers now I was telling you about, like Mark Leyner; William T. Vollman, who’s got four books coming out this year; Jon Franzen, Susan Daitch, Amy Homes. The best book I’ve read recently is by Paul Auster’s wife, who’s named Siri Hustvedt. She’s a Norwegian from Minnesota, who wrote this book called The Blindfold. It’s not a lot of fun, but God is it smart. It’s the best piece of feminist postmodernism I’ve ever read. It makes Kathy Acker look sick because it’s so well crafted. I’m not sure there are any really towering giants. I think some Pynchon, some Bellow, some Ozick will be read a hundred years from now; I think DeLillo, maybe. GP: Do you have any advice for young writers?
WALLACE: Send me at least 50 percent of everything that you make.
GP: That won’t even cover the postage!
WALLACE: This is a long haul. Writing is a long haul. I’m hoping that none of the stuff that I’ve done so far is anywhere close to the best stuff I can do. Let’s hope we’re not fifty-five and doing the same thing. I’d say avoid burning out. You can burn out by struggling in privation and neglect for many years, but you can also burn out if you’re given a little bit of attention. People come to your hotel room and think you have interesting things to say. You can allow that to make you start to think that you can’t say anything unless it’s interesting. For me, 50 percent of the stuff I do is bad, and that’s just going to be the way it is, and if I can’t accept that then I’m not cut out for this. The trick is to know what’s bad and not let other people see it.
LARRY McCAFFERY: Your essay following this interview is going to be seen by some people as being basically an apology for television. What’s your response to the familiar criticism that television fosters relationships with illusions or simulations of real people (Reagan being a kind of quintessential example)?
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: It’s a try at a comprehensive diagnosis, not an apology. U.S. viewers’ relationship with TV is essentially puerile and dependent, as are all relationships based on seduction. This is hardly news. But what’s seldom acknowledged is how complex and ingenious TV’s seductions are. It’s seldom acknowledged that viewers’ relationship with TV is, albeit debased, intricate and profound. It’s easy for older writers just to bitch about TV’s hegemony over the U.S. art market, to say the world’s gone to hell in a basket and shrug and have done with it.
DFW: I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent…
LM: The media seems to me to be one thing that has drastically changed this relationship. It’s provided people with this television-processed culture for so long that audiences have forgotten what a relationship to serious art is all about.
DFW: Well, it’s too simple to just wring your hands and claim TV’s ruined readers. Because the U.S.’s television culture didn’t come out of a vacuum. What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is all it does—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV’s going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy.
LM: You really think this distaste is distinctly American?
DFW: It seems distinctly Western-industrial, anyway. In most other cultures, if you hurt, if you have a symptom that’s causing you to suffer, they view this as basically healthy and natural, a sign that your nervous system knows something’s wrong. For these cultures, getting rid of the pain without addressing the deeper cause would be like shutting off a fire alarm while the fire’s still going. But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate mere symptoms in this country—from fast-fast-fast-relief antacids to the popularity of lighthearted musicals during the Depression—you can see an almost compulsive tendency to regard pain itself as the problem. And so pleasure becomes a value, a teleological end in itself. It’s probably more Western than U.S. per se. Look at utilitarianism—that most English of contributions to ethics—and you see a whole teleology predicated on the idea that the best human life is one that maximizes the pleasure-to-pain ratio. God, I know this sounds priggish of me. All I’m saying is that it’s shortsighted to blame TV. It’s simply another symptom. TV didn’t invent our aesthetic childishness here any more than the Manhattan Project invented aggression. Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just that art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art. This seems like a poisonous lesson for a would-be artist to grow up with. And one consequence is that if the artist is excessively dependent on simply being liked, so that her true end isn’t in the work but in a certain audience’s good opinion, she is going to develop a terrific hostility to that audience, simply because she has given all her power away to them. It’s the familiar love-hate syndrome of seduction: “I don’t really care what it is I say, I care only that you like it. But since your good opinion is the sole arbiter of my success and worth, you have tremendous power over me, and I fear you and hate you for it.” This dynamic isn’t exclusive to art. But I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?
DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s American Psycho: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.
LM: But at least in the case of American Psycho I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.
DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition…
LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?
DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s American Psycho: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.
LM: But at least in the case of American Psycho I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.
DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition…
The modernists and early postmodernists—all the way from Mallarmé to Coover, I guess—broke most of the rules for us, but we tend to forget what they were forced to remember: the rule-breaking has got to be for the sake of something. When rule-breaking, the mere form of renegade avant-gardism, becomes an end in itself, you end up with bad language poetry and American Psycho’s nipple-shocks and Alice Cooper eating shit on stage. Shock stops being a byproduct of progress and becomes an end in itself. And it’s bullshit. Here’s an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn’t divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption. Then some genuine titans came along and said, “Yeah, maybe you can’t divide by zero, but what would happen if you could? We’re going to come as close to doing it as we can, to see what happens.”
LM: So you get the infinitesimal calculus—the “philosophy of as if.”
DFW: And this purely theoretical construct wound up yielding incredible practical results. Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this “as if.” But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It’d never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn’t yield results. It’s hollow. Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenious because it was in the service of something. The math world’s shock was a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself.
I guess I don’t know what to think about these explosions in the sixties you’re so crazy about. It’s almost like postmodernism is fiction’s fall from biblical grace. Fiction became conscious of itself in a way it never had been. Here’s a really pretentious bit of pop analysis for you: I think you can see Cameron’s Terminator movies as a metaphor for all literary art after Roland Barthes, viz., the movies’ premise that the Cyberdyne NORAD computer becomes conscious of itself as conscious, as having interests and an agenda; the Cyberdyne becomes literally self-referential, and it’s no accident that the result of this is nuclear war, Armageddon.
LM: Isn’t Armageddon the course you set sail for in “Westward”?
DFW: Metafiction’s real end has always been Armageddon. Art’s reflection on itself is terminal, is one big reason why the art world saw Duchamp as an Antichrist. But I still believe the move to involution had value: it helped writers break free of some long-standing flat-earth-type taboos. It was standing in line to happen.
LM: You’ve mentioned the recent change about what writers can assume about their readers in terms of expectations and so on. Are there other ways the postmodern world has influenced or changed the role of serious writing today?
DFW: If you mean a postindustrial, mediated world, it’s inverted one of fiction’s big historical functions, that of providing data on distant cultures and persons. The first real generalization of human experience that novels tried to accomplish. If you lived in Bumfuck, Iowa, a hundred years ago and had no idea what life was like in India, good old Kipling goes over and presents it to you. And of course the poststructural critics now have a field day on all the colonialist and phallocratic prejudices inherent in the idea that writers were presenting alien cultures instead of “re-presenting” them—jabbering natives and randy concubines and white man’s burden, etc. Well, but fiction’s presenting function for today’s reader has been reversed: since the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate—satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon’s Zulu back-ups—it’s almost like we need fiction writers to restore strange things’ ineluctable strangeness, to defamiliarize stuff, I guess you’d say.
LM: But so far there aren’t many others who have written anything interesting about rock—Richard Meltzer, Peter Guralnik …
DFW: There’s some others. Lester Bangs. Todd Gitlin, who also does great TV essays.
His self-conscious embarrassment about the trip is reflected in a note on his office door: “D. F. Wallace is out of town on weird personal authorized emergencyish leave from 2/17/96 to 3/3/96 and from 3/5/96 to 3/10/96.”
Written over three years during which Wallace lived in Syracuse, New York, and Bloomington (he began teaching at ISU in the fall of 1993), Infinite Jest is a grandly conceived, dizzyingly executed, darkly comic vision of America’s not-so-distant future. The U.S., having turned much of New England into a toxic waste dump and ceded it to Canada, has evolved into the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N., with any lewd implications being intentional). The action hopscotches among several corporate-sponsored postmillennium years, which are identified not with numbers but labels such as the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland.
Wallace said that when he began writing Infinite Jest, he didn’t realize how large its scope would be. “I wanted to do a book that was sad,” he said. “That was really the only idea that was in my head.”
“When I was in my twenties, I thought I was really smart and really clever and that anybody would be privileged to read whatever I’d written,” he said. “It’s not that I’m entirely over that problem, but I think as one gets older, you begin to realize there needs to be some sort of payoff.” Wallace tried to bridge the gap between avant-garde fiction—too much of which he considers “hellaciously unfun to read”—and commercial escapism. So he’ll be frustrated if Infinite Jest succeeds Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time as books that decorate many a shelf without being read. “I wanted to do something that was really hard but was also really fun and made it worthwhile to spend the effort and the attention to read the thing,” he said.
MILLER: Are you trying to find similar meanings in the pop culture material you use? That sort of thing can be seen as merely clever, or shallow.
WALLACE: I’ve always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fighting with my professors about it in grad school. The world that I live in consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievably entertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporations that want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts on my nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leather patches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral. I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean by it is nothing different than what other people mean in writing about trees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water a hundred years ago. It’s just the texture of the world I live in.
