Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

CHAPTER 3. “Westward!”

During his senior year Wallace applied to creative writing programs. It never occurred to him that he could just go somewhere and write: he came from academia and believed in the classroom. Moreover, he knew with his shaky mental state that he needed health insurance, and to get health insurance you needed a job, and the only job a writer could do was to teach, and to teach you needed an MFA.

He sent out a chapter from Broom along with his stellar transcript and his long list of prizes. He was accepted at several programs, among them the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the writing program at the University of Arizona. Iowa was the most prestigious school in the country — Wallace was keenly alert to this, telling Costello it was the “Harvard Law of MFAs”—but it was also the center of the sort of realist fiction that interested him least.¹ In contrast, Arizona sent him a tempting letter. “Instead of the ‘guru’ system (which tends to foster a ‘school’ of writing, and a tendency of the student to write for or like one master),” the director, Mary Carter, wrote, “we encourage diversity.” In other words, at Arizona Wallace wouldn’t have to come out writing like John Cheever, as he would almost anywhere else; he could follow his own voice. The program, though small, had a national reputation and the offer of admission came with an $8,000 scholarship. When the Iowa Workshop told Wallace he would have to pay full tuition, the deal was done. He wrote the Workshop with the news. “I don’t have any money and need to go where I can get some financial aid,” he reminded them pointedly. McLagan told him he was lucky to be heading west. The desert was beautiful, the girls extraordinary. At his Amherst graduation Wallace received several more academic prizes, bringing his total awards to ten, likely an Amherst record.

Wallace arrived in Tucson in mid-August. Arizona’s beauty was revelatory to him. The light was different, the dunelike mountains “lunar.” “They,” he told his college friends in an audio letter they sent to one another that fall, “catch the sun in really pretty ways, really interesting ways.” “Accidents in Tucson,” he continued, “are basically people hypnotized by the sun, looking out through the screen.” He thought he could be happy there, amid the browned-out lawns and the cactus-dotted foothills.

He was ready for a fresh start. Earlier that year, he and Perkins had finally ended their relationship. At first Wallace found the breakup a relief, but then waves of guilt followed. He saw that his behavior at Amherst had ruined the relationship with the woman who had stuck by him at his lowest point.

In early summer, he decided to drive back to Amherst from Urbana and pick up Corey Washington, who was planning a visit, and by the time he did he was in a quiet crisis. Like Rick Vigorous in Broom, his imagination had begun to run away with him. Perkins was in Urbana too and the nearness tormented him. What was she doing? he would ask, Washington remembers. Whose car was now in her driveway? Wallace imagined her sleeping with other men. The predicament he was thrown into was not unlike the one brought about by his mother after his first breakdown at Amherst: it came from the same sense, justified or not, that someone on whom he had deeply relied, had betrayed him. They had committed the crime of remaking his reality. Wallace held so fast to his sparse emotional certainties that when they proved unstable, the impact was crushing. Then unleashed feelings of hurt and confusion would go round and round, bending in on themselves, mixing with guilt, until his brain reached a point of exhaustion.

Washington saw his friend withdraw. Wallace spoke softly and soberly, without humor. They watched hours of television together, Wallace seeming to gain comfort from the TV; his friend held his hand and tried to maintain contact with him. Offstage there were conversations between Wallace’s parents about what to do. To Washington they seemed surprisingly unsurprised, but then they had been down this road twice before in the past few years. After two days, they took their son to a local hospital, apologizing deeply to Washington, who took a bus home to Amherst.

Wallace stayed at the psychiatric unit at Carle Hospital for several weeks. The doctors likely considered the possibility that he suffered from bipolar disorder, manic depression. That he was crashing after an enormously productive spring would lend credence to that diagnosis, but they decided instead to give him Nardil, a MAO inhibitor often used to treat atypical depression. Atypical depression — its key characteristics are unusual sensitivity to social rejection and a quick return to mental health when circumstances improve — was a more welcome diagnosis in Wallace’s eyes. It seemed less a sentence of insanity than the medical acknowledgment of a condition he was already dealing with. But Nardil — Wallace described the pills in a story he wrote in Arizona as “look[ing] just like the tiny round Red Hots we’d all eaten as children”—was an older antidepressant, a 1960s and ’70s staple that came with many dietary prohibitions. He would no longer be able to eat chocolate or drink coffee, nor should he drink alcohol or take drugs. Smoky cheeses and hot dogs were also out, and he was supposed to avoid aged or fermented food in general, as well as liver. If he slipped up, the result would be fierce headaches and potentially dangerous spikes in blood pressure.

The Nardil helped Wallace quickly. By August he was out of the hospital and on a kind of high. On his way to his new school he stopped in Los Angeles to see a young woman he’d been close to at Amherst. Back in college, Wallace had begun a relationship with Andrea Justus, a fine arts major. Justus admired Wallace, by then a storied figure at the college. (In her circle he bore the nickname “the smart guy.”) She had approached him to help her with the language in her thesis, which was about gesture in art. Quickly they became friends. When Justus was given a B-plus by the art history department, Wallace marched into her professor’s office to ask why she hadn’t gotten an A. With Perkins far away, Wallace got more deeply involved with Justus. She loved his talk and his intense gaze — he commented on an eyelash she had pointing off to the side that no one had ever noticed before. The story he told of how he had taken a semester off to cope with the suicide of his best friend particularly moved her. When Justus invited Wallace to stop in California on his way to Tucson, Wallace accepted. In August he came to Los Angeles. Soon after he got to her home in Fullerton, a town in Orange County, Sally Wallace called to tell his friend’s mother that her son was on a powerful antidepressant and had to be careful around certain foods.

What Wallace knew about Southern California came mostly from books, including The Crying of Lot 49, where the fictional city of San Narciso is described as “a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth.” But Wallace was in an upbeat mood and loved the area. “A real blast,” he wrote Washington. Even better was the coastal city of Newport Beach, a “revoltingly tacky and ritzy Venice-like town.” In his gloomier moments, this was the sort of environment he couldn’t tolerate, but the world appeared cheerful and well to him now. The couple went to a party where a small boat took them out and putt-putted around the bay past John Wayne’s house. They spent a night at the Hotel Laguna in Laguna Beach too, and Wallace overcame his fear of sharks enough to go in the ocean for only the second time in his life. This again may have been a tribute to the confidence and the sense of wellness the successful drug treatment was giving him. Justus’s mother was generous and indulgent, not unlike his own. When he did not want to be sociable, he passed the time in his friend’s bedroom, the lights off and the shades down, listening to Squeeze and INXS. He was still adjusting to the antidepressant, which tended to bring him morning highs and afternoon tiredness. (Justus’s father, a physician, was unsurprised to find Wallace asleep in the car while they were touring Los Angeles.) That summer wildfires burned in the region, sending up huge plumes of smoke, and Wallace wrote to Costello how amazed he was to see rich Angelenos walking on the beach admiring the sunset, as the world burned.

After his visit, Wallace drove the eight hours to Tucson with Justus, ready to move into his graduate housing. She had friends in the city and they were having so much fun she thought about moving there too, a proposition that set off warning bells for Wallace. “I’m not ready or able for anything as serious as a Susie situation,” he wrote Washington, “and couldn’t have the obligation of [Andrea’s] being in town because of me.” There were other considerations too. “Most of the girls here are just incredibly beautiful, like a 10,000 member class of ’88,” he wrote. Happily, it turned out Justus was no more serious than he was. “She’s breathtakingly level-headed (Salingerian trope),” Wallace reported, “and so having her here on the sort of level we’ve established would be terrific for me.”

Justus was intrigued by her friend’s impracticality. She helped him to take the money he routinely kept in his sock drawer and open a bank account with it. They visited his future apartment, which he was supposed to share with a student in optical sciences, and found the walls painted “a kind of urine-yellow” and the whole smelling, as Wallace told his friends in his audio letter, of, “in descending order, Lysol, another kind of air freshener, very, very, very old semen and again, urine.” Justus urged him to find someplace else, reminding him he was an adult now. (Wallace to Washington: “Perhaps only half true.”) With the deposit he got back, the two went house hunting. Soon Wallace found a small apartment on North Cherry Avenue, a shabby district a few blocks from the campus. The complex looked like an overgrown Motel-6 and was mostly parking lot, an unattractive part of an unattractive city, “replete with poisonous spiders and dead grass, gravel, violent crime,” as he later wrote Professor Kennick at Amherst.

But Wallace was content. He had a young woman near but not too near and a place to write. His apartment consisted of two rooms and a kitchen and, as when he lived with Costello sophomore year, a view of a Dumpster. “It’s a good dumpster,” he reported to his friends. “It’s painted white. It’s about as large as a small truck. It gives off a fairly powerful odor when the wind is from the north.”² He set himself up, Smith-Corona on the desk, towels spread out everywhere. Outside was a pool and lots of palm trees. “Their trunks,” he told his friends, “tend to be kind of meaty. And their fronds — they’re not called leaves; if you call them leaves people cock their eyebrows at you — the fronds tend to occupy angles that are sort of Lovecraftian. They don’t quite match up to any known laws.” The black widow spiders everywhere in Tucson excited his imagination too. “You use a propane torch to fry them in their webs and hope their grieving mates don’t fall on your head from the palm trees above,” he claimed.³

What made the room best of all was that he was soon writing in it. He could work hours without breaks, smoking heavily — he began the habit senior year of college — writing longhand on sheets of yellow paper or in notebooks. The notebooks also functioned, as he wrote in a story from that period, for “trapping little inspirations before they could get away.” He found that he could write not just in his little apartment but anywhere — in the smoking room of the library, on a bench, in a café. And he did not need fiction workshops or input from teachers to get him going; he was just exploding with words. One story he focused on was “Forever Overhead,” the tale of a thirteen-year-old boy who stands atop a high-dive board on his birthday and contemplates his imminent leap into maturity. The boy wants both to turn back and to get in the pool. Frozen atop the tower, he certainly experiences anxieties familiar to Wallace. “You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking,” the narrator notes. Wallace uses the boy’s moment of doubt to encapsulate the ambivalence he felt about his own passage from childhood to his teen years (or perhaps the perils of writing). In the end the boy will dive, as he must. “The board will nod and you will go,” the narrator intones, “and eyes of skin can cross blind into a cloud-botched sky that is forever, punctured light emptying behind sharp skin that is forever. Step into the skin and disappear.” The story was not typical of the writing Wallace was becoming interested in — it would soon seem to him sentimental and overblown — but in his early days in Arizona he was happy with how easily everything came to him.⁴

School began soon after he arrived. Among the seven thousand graduate enrollees at the University of Arizona, the students in the writing program were a miniscule contingent, comparable to Wallace’s small band of friends at Amherst. They rented houses together, ate together, drank together, dated each other, and read and commented on one another’s stories. The symbolic hub of their world was a pretty adobe building called the Poetry Center, but most of the work was done in the ugly, newish Modern Languages Building. The program was run by Carter, a novelist of uncertain age.⁵ She had been famous for standing at her office desk, writing and smoking, but by the time Wallace arrived she had given up smoking — and so stopped writing. Competitiveness and not a little jealousy laced the air of the program, though Wallace at first either did not notice or did not care. “I love it here, Corey,” he wrote his friend Washington shortly after arriving. “The place, the weather, the school, the girls, the students in the program, the girls, the professors, etc. I will be here for the next three years at least.”

Most MFA students looked on writing as a calling unto itself. They took a few literature classes to satisfy the requirement for their degree. But Wallace was still interested in the ideas behind fiction, so he signed up his first semester for a class on the history of the English language, which prompted an attempt to write a story in Old English, and another class on literary theory that focused on Derrida’s Of Grammatology. The course was a cinch for Wallace, who was familiar with much of the reading list from Amherst, if not from before. He wrote his old theory professor and friend Andrew Parker about how much he enjoyed grappling with difficult texts again and asked his Arizona literary theory professor if he should reread Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, a book that criticized attempts to turn the study of literature into a science. The professor assured him once was enough. He wasn’t sure if the question had been serious or not or a bit of both. All he knew for sure was that Wallace was far and away his best student.

The fiction survey was taught by a visiting professor, Richard Elman, a veteran novelist, essayist and teacher. One time he invited students in his class to read their stories and then fell asleep in his chair, snoring loudly. But he was intelligent, well-read, and closer than anyone else Wallace knew to New York and publishers, so of interest to the ambitious young Wallace. They would gossip, play tennis, and in his class Wallace read for the first time Gilbert Sorrentino, whose precise, almost analytic evocations of childhood in Aberration of Starlight felt like something he might like to try.

Wallace was not a tentative freshman anymore. He had matured, if not emotionally, then at least socially, and graduate programs, familiar to him from his childhood, were easier for him to navigate than undergraduate life at a preppy school. He knew where the levers of academic control were and how to work them. But he still he had no gift when it came to human interactions. His default mode was to show off in a way that struck others as less than nice. “How well do you know Pynchon’s work?” he would ask when he met a fellow student. “Excuse me,” he said, overhearing a fellow student say “nauseous” when she meant “nauseated.” “My mother’s an English teacher and I have to tell you the way you’re using that word is wrong.” (He would tell an interviewer in 1999 about this time, “I was a prick.”)

Yet his cockiness was always muted by politeness and even graciousness. All teachers were “Professor”; anyone even slightly older than he was “Mr.” or “Ms.” His decorousness bordered at times on parody. “What I came to believe over time,” remembers the novelist Robert Boswell, who was teaching as an adjunct in the program when Wallace arrived, “was that it was both affected and genuine in some way.” And Wallace was gentler on paper, where he was more secure, than verbally. In workshops his written comments on his fellow students’ papers were as generous as his spoken comments could be spiky. He had a way of seeing the promise in stories. “Don’t get me wrong: I like this,” he wrote on the last page of one fellow student’s story, “too much to have you put it away as ‘perfect.’” He drew a large happy face below his signature, a huge pair of eyes, a long descending line for the nose. With his friends, he would often tell them to ignore the negative comments by their teachers and go with what they thought was right.

Wallace made most of his friendships with other students from the Midwest. They tended to be simpler to read and embodied the culture of forthrightness he’d grown up with. In Elman’s class, he grew close to Heather Aronson, who was from Iowa, and Forrest Ashby, from St. Louis. Wallace tried to make friends with them in his usual way by asking how they could call themselves fiction writers without having read Derrida, but they got past this. Ashby, who was athletic, played tennis with Wallace and was astounded by his skills. One day when Aronson was frightened by black widows in her house, Wallace came to the rescue with goggles and a blowtorch. When they all got together, the other two loved Wallace’s talk and were saddened by his story about the suicide of a friend in college that had led to his taking a year off.

He mined them for material, as he did everyone. Ashby told him a story about having kissed the feet of his newborn sister because he had mumps. Soon it appeared in “Forever Overhead,” along with the “very soft yellow blanket” of Ashby’s childhood.⁶ The same night, as the three were watching Kansas City and St. Louis clinch spots in the World Series, Wallace quietly stiffened their gin and tonics. How had they lost their virginity? he asked them. He claimed to have excellent “gaydar”; then was astonished to learn Ashby was gay.

Wallace had by now realized that the “perfectly symmetrical” undergraduate beauties at Arizona were not going to be interested in him. In his grandfather’s old long-sleeved T-shirts, lace-up Timberland boots, and McLagan’s beloved leather jacket, he hardly fit the relaxed and sunny Arizona mold. So he turned his attention to the women in the MFA program. “The girls in the writing program are erotic in a different way,” he reported to his Amherst friends. “There’s a propensity towards sandals. Long hair. Armpits make the acquaintance of shavers not quite as often as I’d prefer.” He allowed, though, that “there’s a kind of mystical, dreamy, spacey eroticism about them.”

At a “Fuck Art. Let’s Dance” party that fall, Wallace met Gale Walden, a young poet. She came from the Chicago area and embodied everything his parents in their house of reason were skeptical of. Her thinking was elliptical and imaginative and seemed to hold the promise of a less anxious relationship to reality. She consulted the horoscope, drew tarot cards, and wore vintage beaded sweaters in the Arizona heat.

Walden’s independence and disheveled appeal attracted Wallace. (“Sloppy sexiness pulls Erdedy in like a well-groomed moth to a lit window,” Wallace writes of one of his characters in Infinite Jest.) Walden also knew a great deal of poetry of the sort he had never considered, not Eliot’s poetry of ideas, but of sensibility. She called him “David” instead of “Dave.” He helped with her grammar and taught her history.

Walden wasn’t sure about getting involved with Wallace. Four years older, she found him immature, “almost as if he chirped rather than talked,” she remembered. She would go around asking her friends, “Shall I date this boy?” Wallace tried to help her make up her mind. He peppered her with letters, popped out of bushes to surprise her, and wrote her a condolence note when her dog died. The note persuaded her to go to a movie with him, and when that turned out to be sold out, they went to a coffee shop, where Wallace was able to persuade her with his brilliant mind.

Soon they were a couple, well known in the program — he the left-brained genius, she the right-brained beauty. They agreed she wouldn’t have to play tennis and he wouldn’t have to dance. They split their age difference: he would say he was two years older; she would be two years younger. That way when they talked of the future, Walden remembers, they could say, “When we are thirty…” He went along to her poetry classes. One evening Wallace dropped by his old friend Andrea Justus’s house to borrow her car and wound up taking her to a favorite spot in the mountains, where, as they sat on the hood looking at the twinkling city below, he put her levelheadedness to the test by telling her about the remarkable, beautiful, and talented woman he was now dating. (Justus was annoyed.) For Wallace, Walden was a new kind of girlfriend: he had until now gravitated toward women who could ground him, save him, if necessary. Now he had found a muse, a spur to his creativity. He let Costello know he had met an epochal beauty.