WALLACE: OK. Historically the stuff that’s sort of rung my cherries: Socrates’s funeral oration, the poetry of John Donne, the poetry of Richard Crashaw, every once in a while Shakespeare, although not all that often, Keats’ shorter stuff, Schopenhauer, Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy and Discourse on Method, Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, although the translations are all terrible, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Hemingway—particularly the ital stuff in In Our Time, where you just go oomph!, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, A. S. Byatt, Cynthia Ozick—the stories, especially one called “Levitations,” about 25 percent of the time Pynchon. Donald Barthelme, especially a story called “The Balloon,” which is the first story I ever read that made me want to be a writer, Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver’s best stuff—the really famous stuff. Steinbeck when he’s not beating his drum, 35 percent of Stephen Crane, Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby. And, my God, there’s poetry. Probably Phillip Larkin more than anyone else, Louise Glück, Auden.
MILLER: What about colleagues?
WALLACE: There’s the whole “great white male” deal. I think there are about five of us under forty who are white and over six feet and wear glasses. There’s Richard Powers who lives only about forty-five minutes away from me and who I’ve met all of once. William Vollmann, Jonathan Franzen, Donald Antrim, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody. The person I’m highest on right now is George Saunders, whose book Civilwarland in Bad Decline just came out, and is well worth a great deal of attention. A. M. Homes: her longer stuff I don’t think is perfect, but every few pages there’s something that just doubles you over. Kathryn Harrison, Mary Karr, who’s best known for The Liar’s Club but is also a poet and I think the best female poet under fifty. A woman named Cris Mazza. Rikki Ducornet, Carole Maso. Carole Maso’s Ava is just—a friend of mine read it and said it gave him an erection of the heart.
Mary Karr, who last year became something of a famous writer herself with the publication of her grim childhood memoir The Liar’s Club, was Wallace’s snorkel to the atmosphere. They didn’t last, despite the heart-shaped tattoo on Wallace’s upper arm inscribed mary. It’s a gesture he now regrets, noting, “A tattoo-based relationship probably has fundamental problems.”
“Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There’s a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing’s kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there’s also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person. “When I was younger,” he goes on, “I saw my relationship with the reader as sort of a sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.”
When Wallace’s erudition starts to show, he seems to feel obliged to explain it, as if it were a broken leg. “I come from a weird background. My parents are academics, and they read a lot. And I read a lot,” he says, neglecting to mention that he also studied philosophy at Harvard. “So I come to writing from a pretty hard-core, abstract place. It comes out of technical philosophy and continental European theory, and extreme avant-garde shit. I’m not just talking Pynchon and Gaddis. That’s commercial avant-garde. I’m talking like Beckett, and Fiction Collective 2, and Dalkey Archive.” Suddenly, he slaps his forehead, swears, and makes the train noise again. “On the other hand,” he continues, “I’m somebody who can’t even own a TV anymore, because I’ll just sit there slack-jawed and consume enormous amounts of what is, in terms of art, absolute shit. But it’s very pleasurable shit.
Though I’m convinced that television today lies … behind a genuine crisis for U.S. culture and literature,” he writes in the lively, irreverent style that characterizes both his fiction and criticism, “I do not agree with reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes.
“My students don’t like to read,” acknowledged Wallace, who himself projects the air of a brainy, intense but good-humored grad student, in his rumpled jeans, wire-rimmed specs and uncooperative long hair. “They’ll say it’s boring, but what they really mean is that it’s too hard, the ratio of work to pleasure is too high.”
Q: I mean, when you have something like the oil rigs “bobbing fellatially” …
A: Yeah, except that’s exactly how it looks.
Q: That is exactly how they look, but it’s funny enough to … A: But that was another big fight, ’cause I originally had fellatically, which I thought sounded better and had more of a kind of harsh, glottal, fellatiatory sound, and then the copyeditor goes, “There’s no such word, we’ve got to say fellatially,” and I think that sounds like palatially, and I don’t like it, and so forty-eight hours is spent thumb-wrestling over this bullshit.
Q: How big does the big-shot treatment get? A: I remember giving a reading at a bookstore in Harvard Square. It was December of ’91, and Harper’s had this whole idea that they were going to put on these readings. The Harper’s PR person came to Boston, and I came and I gave a reading, and nobody showed up. There was a snowstorm, but the basic point is, nobody showed up. So me and the PR guy went out and ate, like, three pieces of cake each and apologized to each other for three hours. So, being used to that kind of stuff, giving a reading in New York and having some people not be able to get in is weird, and it makes you feel like you’re a big shot. Temporarily. The Sauron-like eye of the culture passes over you, like in Lord of the Rings. You’re old enough to know Lord of the Rings. A bitchingly good read, I think.