Wallace had been able to be himself with Susie Perkins, a hometown girl, but with Walden he felt the need to pretend, not hard given his natural bent for mystery and secrecy. She liked musicians, so he played her an album by the esteemed Amherst a cappella group the Zumbyes, and claimed he was one of the voices on the recording. Then he had to get his Amherst friends to cover for him.⁷ There was a mythopoeic, volatile quality to their relationship. One time Walden demanded he find her a bun with no burger. Wallace disappeared and came back two hours later with a story about having had a fight with a McDonald’s counterman.

But mostly, once again, Wallace was writing. He was starting new stories and reworking old ones. The work was coming quickly and easily. He would look up and hours would have passed. He was evolving into a different kind of writer. The change was gradual and never involved entirely abandoning his interest in words and play and how we know what we know about the world, the material of Broom, but it took a new direction. Spurred by his readings in literary theory, he was trying to grow beyond such self-referential questions, to answer the question of how to write in a new way.

Trying to write in a new way was not a goal unique to Wallace; it is the exemplary act of each new literary generation. For writers from the 1920s to the 1950s the main route had been modernism, with its emphasis on psychological subjectivity and its retreat from assertions of objective knowledge. Many writers in the 1960s and ’70s, faced with the ugliness of the American landscape and its saturation by the culture of mass media, turned to highlighting the artificiality of the literary act itself. Wallace of course had a great fondness for many of the writers of this postmodernist movement, primarily Barthelme (who, as he would say, had “rung his cherries” in college) and Pynchon, whom he had all but engulfed Bombardini-like in The Broom of the System.

But the path the writers who had come just before Wallace’s generation chose was very different. They sought to pare down their prose, to purvey an exhausted realism. Life weighed heavily; existence carried few possibilities of pleasure or redemption. In minimalism, simple sentences carried great meanings and a waitress’s trip to the K-Mart telegraphed misery and blighted opportunity. It was the world according to Raymond Carver, as interpreted by his thousands of descendants.⁸

As Wallace entered Arizona, MFA students all over America were writing stories in the minimalist style, affecting ennui and disappointment toward a world they knew mostly from other minimalists. Wallace accepted the minimalists’ attitude toward the landscape of America and its debilitating effect on its inhabitants, but he disliked how formally and verbally claustrophobic their writing was. Minimalist stories gave the reader little experience of what it was like to be assaulted the way in real life their characters would be. They were effectively unease recollected in tranquillity. While Wallace certainly knew what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the stimuli of modern life — indeed his response to them when under stress was more extreme than anyone knew — this was not his stance when he recreated experience. As a writer, he was a folder-in and includer, a maximalist, someone who wanted to capture the everything of America.

Most of the teachers at Arizona were not fans of postmodernism, which they associated with a different era and condition and a preciousness that stories in the true American grain should not possess, but they also did not like minimalism, which smelled trendy to them. They particularly disliked one thing the minimalists did that Wallace admired. In his class Elman assigned both Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Ellis and McInerney were minimalists with attitude, bored with being bored. Dubbed “the brat pack,” by the mid-1980s they had become required reading among the affluent and college-educated young. Predictably, then, the students in Elman’s class tore apart their easy plots and heartstring-plucking narratives. Wallace, though, did not go along entirely. He was interested in the way their simple narratives swept up and held the reader and, in the case of Ellis, how he used brand names as shorthand for cultural information like status and even to stand in for emotional states. “What should we be writing about?” he demanded to know, “Horses and buggies?”⁹

What the teachers at Arizona did like was the well-made realist short story. The well-made story was teachable, annotatable, and suitable for differing levels of talent. The professors were themselves mostly trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where such stories were the orthodoxy. They believed stories should be character-driven; they should have arcs, with moments of crisis ending in epiphanies. Most of all, for a story to succeed the reader had to know who he was reading about and why the events of the story mattered so much to him or her. “Show us what’s at stake for the character,” was a constant request from the faculty, as was, “Why is this person telling us the story?”

Wallace probably did not know much about any of the faculty when he applied to the school. Mary Carter’s welcome letter suggested the opposite of a program bias toward realism. But it did not take long for him to learn that the teachers in Arizona wanted one thing, and he wanted another. He was at a point where he was more interested in experimentation in form and voice than in conventional narratives. He felt he had entertained readers once in Broom; what else, he wondered now, could he do with them? And once he grasped these were not the questions on the table at Arizona, he may even have enjoyed the consequent head-butting — Lelchuk had shown him that opposition could energize him. He perhaps even baited the teachers to bring it out.

His first-semester workshop was with Jonathan Penner, an Iowa Workshop graduate and a writer principally of well-honed, closely observed realist novels. Penner, then in his forties, had supported Wallace’s application for admission, thrilled by his submission of a chapter from Broom in which two Amherst fraternity pledges barge into Lenore’s sister’s dorm room and try and get her and her roommate to sign their rear ends. A flashback to 1981, it does not sound like anything else in the book. Someone familiar with only these pages might have thought Wallace had written a ribald tour de force, in the bravura style of early Roth or an update on Terry Southern — maybe even something by Lelchuk.¹⁰ When Penner began reading Wallace’s new efforts in class he was surprised to find that a very different writer had apparently come to Tucson. The comic energy and verbal dexterity had been replaced by something experimental, self-referential, and deliberately graceless. Wallace was beginning to play around with the props of narrative, rearranging them to see what might catch his attention. He was also going through the various tools in the postmodern tool kit, trying each one out. Part of his goal was to erect a wall between his writing and the pleasure it could give. A passage at the beginning of the first story Wallace submitted, “Here and There,” is a parody of minimalist openings: “I kiss her bitter photo. It’s cloudy from kisses. I know the outline of my mouth from her image. She continues to teach me without knowing.”

The story goes on in the same arch vein. Bruce, a Wallace stand-in, is reeling after his girlfriend, a Susie Perkins — like nurse/lover figure—“a certain cool, tight, waistless, etcetera. Indiana University graduate student”—has ended their relationship. In an exaggerated variant on the typical college breakup story, he reflects on what went wrong as he flees toward elderly relatives in the mythic Maine town of Prosopopoeia (literally, “mask-making,” but also a literary trope for the voice of an absent speaker).¹¹ The ex-lovers and their therapist converse in the space the rhythms of the highway open in Bruce’s brain, the story told as a flashback, a memory dance in three voices.

Part of what ended the lovers’ relationship — we learn — was Bruce’s desire to be “the first really great poet of technology.” To which the therapist (who seems to have something of Lelchuk or Penner in him) chimes in:

Bruce[,] here I feel compelled to remind you that fiction therapy in order to be at all effective must locate itself and operate in a strenuously yes some might even say harshly limited defined structured space. It must be confronted as text which is to say fiction which is to say project.

Bruce, unrepentant, answers, “This kind of fiction doesn’t interest me,” and lays out his manifesto for a different sort of writing (and a new sort of relationship):

No more uni-object concepts, contemplations, arm clover breath, heaving bosoms, histories as symbol, colossi; no more man, fist to brow or palm to décolletage, understood in terms of a thumping, thudding, heated Nature, itself conceived as colored, shaped, invested with odor, lending meaning in virtue of qualities. No more qualities. No more metaphors. Gödel numbers, context-free grammars, finite automata, correlation functions and spectra. Not sensuously here, but causally, efficaciously here. Here in the most intimate way…. I admit to seeing myself as an aesthetician of the cold, the new, the right, the truly and spotlessly here.

As the miles roll by, Bruce struggles to hold on to his vision of a fiction whose “meaning will be clean” between the harangues of his ex and his writing teacher. The story finishes in a more traditional mode, when Bruce tries to rewire his relatives’ broken stove, only to discover that, despite his degree in engineering from MIT, he has no idea how the device works. But at this point the reader suspects another parody, a subversion of the MFA-perfect trope of the stove as symbol of hearth and family, of the tidy ending.