Q: Are there any nonfiction writers who’ve inspired your work?
A: Ever since I was in college, I’ve been an enormous fan of both Joan Didion and Pauline Kael. And, I don’t know … I think prosewise, Pauline Kael is unequaled. Maybe John McPhee, at his very best, is as good. I don’t know what influence they have, but in terms of just being a slobbering fan of … Frank Conroy’s first book, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life. Oh, God, there’s a book by a mathematician named Hardy at Oxford called A Mathematician’s Apology. Hardy gets mentioned in Good Will Hunting, by the way. Anyway. There are quite a few that are just really, really, really, really good. But I’d say Pauline Kael is the best. Annie Dillard’s really good, but she’s much more sort of restrained.
Wallace says he could have stayed with Howard at Norton, but “unfortunately, Norton did not authorize him to pay out advances sufficient to allow people to live,” so when Wallace had written half of Infinite Jest, Nadell sold the book to Michael Pietsch, at Little, Brown. Pietsch’s work on Infinite Jest is already widely celebrated. Wallace praises not just the laser-surgical feat of cutting “two or three hundred pages” from a novel full of microscopic subplots and cross-references, but Pietsch’s diplomacy as he shuttled between marketers, who worried over the novel’s size, and Wallace, whose “big hope was that two or three thousand people would read the book. “This wasn’t a matter of liking my editor. We don’t mix socially: I’m nervous around Michael; he’s an authority figure for me. But I feel like I know him, and I trust him, and that’s priceless.”
Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown, Michael Pietsch, has said he was initially intimidated by the sheer size of the novel. “I had no clue how the characters connected, except they were either doing drugs or playing tennis,” he admitted in one interview. Eventually Pietsch decided to turn the book’s length into a dare: “Have you finished David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan masterpiece?” A Little, Brown sales representative told me, “We put more effort and money behind marketing that book than we ever had before …and it paid off.”
“It’s a good book,” Wallace says, a little defensively. “But it’s a difficult long book and there’s no reason why it should have gotten that kind of attention. Much of the attention was hype attention rather than literary attention, and so it didn’t get to me all that much. The book is partly about hype and sort of the spiritual consequences of hype, and then the book itself became an object of hype. For a while I was amused by the irony, and then it just kind of made me feel empty.”
Back in the gift shop, Wallace says, “The thing to realize is how fast this will move across everybody’s brain but yours and mine. You’ll care about the story, and I’ll care about the story. Everybody else, like people in dentist offices…” He shakes his head but then thinks better of it. “That doesn’t mean you don’t have an obligation to the truth.” I thank him for the advice. The piece is supposed to be short. “How long?” A couple thousand words. “Oh, Christmas! Just take out all the articles.” We walk out into the parking lot, and Wallace puts his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be interested to see what you do with it.” He smiles. “Compression has never been my forte.”
Concision is not my strength.
SHECHNER: Whom do you read these days with pleasure? Who among your contemporaries is something that you would want the rest of us to read?
WALLACE: The answer, first of all, depends on how long you have, but to take a broad swipe, the three people who are at the top of the food chain just now are Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, and Cormac McCarthy, all of whom are either in their fifties or their sixties. People around my age whom I’m a big fan of include George Saunders, who writes for the New Yorker a lot, and Richard Powers—the way he can combine and transfigure data is just incredible—Joanna Scott [whom I remind Wallace lives nearby in Rochester], Denis Johnson, though more of his earlier work in poetry than the later work that is getting so much attention now. There is a San Francisco writer named William T. Vollmann, who is very prolific. He has a book of stories called The Rainbow Stories that will raise hair on parts of your body that don’t have hair.
SHECHNER: I had read before that you were a fan of Cynthia Ozick’s. That is surprising to me; you seem so different.
WALLACE: We’re both politically active Jewish females. I don’t see the problem. [Laughter on both sides.] When I was in high school I read a lot of Malamud, because that is what my parents had around, and afterward I read Ozick, including some Ozick that is written in the margins of Malamud, and it blew the top of my skull off. I think Ozick is an immortally good pure prose writer, but I think it is also the fact that I’m about the goyist gentile anybody’s ever met, and I can feel in my nerve endings the kind of stuff she is writing about. In reading her I feel an utter erasure of difference, which does not happen to me with a lot of other writers from different cultural backgrounds. I can appreciate the peering across the chasm at another culture, but with Ozick that chasm just vanishes. Her Bloodshed and Three Novellas, if you haven’t read it, is fine.
IDEAS: A few years ago, you reviewed two novels about math for the magazine Science and took them to task for not having thought through who their audience was.
WALLACE: They were really dreadful books. One of them would take time to define very simple stuff like addition but would then throw around really high-level math terms.
IDEAS: The Greek epigraph to Everything and More—where’s it from?
WALLACE: It’s made up. “It is not what’s inside your head, it’s what your head’s inside.” It’s a gag. I think the editor thought it was some really esoteric ancient Greek. I got a big kick out of it. It was a big deal to get him to get the diacriticals right.
PAULSON: I want to start by talking about one particular story, “The Soul Is Not a Smithy.” How would you describe this story?
WALLACE: As longer than I intended it to be? A little kid with attention problems in school is not attending on a very dramatic day for him, where his teacher kind of has a psychotic breakdown.
PAULSON: His substitute teacher starts writing “Kill Them” over and over on the blackboard, and then when these kids in the fourth grade start realizing what he’s doing—that he’s basically lost his marbles—they panic.
WALLACE: Yes.
PAULSON: But your narrator who is reflecting back on that time, his mind was actually elsewhere because he had been staring out the window watching other strange stuff.
WALLACE: Yeah, it’s weird because the narrator is partly narrating as a child and partly as an adult. But mainly his big concern is how boring and meaningless his life has been and how he’s missed the one really dramatic thing that ever happened to him. It’s actually more interesting than that—I’m not making it sound very …
PAULSON: It’s actually a fascinating story, and I think fascinating partly because it takes a turn somewhere else, really near the end, and it becomes about a child’s fear of the adult world and what seems to be this boy’s fear of becoming like his own father, who is an insurance actuary. I wonder if you could read a passage from the story, I’m thinking maybe starting around page 103 or so.
WALLACE: So I should start now?
PAULSON: Yes. [Wallace reads a section from pages 103–6 of Oblivion, beginning “For my own part …” and ending “… dreamed in the real world.”]
PAULSON: Did you have that kind of dread when you were a kid?
WALLACE: I think that in a country where we have it as easy as we do, one of our big dread vectors is boredom. I think little edges of despair and soul-level boredom appear in things like homework or particularly dry classroom stuff. I can remember the incredible soaring relief when certain teachers said we were going to watch a movie in grade school. And it wasn’t just a hedonistic “oh-we’re-going-to-have-fun.” It was a relief from some kind of terrible burden, I thought. So, I don’t know. Maybe.
Because you want your art to be hip and seem cool to people, you want people to like the stuff, but a great deal of what passes for hip or cool is now highly, highly commercially driven. And some of it is important art. I think The Simpsons is important art. On the other hand, it’s also—in my opinion—relentlessly corrosive to the soul, and everything is parodied, and everything’s ridiculous. Maybe I’m old, but for my part I can be steeped in about an hour of it, and I sort of have to walk away and look at a flower or something. If there’s something to be talked about, that thing is this weird conflict between what my girlfriend calls the “inner sap”—the part of us that can really wholeheartedly weep at stuff—and the part of us that has to live in a world of smart, jaded, sophisticated people and wants very much to be taken seriously by those people. I don’t know that it’s that irony tyrannizes us, but the fashions that are so easy to criticize but are so incredibly powerful and authentic-seeming when we’re inside them, tyrannize us. I don’t know that it’s ever been any different. That probably makes absolutely no sense. That was my experiment at telling the truth.
JACOB: How would you summarize your entire life, from birth to the summer of 2005?
WALLACE: Taken literally, this question is impossible to answer. My best guess is that the question is meant to be humorous, or to set up the respondent to say something funny or piquant in answer. Unfortunately, whenever I feel pressure to say something funny or piquant, my mind fills with the same roaring static as an off-air TV channel, and I can think of nothing to say. This is just one reason why I am not a very good subject for an interview.