When Wallace presented “Here and There” for comment in Penner’s workshop, the students were impressed. They were struggling to fit themselves within the boundaries of the well-made story; he was struggling to get out of them. But Penner considered the story “talky, slow and boring.”¹² Wallace next presented “Love,” a story within a story from Broom, about a conversation between characters named Donald and Evelyn Slotnik and their neighbor Fieldbinder about another neighbor who may have been stalking the Slotniks’ son. The third story was “Solomon Silverfish,” the tale of a lawyer whose wife is dying of cancer. For most of its nearly thirty pages, the story adheres closely — even mockingly — to the rules of narrative. Points of view alternate obediently among the characters; each one speaks in an identifiable voice: “Sophie is Solomon’s life and vice-versa, Mrs. Solomon thinks, Thirty-two years of such luck and happiness she did not even know how to begin thanking God on her knees.” But the last scene erupts into a Malamud-like moment of magic, a rapturous lovemaking in a cemetery as witnessed by Too Pretty, a pimp, high on heroin, who happens to drive by:

I be sittin up straight in my ride, and she be doin my man standin up, they be doin each other like children, too clean, too happy, my mans ass on marble, and theres no noise I can hear but my breathin and…this high thin whine of the burnin gate and the stones that be flashin a fire of they own light in the sun.

“There’s a fine and moving story here, David,” Penner wrote his student in response. “It’s about half this long.”¹³ A conservative Jew himself, Penner found Wallace’s idea of Jews as targets of comedy “mildly offensive” and remembers wondering why Wallace kept submitting stories about people of his own religion to him. Other students assumed it was Wallace’s attempt to get under the skin of a professor who was not giving him the praise he expected. If so, it may have worked. Penner saw the talent that Wallace possessed and felt he was misusing it. At one point, he took Wallace aside and told him that if he continued to write the way he was writing “we’d hate to lose you.”¹⁴

Penner thought he was giving Wallace just the sort of help he had come to Arizona for, but Wallace was flabbergasted and furious, and also excited. As often when goaded, he fought back with humor. He liked to sit around with friends, imitating Penner’s mannerisms; the hemorrhoid pillow the teacher brought to class was fair game. He joined Penner’s Sunday basketball games. Wallace no longer threw a timid hook shot. He enjoyed battling his professor in the pebbleless paint. (Penner was famous for scrupulously sweeping the court before a game.)

In December, when a small studio opened in a row of bungalows on East Adams Street where several of the other writing students lived, Wallace moved. He brought his books and towels to the “casita.” The rent was cheap and Walden’s new puppy, Jonson, could spend the night with them there. (The North Cherry Avenue apartment building had prohibited pets.) The bungalow had only a swamp cooler, and Wallace, who sweated heavily even when he wasn’t in the grip of anxiety, took to wearing his tennis bandana off the court. As the months passed at Arizona, he let his hair grow; the bandana became useful to hold it back. The look felt right — part of his rejection of midwestern conformity, a light shock to the bourgeoisie that also kept the sweat off his face — and he began trying out various headscarves to see others’ reaction. Sometimes he borrowed Walden’s. One day he poached a turquoise sash from Heather Aronson and wore it around his head. Her sister Jaci, who also lived in town, told him he looked like a member of Kajagoogoo.

Wallace thought he was doing new and stimulating work at Arizona. The Broom of the System belonged to his creative past, but he understood the importance of getting it into print. He did not want to wait any longer to make his mark. He asked around for a teacher who would be willing to read it and make some suggestions for how to improve it, but no one offered. The prospect of spending time on a large undergraduate project of postmodernist tendencies did not appeal to the faculty. So, soon after arriving, Wallace asked Boswell to help. Boswell, who had been a star student in the program, made suggestions for the novel and also told Wallace he should get an agent. He suggested his friend send fifteen pages of the work to fifteen different literary agencies and see who responded first. A little more than a month after getting to Tucson, Wallace had a draft of the novel ready to submit. His cover note was coy:

I’ve been advised by people who seem to be in a position to know that The Broom of the System is not only entertaining and salable but genuinely good, especially for its being the first major project of a very young writer (though no younger than some — Ellis, Leavitt — whose fiction has done well partly because of readers’ understandable interest in new, young writing).

He enclosed a chapter from the middle of the book, explaining that to send the beginning would only confuse the reader, “since the novel itself isn’t really constructed in an entirely linear, diachronic way.” Perhaps he had also learned from his experience with Penner that certain chapters might not prepare readers for the medley of parody, philosophy, and Wittgensteinian teases that followed. One of the agencies the package went to was Frederick Hill Associates in San Francisco, where Bonnie Nadell, a new associate who had worked in the subsidiary rights department at Simon & Schuster when Less Than Zero was published, opened it. Nadell liked the cocky tone of the letter and was impressed by the term “diachronic,” which she did not know. She read the chapter and responded to its energetic comic voice. It reminded her of Pynchon, whom she had studied in college. Nadell asked for more pages. Wallace sent her the balance, and soon afterward she took the novel on. When the two first spoke by phone, Wallace called her “Ms. Nadell,” until he found out she was only a year older than he. He had so little cash he asked her to make a copy of the manuscript for him. “I defy you to picture a boy living on Ritz crackers and grape Kool-Aid…and be unmoved.” Nadell had no money either and instead got a friend at a publisher to photocopy it.

There was already a well-known nature writer named David Rains Wallace, so Fred Hill, Nadell’s boss, who had once worked for Sierra Club Books, suggested he use his full name. Wallace was to claim in later years that the change in his byline to David Foster Wallace had been against his will—“I would have called myself Seymour Butts if he’d told me to,” he wrote to Don DeLillo nearly two decades later — but Nadell remembers Wallace as happy with his new triple-barreled moniker. He had been experimenting with various names since he was a little boy and the homage to his literary mother was fitting.

After Thanksgiving, Nadell sent the novel out to a group of editors, including one at Viking Penguin, Gerry Howard, who responded at once. Howard had an affection for postmodernism and nostalgia for the literary culture it came out of. He loved words and word games and writing that exposed the artificiality of narrative. He was steeped in the works of Pynchon and had edited an anthology of prose from the 1960s as well. But he also thought Broom was different, that it used postmodernism in new ways. He remembers reading the manuscript and thinking he was reading something truly new, “a portent for the future of American fiction,” as he remembered it: “It wasn’t just a style but a feeling he was expressing, one of playful exuberance…tinged with a self-conscious self-consciousness.” For him — and for many others who would read the book — Wallace held the hope of an alternative to minimalism and to Ellis-type fiction, a way out of the etiolated mind-set of the moment. There was optimism in Broom’s despair, elation in its loneliness. Words tumbling over words might, it suggested, overwhelm the depressing anomie of American life. Howard offered a $20,000 advance to Nadell, quite large under the circumstances, as a minimum bid in return for the right to top any other publisher’s subsequent offer. As it turned out, no one else bid on the book. Howard decided he would publish the book primarily as a paperback original.¹⁵ This strategy had worked for Bright Lights, Big City, the publication of which was the industry’s model for how to reach younger fiction readers.

Wallace was thrilled. Finding a publisher had happened so fast it seemed unreal. He waited two hours on Walden’s stoop to tell her the news. Soon he flew to New York, where Nadell had found him an apartment to borrow on the Upper West Side. He met Howard and, separately, Nadell, who had grown up in the city. At the Hungarian Pastry Shop near Columbia University, they hung out with some of her college friends. They talked about favorite authors, including Pynchon, but they worried, one of her friends remembers, that the discussion was making Wallace uncomfortable so they changed the subject. The same friend said that his favorite word was “moist” and that it gave him particular pleasure to hear it used in conjunction with “loincloth.” (The phrase would turn up in a later story of Wallace’s out of the mouth of Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek.)

At the Viking Penguin offices on 23rd Street, Wallace, wearing a U2 T-shirt, sat down with his editor, who was amazed at how young he looked. Howard worried that Wallace would trip over the untied laces of his huge sneakers and found it funny that his new author insisted on calling him — he was only in his mid-thirties—“Mr. Howard.” He wondered at his diffidence and what seemed to him his tenuous connection to the larger world, thinking of the twenty-three-year-old Wallace, he would later tell an interviewer, “as a newly-hatched chick.”

Wallace went home intoxicated with excitement, so much so that he was carried away, reporting back to Costello that Howard had been the editor for Gravity’s Rainbow (not quite true, though Howard had gotten Pynchon to write an introduction to a reissue of Pynchon’s friend Richard Fariña’s novel). Once back in Urbana, he joined Walden in Chicago to see Fool for Love, the movie version of Sam Shephard’s play about battling lovers, and ate at a restaurant called Printers Row. Wallace, the ambitious part of his psyche coming to the fore, asked Washington to plant the good news with their class agent for the Amherst newsletter, “not, of course, letting her know that I requested or even endorsed your doing so.”

Howard felt he had a prodigy of a novel on his hands, a book that was brilliant, intuitive, obeying no rules. He settled down to edit the long manuscript, accompanied by a reference book on Wittgenstein. Early in the New Year he sent Wallace a note with four pages of suggestions, focusing on passages he found self-indulgent and on problems of chronology. He thought his edit quite light, given the length of the manuscript.