Regarding your example: For complicated reasons that I won’t bore you with, I am not very interested in Hunter S. Thompson. In brief, he seems to me to be far more interested in developing himself as a charismatic persona and as a heroic symbol of decadent nihilism and rage than he is in writing honest or powerful nonfiction. His book on the Hell’s Angels is an exception, but most of his work bores me; it seems naive and narcissistic. Maybe this will annoy your readers; maybe Thompson is an icon in France (like J. Lewis?). If so, I can assure you that I do not pretend to speak for all American readers … but I personally find a great deal more pleasure and value in the “works and ideas” of nonfiction writers like Swift, Montaigne, Lamb, Orwell, Baldwin, Dillard, and Ozick than in those of Hunter Thompson or Tom Wolfe. I do, however, have intelligent, discerning friends who disagree with me: De gustibus non est disputandum
JACOB: A tennis player can dream of having Agassi’s legs, Connor’s spirit, or McEnroe’s vocabulary, and so on. As a writer, what parts of another writer’s work would you dream of being able to borrow—the rhythms of Don DeLillo, for example? Russell Banks’s characters? Pynchon’s titles
WALLACE: I would have been better at answering this question in my twenties, when there was very little difference between my admiring some writer’s particular ability and my wishing to appropriate that ability for myself. I notice this same tendency in students and younger writers—many of them spend a lot of time imitating writers they admire, and they are often not even aware that what they’re doing is an imitation, because when you’re young your sense of yourself is fluid and the possibilities seem infinite. For myself, as I get older and see myself more clearly (at least I think I do), I have come to accept that there are certain things I do quite well and others I don’t do well … and still other things that it would be absurd for me to try. Examples: I admire Cormac McCarthy’s ability to use antiquated, ornate English in ways that don’t seem silly or stilted, but I have no illusion that I could do the same. I admire the conciseness and lucidity of DeLillo and Ozick, but I have accepted the fact that I will never be very lucid or concise in my own work. As far as I can see, at age forty-three, those vestiges of envy and desire for appropriation that survive in me have to do with larger, more amorphous qualities. The abilities of writers like St. Paul, Rousseau, Dostoevsky, and Camus to render so fully, passionately, the spiritual urgencies they felt as, saw as reality continue to fill me with an awe that is almost despair: To be able to be such a person! But what are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.
Obama is an orator, for one thing—a rhetorician of the old school. To me, that seems more classically populist than McCain, who’s not a good speech-maker and whose great strengths are Q&As and small-group press confabs. But there’s a bigger [reason]. The truth—as I see it—is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism, and contempt for the electorate that it’s very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.
He was the greatest writer of his generation—and also its most tormented. In the wake of his tragic suicide, his friends and family reveal the lifelong struggle of a beautiful mind. He was six-feet-two, and on a good day he weighed two hundred pounds. He wore granny glasses with a head scarf, points knotted at the back, a look that was both pirate-like and housewife-ish. He always wore his hair long. He had dark eyes, soft voice, caveman chin, a lovely, peak-lipped mouth that was his best feature. He walked with an ex-athlete’s saunter, a roll from the heels, as if anything physical was a pleasure. David Foster Wallace worked surprising turns on nearly everything: novels, journalism, vacation. His life was an information hunt, collecting hows and whys. “I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today,” he once said, “of which maybe twenty-five are important. My job is to make some sense of it.” He wanted to write “stuff about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief from what it feels like to live.” Readers curled up in the nooks and clearings of his style: his comedy, his brilliance, his humaneness.
He was clinically depressed for decades, information he limited to family and his closest friends. “I don’t think that he ever lost the feeling that there was something shameful about this,” his father says. “His instinct was to hide it.” After he died on September 12, readers crowded the Web with tributes to his generosity, his intelligence. “But he wasn’t Saint Dave,” says Jonathan Franzen, Wallace’s best friend and the author of The Corrections. “This is the paradox of Dave: The closer you get, the darker the picture, but the more genuinely lovable he was. It was only when you knew him better that you had a true appreciation of what a heroic struggle it was for him not merely to get along in the world, but to produce wonderful writing.”
By the time he was fourteen, he felt he could have made nationals. “Really be in the junior show. But just at the point it became important to me, I began to choke. The more scared you get, the worse you play.” Plus it was the seventies—Pink Floyd, bongs. “I started to smoke a lot of pot when I was fifteen or sixteen, and it’s hard to train.” He laughed. “You don’t have that much energy.” It was around this time that the Wallaces noticed something strange about David. He would voice surprising requests, like wanting to paint his bedroom black. He was constantly angry at his sister. When he was sixteen, he refused to go to her birthday party. “Why would I want to celebrate her birthday?” he told his parents. “David began to have anxiety attacks in high school,” his father recalls. “I noticed the symptoms, but I was just so unsophisticated about these matters. The depression seemed to take the form of an evil spirit that just haunted David.” Sally came to call it the “black hole with teeth.” David withdrew. “He spent a lot of time throwing up junior year,” his sister remembers. One wall of his bedroom was lined with cork, for magazine photos of tennis stars. David pinned an article about Kafka to the wall, with the headline THE DISEASE WAS LIFE ITSELF. “I hated seeing those words,” his sister tells me, and starts to cry. “They seemed to sum up his existence. We couldn’t understand why he was acting the way he was, and so of course my parents were exasperated, lovingly exasperated.”