Wallace was just now settling in for the spring semester. Howard’s letter knocked him off stride. Fragile in his confidence, even mild criticism hurt him, and since negative comments could plunge him into effulgences of self-doubt, he responded immediately, hitting the ball right back over the net. “If this seems fast,” he assured his editor, “be aware that I have done nothing ELSE besides eat and smoke since I got your letter and suggestions,” adding sneakily, “Don’t think because I’ve sent this back to you so quickly I’m not ready and willing to go over it again if you decide it’s necessary…I’ll just pull another all-weeker.”

Wallace had promised Howard he would find him reasonable when it came to editing, “neurotic and obsessive” but “not too intransigent or defensive about my stuff.” Generally, he was true to his word. If Howard adduced publishing wisdom or reader response, Wallace stepped quickly out of the way. Wallace had made a pun on the names of Raymond Carver and Max Apple, a comic novelist. “This Carver/Apple joke is too cute and you’ll be picked on for it. Drop it,” Howard wrote; Wallace did. Howard thought Wallace overdid the use of ellipses in quotes in dialogue as a way of indicating a lack of verbal response, dead air. Wallace trimmed them back. Howard found Dr. Jay, the bizarre psychiatrist whom both Rick Vigorous and Lenore see, tedious. “The more you condense or even eliminate his palaver, the better for the book,” he insisted. Specifically, he found Dr. Jay’s “membrane theory” of personal relations “disgusting and far too strange for the book’s good — and it is very tenuously related (I think) to whatever Lenore’s plans for Lenore B might be.”

This was pushing too hard. Accusations that he was careless or meandered set Wallace on edge. It mattered enormously to him that the power of his mind be acknowledged. The membrane theory was one of his favorite moments of the book. It was the unbalanced Dr. Jay’s assertion that human relations could be entirely understood with regard to the struggle over the boundary between the self and the other. Physical limits were mental limits too: “Hygiene anxiety,” the therapist points out, “is identity anxiety.” The membrane around us kept us safe and clean but also carried the risk of isolating us. It sounded Freudian, came out of Wallace’s reading of literary theory, and struck a chord with the hygiene-obsessed Wallace. It played off of Vigorous’s sexual problems with Lenore as well — her own boundaries frustrate his small penis. In response to Howard’s letter, Wallace gave his editor a bit of the razzle-dazzle methodology he was riddling his Arizona writing teachers with. The membrane theory, he wrote,

while potentially disgusting…is deeply important to what I perceive as a big subplot of the book, which is essentially a dialogue between Hegel and Wittgenstein on one hand and Heidegger and a contemporary French thinker-duo named Paul DeMan and Jacques Derrida on the other, said debate having its root in an essential self-other distinction that is perceived by both camps as less ontological/metaphysical than essentially (for Hegel and Witt) historical and cultural or (for Heidegger and DeMan and Derrida) linguistic, literary, aesthetic, and fundamentally super or metacultural.

This long sentence was Howard’s first glimpse of how thoroughly his young author had worked out the philosophical thinking behind the book — or perhaps of the rigid will behind a hyperverbal façade — and he backed off. Howard’s more concrete problem was with the ending: the book didn’t have one. In the last pages, Lenore appears to be closing in on her great-grandmother, but we never find out for sure. Nadell had raised the issue even before she sold the book to Viking Penguin. The story, she felt, just seemed to stop. She suggested Wallace think about a more traditional last scene. Wallace had dug in—The Crying of Lot 49 famously ends in mid-scene.

Howard too thought the text called for some sort of resolution. He urged his author to keep in mind “the physics of reading.” The physics of reading were, as Wallace came to understand the phrase, “a whole set of readers’ values and tolerances and capacities and patience-levels to take into account when the gritty business of writing stuff for others to read is undertaken.” In other words, a reader who got through a long novel like Broom deserved to know what had happened. “You cheat yourself as well of the opportunity to write a brilliantly theatrical close to the book,” the editor chided his young author.

Phrases like “the physics of reading” were seductive to the theoretician in Wallace. His clumsiness in the world of emotions also led to odd mixtures of gratitude and indifference. Over the years many editors would wonder whether Wallace was making fun of them with his excessive-seeming deference. The answer is he both was and wasn’t. To Wallace’s mind now, Howard had hazarded everything on his youthful work and no amount of gratitude could repay the gesture. At the same time he was not without diffuse cunning. He already had in mind to publish a follow-up volume of short stories; it would not be prudent to alienate his editor — or his readers, before he even had any.¹⁶ So, sincerely or not — or sort of — he wrote Howard that the idea of the physics of reading had “made an enormous, haunting impression on me.” He assured him that he didn’t want his novel to be like “Kafka’s ‘Investigations of a Dog’…Ayn Rand or late Günter Grass, or Pynchon at his rare worst.” To him these were writings that gave pleasure only to their authors. All the same, he simply could not rewrite the ending. To do so would risk turning the book into a realist novel and betray his deepest belief about the relationship between reader and character (and by extension between life and reader):

I admit to a potentially irritating penchant for anti-climax, one that may come out of Pynchon, but a dictum of his that I buy all the way is that, if a book in which the reader is supposed to be put, in some sort of metaphysical-literary way, in something like the predicament of the character, ends without a satisfactory resolution for the character, then it’s not only unfair but deeply inappropriate to expect the book itself to give the reader the sort of satisfaction-at-end the character is denied — the clear example is Lot 49.

He’d tried, he said, to write a proper conclusion, in which, he told Howard, “geriatrics emerge, revelations revelationize, things are cleared up.” But the scene, never sent (if it ever existed), felt too pat to him. The issue was a serious one for him. “I am young and confused and obsessed with certain problems that I think right now distill the experience of being human in a human community,” he begged Howard. “Can you help me with this?” What he meant was he knew reality to be fragmented, oblique, unbalanced, and his book had to capture that fragmentation if that experience was to count for anything — that was why he wrote the way he did. In the end, he insisted on keeping the ending he had written, breaking the novel off in midsentence, with Rick Vigorous, Lenore’s ex-boyfriend, attempting to pierce the physical boundaries of Mindy Metalman, assuring her, “I’m a man of my”—the missing word being, elegantly and self-referentially, the word “word.”¹⁷

Howard was satisfied; he had tried. He was still in awe of the book he held in his hands and felt, with or without a conventional ending, it was, as he remembered, full of “the sheer joy of a talent realizing itself.” He wrote to Nadell, even before he had finished editing Wallace’s book, “It is a great joy to be in at the start of his brilliant career.”¹⁸ The title of the book was open to discussion. It had begun, at Amherst, as The Great Ohio Desert, a reference to a fictive human-engineered pile of sand near Cleveland with its suggestive acronym that figures in the story; to Three Deserts (“Rick, Lenore, and the G.O.D.,” Wallace noted to Howard); to The Broom of the System, the name it was submitted to Howard under. Amy Wallace now suggested Family Theater, a reference to the therapy that the Wallaces had undergone as a group in summer 1982, but in the end Broom won out.

Wallace’s life began to go on two tracks. His book was soon to be the first original novel in a fiction line from an important New York publishing house, but he was still a first-year MFA student, facing a faculty less than enchanted by his success. Personal dislike, professional jealousy, and opposition to postmodernism made anything good that happened to Wallace dubious in the eyes of his teachers — at least that was how he read the situation.

Wallace had grown close to a fellow student named JT. “Jate”—no one knew what the initials stood for — was a former marine, who wore a hat and leather bomber jacket in the heat of Tucson. He called his apartment on 9th Street “the lair.” It featured a Soloflex machine in the living room and a stack of Diet Coke cases reaching almost to the ceiling in the kitchen. For Wallace 9th Street became a replacement for the lost “womb” at Amherst. He would go there to relax, hide out from Gale Walden, get high, discuss their fiction, and engage in what he called in a story he wrote of the time “macrocosmic speculations.” JT was the sort of friend Wallace was increasingly drawn to, the sort to whom he could be at once a pal and still somewhat mysterious to. They had a routine together. “How’d you get to be so smart?” JT would ask. “’Cause I did the reading,” Wallace would respond. They called first novels “big shits” because everything you knew got poured out into them. Together with an undergraduate friend they put out a parody issue of the writing program newsletter, a publication of the “University of Aridzona Piety Center”:

How many Jonathan Penners does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

One. Having more than one Jonathan Penner violates basic point-of-view considerations.

How Many Robert Boswells does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Two: One to screw in the bulb, and one to accept the award.

JT created a joke for Wallace, but the latter cut the entry when he sat at the printing shop alone with the manuscript. The parody offended many of its targets, not entirely a surprise to Wallace, who as they finished up the issue began to downplay his involvement.

JT helped Wallace in crucial ways. Wallace was a child of academia with little knowledge of the larger world. That world frightened him easily and often overwhelmed him, but he saw that without broader experience he was going to have a hard time growing as a writer. Fantasizing about his future biography, Wallace joked with JT one day, “‘Dave sat in the smoking lounge of the library, pensively taking a drag from a cigarette and trying to think of the next line.’” He added, “Who wants to read that?” JT’s stories held a partial solution. He told him he had been in a severe accident involving an International Harvester truck in the 1970s that had left him in a coma; Wallace put the accident in a story. Another day, early in the semester, as JT remembers, Wallace put on a recording by Keith Jarrett. While they listened to the improvisation, JT told Wallace, who was high, a story about a road trip he took to see the Grateful Dead with his brother, a bouncer nicknamed Big. Just before, Wallace had been flipping through a collection of records put out by Placebo Records, a punk rock label. Many of the Placebo musicians and their associates were friends of JT, and two of their names came up in the road trip story too: Big and Mr. Wonderful. Wallace ran off to his bungalow and a few days later came back with a story narrated by a rampaging young Republican named Sick Puppy who delights in burning women while they fellate him.¹⁹ The story starts:

Gimlet dreamed that if she did not see a concert last night she would become a type of liquid, therefore my friends Mr. Wonderful, Big, Gimlet and I went to see Keith Jarrett play a piano concert at the Irvine Concert Hall in Irvine last night.

The story, “Girl with Curious Hair,” was in the same key as Less Than Zero. Wallace felt that employing bored, vapid characters to capture boredom was poor writing, but as a natural mimic he admired the strong voice Ellis had found; he saw its potential. So he pushed the voice past where Ellis had taken it, moving it from the stylish into the gothic or repulsive.²⁰ When Costello came to visit, Wallace recited the opening of A Clockwork Orange, and Costello realized that the Anthony Burgess novel had also been a model for the story his friend had just written. Wallace told his friend that Burgess’s novel showed how to use hyperbolic language to convey deadened emotional states. (The debt to Bret Easton Ellis was one Wallace would never acknowledge. When Howard asked after reading the story whether Wallace had read Less Than Zero, Wallace told him no.)

When Wallace was not with JT, he was with Walden. During the return from Christmas 1985 break, they each had car trouble, so they agreed that it would be romantic to join up and drive in a convoy back to Tucson, Wallace from Urbana, Walden from the South Side of Chicago. The only problem was that Wallace had already agreed to make the trip back to Tucson with his sister, Amy, who was coming to visit him, and his friends Heather from Iowa and Forrest from St. Louis. So when Wallace, Amy, Heather, and Forrest, traveling in two cars, got to Oklahoma, he called Walden, to discover she needed his company while she waited for a mechanic to fix her car. Then he drove off with barely another word, his change of plans pulled off so quickly that his sister’s suitcase was still in his trunk. When he and Gale finally got to Tucson—“two broken cars limping across the desert,” as Walden would remember it in a later poem — they found Amy hurt and bewildered, her feet bleeding from Heather’s borrowed shoes.

On the trip, Wallace listened to the southwestern accents. He had long wanted to write a variation on William Gass’s novel Omensetter’s Luck. The laconic hillbilly voice of the story appealed to him. As a “weird kind of forger,” imitating it would be a fun challenge. “He started to talk out ‘John Billy’ at rest stops,” Walden remembers. “He was trying to get the cadence of the dialogue down.” When he got home, he wrote a draft. “Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed,” the eponymous narrator states. There was, as ever, an element of parody in the homage. The goal was to push the original author out of sight. That the story was not easy to read mattered not at all to Wallace; all he cared about was the sentences.

Back at school for the spring 1986 semester, Wallace decided to try to finish his MFA more quickly. From his original boast to Washington that he would stay for “the next three years at least,” he now wanted to try to wrap up his graduate work in two. He may have wanted to be done at the same time as Walden, who was planning to graduate the next June, or to save tuition. He signed up for a workshop with program director Mary Carter, in which he would write extra stories for double credit, as well as a seminar on literary theory and an independent study on the theory and practice of poetry. In the last, when another participant called Derrida a waste of time, Wallace got so mad that everyone thought there would be a fight. He was still convinced that theory was what separated the serious novelist from the others, that without it writers were just entertainers. His interest in theory, like his fondness for stories with strong voices, also had a compensatory element. It served to satisfy energies that would have been frustrated had they gone into aspects of fiction writing he did not naturally excel at, like character development. It was a handy refuge for a writer who was still an odd combination of a mimic and engineer.

The workshop with Carter was Wallace’s happiest time at Arizona. The program director was supportive in the same way Dale Peterson had been at Amherst. She herself was an entirely conventional writer and not even a very good one, but she understood that her protégé’s work was special and encouraged him to write what he wanted. “He is going to make us all very proud,” she would tell the other students. Her support for him was evident to all. At a publishing conference Carter convened, she squired Wallace around to meet important fiction agents and editors. Wallace rallied to the challenge, surprising his fellow students who thought of him as shy. They had not realized that he could play the game when he wanted to.²¹

The double credit in Carter’s workshop required Wallace to supply six new stories in a semester, a rigorous pace. But he continued to write well and fast and anywhere he wanted, caught up in gusts of inspiration. One weekend that spring he disappeared. Walden grew worried, called him, went by and rang the doorbell of the casita but got no response. The next Monday at the offices of the program’s literary magazine, the Sonora Review, he presented her with the story “Little Expressionless Animals,” a tale about a young woman who is a champion Jeopardy! player. It was thirty pages long. “I wrote straight through,” he told Walden, who had been sure he had run away with another woman.

“Little Expressionless Animals” was Wallace’s first attempt to treat seriously issues that had mostly been played for laughs in Broom. Its central preoccupation is the relationship between people and the images they appropriate from media to shape and infuse their thoughts. The narrative tells the story of Julie Smith, the winner of the last seven hundred episodes of the game show. She is a smart, twentyish square peg of a young woman, a descendant of Lenore Beadsman, herself a descendant of Oedipa Maas (and of Amy Wallace). The question at hand for the show’s executives, Merv Griffin and Alex Trebek, is whether to let her continue her Jeopardy! streak. “Rules, though,” points out one of their staff. “Five slots, retire undefeated, come back for Champion’s Tourney in April…. Fairness to whole contestant pool. An ethics type of thing.” Griffin, though, prizes the ratings and the advertising income, and, more complexly, the ineluctability of a great image. He sees that Julie Smith is different. “She’s,” he says, “like some lens, a filter for that great unorganized force that some in the industry have spent their whole lives trying to locate and focus.” That filter operates only when she is on television. This girl, who is almost affectless off camera, comes alive on the set. As the narrator points out:

Something happens to Julie Smith when the red lights light. Just a something…. Every concavity…now looks to have come convex. The camera lingers on her. It seems to ogle…. Her face, on-screen, gives off an odd lambent UHF flicker; her expression, brightly serene, radiates a sort of oneness with the board’s data.

Julie, TV’s natural spawn, seems to be assuming some of its properties, to be acquiring, like Pynchon’s San Narciso, a sort of “intent to communicate.” In the end Griffin decides to have Julie play against her autistic brother—“Great P.R.,” as one staffer points out — and the story, full of mirrors and characters’ glimpsing themselves in the glass, ends appropriately with the most important mirror moment of all: “Julie and the audience look at each other.”²²

Wallace was maturing as a writer. The preoccupation with media now went deeper than just a statement of purpose. The voice of the story was diffuse, hovering, omnipresent without being omniscient. As the critic Sven Birkerts noted in a later essay in Wigwag, “Wallace does not, in fact, tell the story. Instead he inhabits for extended moments the airspace around his characters.” This charged airspace is where the artistic activity of the story resides. The story ably frustrates the MFA ukase, the order to “hook” the reader fast. What is at stake for the main character? Everything, and also nothing, the story’s tension residing, with the narrator, in the ether above her.

The story received a favorable reception in Carter’s workshop. (It would continue to be one of Wallace’s best known. He would read it publicly for years.) At one point in the story, Alex Trebek says, “My favorite word is moist,…especially when used in combination with my second favorite word, which is loincloth.” Later when Wallace saw the young man who had supplied the phrase at the Hungarian Pastry Shop waiting in line at one of his signings, he called out, “You’re the moist loincloth guy!”

At semester’s end, Wallace decided to stay in Tucson. Walden would be there, and he could get credit for attending a teacher-training workshop at the Southern Arizona Writing Project. Wallace was used to going home in the summer and staying away turned out to be an unpleasant experience. He found the desert heat oppressive and the relationship with Walden developed problems: they had begun talking about the future, marriage and children; Wallace was not ready. They went to Nogales, just over the Mexican border—“kind of a depressing place,” as Walden remembers — and stayed for a few days, listening to the mariachis play all night long. They broke up, if temporarily. “It’s hot, here. Over 100° and climbing,” Wallace wrote Washington in July. “I have no job, no girlfriend, no friends.” He was “getting high too much, and moping.”