In 1984, Costello left for Yale Law School; Wallace was alone senior year. He double-majored—English and philosophy, which meant two big writing projects. In philosophy, he took on modal logic. “It looked really hard, and I was really scared about it,” he said. “So I thought I’d do this kind of jaunty, hundred-page novel.” He wrote it in five months, and it clocked in at seven hundred pages. He called it The Broom of the System. Wallace published stories in the Amherst literary magazine. One was about depression and a tricyclic anti-anxiety medication he had been on for two months. The medication “made me feel like I was stoned and in hell,” he told me. The story dealt with the in-hell parts: You are the sickness yourself … You realize all this … when you look at the black hole and it’s wearing your face. That’s when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they’re “severely depressed;” we say, “Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!” That’s wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. … When they “commit suicide,” they’re just being orderly.
“He could get himself into places where he was pretty helpless,” Costello says. “Basically it was the same symptoms all along: this incredible sense of inadequacy, panic. He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the babble in his head. He said when you’re writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices. The ones that are saying, ‘You’re not good enough, you’re a fraud.’”
Wallace spent eight days in McLean. He was diagnosed as a clinical depressive and was prescribed a drug, called Nardil, developed in the 1950s. He would have to take it from then on. “We had a brief, maybe three-minute audience with the psychopharmacologist,” his mother says. Wallace would have to quit drinking, and there was a long list of foods—certain cheeses, pickles, cured meats—he would have to stay away from. He started to clean up. He found a way to get sober, worked very hard at it, and wouldn’t drink for the rest of his life. Girl with Curious Hair finally appeared in 1989. Wallace gave a reading in Cambridge; thirteen people showed up, including a schizophrenic woman who shrieked all the way through his performance. “The book’s coming out seemed like a kind of shrill, jagged laugh from the universe, this thing sort of lingering behind me like a really nasty fart.”
Wallace met Jonathan Franzen in the most natural way for an author: as a fan. He sent Franzen a nice letter about his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City. Franzen wrote back, they arranged to meet in Cambridge. “He just flaked,” Franzen recalls. “He didn’t show up. That was a fairly substance-filled period of his life.” By April of 1992, both were ready for a change. They loaded Franzen’s car and headed for Syracuse to scout apartments. Franzen needed “somewhere to relocate with my wife where we could both afford to live and not have anyone tell us how screwed up our marriage was.” Wallace’s need was simpler: cheap space, for writing. He had been researching for months, haunting rehab facilities and halfway houses, taking quiet note of voices and stories, people who had fallen into the gaps like him. “I got very assertive research- and finagle-wise,” he said. “I spent hundreds of hours at three halfway houses. It turned out you could just sit in the living room—nobody is as gregarious as somebody who has recently stopped using drugs.”
He and Franzen talked a lot about what writing should be for. “We had this feeling that fiction ought to be good for something,” Franzen says. “Basically, we decided it was to combat loneliness.”
His romantic anxieties were full-spectrum, every bit of the mechanics individually examined. He told me a joke: What does a writer say after sex? Was it as good for me as it was for you?
Wallace met Karen Green a few months after moving to Claremont. Green, a painter, admired David’s work. It was a sort of artistic exchange, an interdisciplinary blind date. “She wanted to do some paintings based on some of David’s stories,” his mother says. “They had a mutual friend, and she thought she would ask permission.”
According to Wallace’s family and friends, the last six years—until the final one—were the best of his life. The marriage was happy, university life good, Karen and David had two dogs, Warner and Bella, they bought a lovely house. “Dave in a real house,” Franzen says, laughing, “with real furniture and real style.”
Because Wallace was secure, he began to talk about going off Nardil, the antidepressant he had taken for nearly two decades. The drug had a long list of side effects, including the potential of very high blood pressure. “It had been a fixture of my morbid fear about Dave—that he would not last all that long, with the wear and tear on his heart,” Franzen says. “I worried that I was going to lose him in his early fifties.” Costello said that Wallace complained the drug made him feel “filtered.” “He said, ‘I don’t want to be on this stuff for the rest of my life.’ He wanted to be more a member of the human race.”
In June of 2007, Wallace and Green were at an Indian restaurant with David’s parents in Claremont. David suddenly felt very sick—intense stomach pains. They stayed with him for days. When he went to doctors, he was told that something he’d eaten might have interacted with the Nardil. They suggested he try going off the drug and seeing if another approach might work.