The early part of the summer was taken up by the page proofs of Broom, which was to be published the next January, but the work felt old and stale to him. He told JT he wished he could pull a Norman Mailer and rewrite the book from scratch. He also soon entered into what would come to be a familiar struggle with copy editors. They wanted to standardize his prose, not understanding how thoroughly thought through were his departures from standard grammar. If he used a comma in an unusual place or chose to indicate direct speech with single quotes rather than the usual double ones, there was a reason. He was going, he had written Nadell in April, to have to “copy-edit the copy-editor.” The process exhausted him. When the final proofs came in July, he sent them back to Howard with a typically confused sign-off: “Hoping Very Much I’ll Never Have To Look At That Particular Confoguration Of Words Again, Yet Eager To Do So If It Will Help Viking One Little Bit.”

Meanwhile, Howard was soliciting prepublication quotes for the novel. “No autobiography, no cocaine, no rock clubs, lots of ambition and inventiveness,” he promised Don DeLillo, who passed, as did dozens of others. Most, if they even leafed through it, likely saw the book as derivative of Pynchon, or of DeLillo himself. Elman was one of the few to offer praise — sort of. At Wallace’s request, he read the manuscript and wrote to Howard, in part, “As wild elk produce many elkins, so the American heartland produces its own Menippean satirists. David Wallace’s young genius is undimmed. The magnitude of his borrowings he pays back with interest.” When he shared the quote with Wallace, Wallace asked his old teacher what he meant. “You must not confuse the modesty of hype for lack of admiration of your talent,” the teacher replied evasively. To Howard, he was less disingenuous. “I would be hard put to defend David’s writing, for all its charm, as original, in most of the standard senses of the word.” He added, half joking, “If you want to publish really good writing you should publish mine.”

Shortly after sending off the page proofs in July, Wallace drove up to see Costello, who was now a summer associate at a law firm in Denver. They planned a weekend road trip, but at the last minute Costello was called in to work. Wallace came along to get a little experience of what it was like to be in an office. They parked in the underground garage of the nearly sixty-story building and took the elevator up to Costello’s office. Wallace, wide-eyed, settled in an empty conference room. While his old roommate took a long call from another lawyer, Wallace wrote the first draft of “Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR” in a notebook. It is the story of two executives whom chance throws together in a huge office building, the building itself “empty and bright, dispossessed, autonomous and autonomic.” The older one has a heart attack in the building’s garage and falls slowly, inexorably to the ground:

The Account Representative watched as the Vice President in Charge of Overseas Production pirouetted, raked a raw clean streak in a cement pillar’s soot and clipped a WRONG WAY sign’s weighted concrete doughnut with a roundabout heel as he pirouetted, reached out at air, hunched, crumpled, and fell.

The younger of the two men then tries to come to his rescue. It is unclear whether he succeeds in saving the other’s life with CPR. “They shared pain, though of course neither knew,” the narrator of the story asserts.

The effort was an early example of the paradoxical approach that would come to dominate Wallace’s later fiction: a passionate need for encounter telegraphed by sentences that seem ostentatiously to prohibit it, as if only by passing through all the stages of bureaucratic deformation can we touch each other as human beings. This would prove one day to be the stance of much of the writing in the story collection Oblivion and, finally and problematically, in The Pale King, but in its earliest incarnations it came easily to Wallace.²³

The next day he and Costello took to the road. They planned on going to St. Francis, Kansas, about two hundred miles to the east. There was a well-known NPR station there. Wallace wanted, Costello remembers, Oedipa Maas — like, “to get to the source of the signal.” On the way they stayed overnight in a cheap motel in eastern Colorado. Wallace realized the next morning en route that he had left behind the notebook with the “CPR” story in it, so the two turned around and drove back the twenty miles to the motel to get it; Wallace mentioned to Costello that it also contained “a big thing”—Costello assumed a new novel was being started. They turned around one more time and got to St. Francis, where they sat in the parking lot for a few minutes. That month, a friend of Walden’s took a photo of Wallace for his book jacket. He chose to wear the leather jacket he’d bought from McLagan, the one that always brought him luck.

The fall 1986 school term came with two big changes. Mary Carter was gone, forced out by the faculty. She did not go quietly. Soon, as Wallace wrote to Nadell, she was “going through both a lawsuit and a nervous breakdown in London.” Carter’s departure was awkward for Wallace. He was her favorite; indeed, some people assumed that they were involved, not least because she had some years before published a novel about an older woman and a younger man. Fueling the rumor was that he moved into her apartment after her departure. Some guessed it was a present of some sort (in fact she charged him rent and told him not to smoke inside). He enjoyed the condo, which was much more pleasant than the swamp-cooled bungalow he’d lived in for the past year. It had color-coordinated furniture and wall hangings, not to mention access to a pool. “I got darned little work done,” he complained to Washington about the summer when September finally came around, “just took one gutty class and sat around smoking pot in airconditioning.”

His scholarship having ended, that fall Wallace had to teach. The prospect did not delight him. In his audio letter to his Amherst friends on arriving, he had declared the undergraduates at UA to be “roughly of an intelligence level of a fairly damaged person.” More important, he was aware that the teacher-student relationship was one of performer and spectator. The teacher was under constant pressure to entertain if he wanted to be liked — and no one wanted to be liked more than Wallace did. The bind was not just that he did not think he could do it, but that if he did do it, was he actually doing something he would admire himself for having done? The first morning of classes found him lying on the floor of the Sonora Review offices in the Modern Languages Building, unable to move. “Give him space. He’s nervous,” Walden whispered to everyone. The others were shocked. Wallace to them was by now the epitome of confidence.

But once he had decided to become good at something, Wallace usually succeeded. It was the decision to dive, not the entry into the water that was hard. Quickly, he became a top instructor, charismatic and popular. He scoured every piece of undergraduate writing, striving to overwhelm the students with the volume and sincerity of his comments. It did not matter that much of what they wrote was indifferent, nor that he was teaching ordinary undergraduate expository writing classes, classes, in other words, for people who by and large only wanted to be done with the class to move on to other things. The vitalizing — he would have said “erotic”—power of his mind made what they did interesting. What he wrote of Julie Smith in “Little Expressionless Animals” applied equally to him:

This girl not only kicks facts in the ass. This girl informs trivia with import. She makes it human, something with the power to emote, evoke, induce, cathart.

And as with Julie Smith, there was at once an out-of-proportion commitment and a hint of irony to his behavior. When the university sent an examiner to evaluate his teaching, Wallace had every student in the class bring an apple to present to him. Whether his mockery was appreciated or went unnoticed, that year he won the prize for best teaching assistant in the department.

Teaching taught him a hard lesson, though: he had only a limited amount of energy. If he taught, that drew down the tank with which he wrote. “I leave at dawn and get home at night,” he wrote Washington as the semester began, “promptly get drunk and fall into a sweaty half-sleep.” Two months later, he was back to Washington with more complaints: “I mostly sit around smoking pot, cigarettes, worrying about not working, worrying about the tension between the worry and the absence of and action fuelled by that worry.”

The page from Penguin’s winter 1987 catalog promised “an ambitious, irreverent novel that speaks to the anxieties and concerns of a new generation,” but trade magazine reviews of Broom failed to spot what was special about Wallace. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, dismissed the author as “a puerile Pynchon, a discount Don DeLillo,” though conceding he was “even a bit of an original.” Walden read the review to Wallace over the phone, sending her boyfriend into a tailspin. “The guy seemed downright angry at having been made to read the thing,” an upset Wallace complained to Howard afterward. He took particular issue with the reviewer’s characterization of the ellipses in quotes to denote a non-response that Howard had warned him against overusing as “pseudo-Wittgensteinian” pauses. “If the technique is a rip-off of anyone it’s of Manuel Puig,” he noted. The book was officially published on January 6, 1987, and came with a nasty surprise. Viking Penguin sent Wallace a bill for $324.51 for his reversal of some of the copyedits. He was incensed. “Maybe,” he wrote Howard, “they never found out that the copy editor had a wild hair up every orifice of his/her body? I can’t see any way that I made 300 bucks worth of my own whimsical corrections in galleys.”

Post-publication book reviewers were kinder than Kirkus. If they didn’t exactly see Broom as a portent, they at least tended to appreciate that a writer in his mid-twenties was reviving some of the energies of postmodern fiction in the midst of the entropic wasteland of minimalism. The Washington Post Book World put its review of Broom on its front page, declaring it “a hot book…a terrific novel.” The New York Times Book Review proclaimed the book

an enormous surprise, emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin’s “Franchiser,” Thomas Pynchon’s “V,” John Irving’s “World According to Garp.” As in those novels, the charm and flaws of David Foster Wallace’s book are due to its exuberance — cartoonish characters, stories within stories, impossible coincidences, a hip but true fondness for pop culture and above all the spirit of playfulness that has slipped away from so much recent fiction.