“So at that point,” says his sister Amy, with an edge in her voice, “it was determined, ‘Oh, well, gosh, we’ve made so much pharmaceutical progress in the last two decades that I’m sure we can find something that can knock out that pesky depression without all these side effects.’ They had no idea that it was the only thing that was keeping him alive.” Wallace would have to taper off the old drug and then taper on to a new one. “He knew it was going to be rough,” says Franzen. “But he was feeling like he could finally afford a year to do the job. He figured that he was going to go on to something else, at least temporarily. He was a perfectionist, you know? He wanted to be perfect, and taking Nardil was not perfect.”
That summer, David began to phase out the Nardil. His doctors began prescribing other medications, none of which seemed to help. “They could find nothing,” his mother says softly. “Nothing.” In September, David asked Amy to forgo her annual fall-break visit. He wasn’t up to it. By October, his symptoms had become bad enough to send him to the hospital. His parents didn’t know what to do. “I started worrying about that,” Sally says, “but then it seemed OK.” He began to drop weight. By that fall, he looked like a college kid again: longish hair, eyes intense, as if he had just stepped out of an Amherst classroom. When Amy talked to him on the phone, “sometimes he was his old self,” she says. “The worst question you could ask David in the last year was ‘how are you?’ And it’s almost impossible to have a conversation with someone you don’t see regularly without that question.” Wallace was very honest with her. He’d answer, “I’m not all right. I’m trying to be, but I’m not all right.”
In early May, at the end of the school year, he sat down with some graduating seniors from his fiction class at a nearby cafe. Wallace answered their jittery writer’s-future questions. “He got choked up at the end,” recalls Bennett Sims, one of his students. “He started to tell us how much he would miss us, and he began to cry. And because I had never seen Dave cry, I thought he was just joking. Then, awfully, he sniffled and said, ‘Go ahead and laugh—here I am crying—but I really am going to miss all of you.’”
His parents were scheduled to visit the next month. In June, when Sally spoke with her son, he said, “I can’t wait, it’ll be wonderful, we’ll have big fun.” The next day, he called and said, “Mom, I have two favors to ask you. Would you please not come?” She said OK. Then Wallace asked, “Would your feelings not be hurt?”
No medications had worked; the depression wouldn’t lift. “After this year of absolute hell for David,” Sally says, “they decided to go back to the Nardil.” The doctors also administered twelve courses of electroconvulsive therapy, waiting for Wallace’s medication to become effective. “Twelve,” Sally repeats. “Such brutal treatments,” Jim says. “It was clear then things were bad.” Wallace had always been terrified of shock therapy. “It scares the shit out of me,” he told me in 1996. “My brain’s what I’ve got. But I could see that at a certain point, you might beg for it.”
Franzen spent a week with Wallace in July. David had dropped seventy pounds in a year. “He was thinner than I’d ever seen him. There was a look in his eyes: terrified, terribly sad, and far away. Still, he was fun to be with, even at 10 percent strength.” Franzen would sit with Wallace in the living room and play with the dogs, or step outside with David while he smoked a cigarette. “We argued about stuff. He was doing his usual line about, ‘A dog’s mouth is practically a disinfectant, it’s so clean. Not like human saliva, dog saliva is marvelously germ-resistant.’” Before he left, Wallace thanked him for coming. “I felt grateful that he allowed me to be there,” Franzen says. Six weeks later, Wallace asked his parents to come to California. The Nardil wasn’t working. It can happen…
“He didn’t want anyone to see him the way he was,” his father says. “It was just awful to see. If a student saw him, they would have put their arms around him and hugged him, I’m sure.” His parents stayed for ten days. “He was just desperate,” his mother says. “He was afraid it wasn’t ever going to work. He was suffering. We just kept holding him, saying if he could just hang on, it would straighten. He was very brave for a very long time.” Wallace and his parents would get up at six in the morning and walk the dogs. They watched DVDs of The Wire, talked. Sally cooked David’s favorite dishes, heavy comfort foods—pot pies, casseroles, strawberries in cream. “We kept telling him we were so glad he was alive,” his mother recalls. “But my feeling is that, even then, he was leaving the planet. He…
At the end of August, Franzen called. All summer long he had been telling David that as bad as things were, they were going to be better, and then he’d be better than he’d ever been. David would say, “Keep talking like that—it’s helping.” But this time it wasn’t helping. “He was far away,” Franzen says. A few weeks later, Karen left David alone with the dogs for a few hours. When she came home that night, he had hanged himself. “I can’t get the image out of my head,”…