But the review’s author, Caryn James, didn’t like the ending of the book, in which a “tortured running joke turns into a contrived explanation and characters we expect to appear never show up.” Other reviewers filed in in similar fashion: exuberant versus sloppy, homage versus theft. Wallace was particularly hurt by the review in the daily New York Times by Michiko Kakutani. Many first-time authors would have been excited to be written up by a critic known for spotting young talent. Her praise of Wallace’s “rich reserves of ambition and imagination” was flattering, to be sure, but Wallace told a friend he hid in his room for two days and cried after reading yet another paragraph devoted to parallels between his first book and Pynchon’s most popular novel. “I didn’t think the review was all that favorable,” Wallace wrote Howard afterward. “But if you and Bonnie think it’s nice, I’m more than happy to see it that way.” To Howard he noted in general that the reviews had him “kind of down.”

A film company, Alliance Entertainment, optioned the book for $10,000. There was talk that Terry Gilliam, famous for the near-future satire Brazil, a movie Wallace had loved, might want to direct it. Wallace took a try at writing a treatment in the winter of 1987, simplifying the plot and minimizing the philosophical underpinnings. The story, he wrote in the précis, “is one not only about coming of age, but also about romantic love, and familial love, and the reconciliation of the heroine’s present with her past, and how these three sub-elements relate to the process of ‘growing up’ in particular and being a person in general.” “Bonnie,” he wrote, “I’ve never had more difficulty and less fun working on anything in my life. This project is dead to me, and my head is full of fiction.” He joked that if she would write the screenplay she could have the money.

For all the misgivings and the mixed reviews, Broom made its mark. A consensus among critics emerged that Wallace was a writer worth paying attention to, if for no other reason than as a corrective to the literary brat pack of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, as well as the short-story writer Tama Janowitz. Some readers may even have seen the “portent” Howard did, the emergence of a new, youthful self-questioning sensibility. Penguin printed fourteen thousand copies of the paperback and went back to press for more. One indication of the book’s standing was that the Wall Street Journal ran a short profile of Wallace entitled “A Whiz Kid and His Wacky First Novel.” “You would think that a brilliant young man who had produced his first novel before commencement would forgo more classes, but this one is not only well-educated, he is smart,” the writer began. Wallace responded to Nadell, “Nice, in a condescending way. I kept getting the impression that my hair was being affectionately ruffled by an elderly relative.”

Another sign of the growing interest in Wallace’s writing that spring was an invitation to participate in a reading at the West Side Y in Manhattan. Other authors reading that night would be T. C. Boyle, Laurie Colwin, and Frank Conroy. Wallace had never performed at such a large or important gathering, and thinking about it terrified him. “I’m so nervous about the reading,” he wrote Nadell just beforehand, “I can hardly breathe.” The night of the event he went to a dinner with the other authors at a Chinese restaurant in the west 60s. He quietly excused himself several times to throw up in the bathroom.

At the theater, the writers read in alphabetical order, so Wallace’s nervousness had time to swell, as Gerry Howard looked on with worry. Finally Wallace’s turn came. Howard introduced him, Wallace stood up on the stage, very slowly poured himself a glass of water, took a sip, put it down, and, smacking his lips, said, “Aaaah.” “You know,” he told the audience, “I always wanted to do that.” Peals of laughter. Wallace opened the book and read one of the stories within a story that Rick Vigorous tells to Lenore, in which a child’s crying unleashes a chain of improbable, catastrophic events. The audience loved the bravura homage to and parody of John Irving and sensed the young writer’s charisma, participating in the pleasure he took in having surmounted his own anxiety. Howard thought the performance was “maybe the best reading I’ve ever seen.” A Penguin publicist wrote Nadell a few days afterward to assure her she had nothing to worry about. For his part, Wallace wondered what had gone on. “The reading went really well,” he reported to Nadell, “and I had a marvelous time on stage (a bit disturbing).”²⁴

As Wallace began his last semester at Arizona, things between him and Gale Walden reached a breaking point. School would end soon and what was ahead was blank. Wallace wasn’t clear on what he wanted, unless it was to be left alone — except when he didn’t. He drank and got high a lot, which was helpful in keeping Walden at a distance. They decided to get married — Walden says Wallace wanted to elope — but by late spring it was clear no wedding was going to take place. “I guess the engagement is more or less off,” he wrote to Nadell in mid-April, whatever relief he felt buried under a sense of being wronged; “it’s hard to be engaged to someone who won’t speak to you.”

Weighing Wallace down was the growing certainty that he would soon be a professional writing teacher. Income from Broom, he knew, would not support even his modest needs. “Writing means teaching,” he told anyone who would listen. But if he needed to teach, the past year had also taught him to be careful how much. Dale Peterson at Amherst held out the prospect of a part-time engagement. Wallace was interested; he had turned down a tenure-track job offer from Northwestern (or so he wrote Peterson, though the school has no record of it and it seems unlikely). The prospect of being back where Broom had unscrolled held special appeal. “Could you give me a general idea about the whole thing’s modal status?” he followed up in the spring. Peterson said to be patient; it would take time to get his protégé the appointment.

In April Wallace was the subject of a profile in Arrival, a small glossy magazine based in Berkeley. The article, written by a friend of Nadell’s, carried a photo of Wallace in a saguaro cactus — dotted desert, dressed in jeans and a checked button shirt. His arms dangled loosely, as if ready to grab his gun. “Hang ’Im High” was the title. Clearly, there was a new sheriff in FictionTown, USA. In the article, Wallace made evident his disdain for the workshop writing he had spent the past two years battling. “I’m not interested in fiction that’s only worried about capturing reality in an artful way,” he asserted. “What pisses me off about so much fiction these days is that it’s just boring.”

Alongside the profile, Arrival published a sample of Wallace’s work, the story “Lyndon,” a fictionalized biography of the thirty-sixth American president in the style of Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, which Wallace had read shortly before. Wallace fabricated an aide to LBJ named David Boyd and gave him a male lover, anachronistically dying of AIDS, and indeed the challenges of love — theirs for each other, Lady Bird’s for LBJ, strangers’ for a public figure — form the creative core of the story. “I never saw a man with a deeper need to be loved than LBJ,” an aide comments.

“Lyndon” was noteworthy for its tight control of tone and careful observation, some of it gleaned from books and another portion borrowed from JT, whose mother had had a friend in the administration. What was also noticeable was that Wallace’s characteristic manic quality was again tamped down. As with “Little Expressionless Animals,” it was as if a newer, more serious writer had entered the room. Pynchon as model was being replaced or at least added to. In a later interview, Wallace would credit the movie Blue Velvet, the offbeat noir film by David Lynch, for this new poise. He had seen the film several times and found it revelatory, so much so that he brought it up in an interview he gave nearly a decade later:

It was my first hint that being a surrealist, or being a weird writer, didn’t exempt you from certain responsibilities. But in fact it obligated, it upped them…. That whatever the project of surrealism is works way better if 99.9 percent of it is absolutely real…. I mean, most of the word surrealism is realism, you know? It’s extra-realism, it’s something on top of realism. It’s that one thing in a Lynch frame that’s off, that, if everything else weren’t picture-perfect and totally structured, wouldn’t hit.

Around this time Wallace was also finishing a new short story about a guest on Late Night with David Letterman. Wallace told Costello he had gotten the idea for it from a show he’d seen several years before. The singer Billy Idol had bragged to the talk show host that his songs were so popular that dealers named street drugs after them: cocaine was “White Wedding,” Quaaludes were “Rebel Yells,” and marijuana was “Dancing with Myself.” Letterman, after a beat, responded, “You must be a very proud young man.”

This was the general inspiration; the direct source was that Wallace had watched the actress Susan Saint James on a recent Letterman show and taken extensive notes—“w/r/t [with respect to] the fact that the idea of having a television actress who’s agreed to represent Oreos face questioning by Letterman on why she would do such a thing and what the potential implications for her career might be seemed fascinating,” as Wallace would later write in response to a publishing lawyer’s inquiry when the story raised legal issues.

In the story that resulted, “My Appearance,”²⁵ Wallace wanted again to show the way media colonized everything from history to our private thoughts. But in the Letterman story, Wallace narrowed his concern, focusing on what he saw as television’s elevation of a rising attitude of knowingness in the culture. “My Appearance,” set, like Broom, slightly in the future, begins with a straightforward statement of fact: “I am a woman who appeared in public on Late Night with David Letterman on March 22, 1989.” The story then goes on to recount how her media-savvy husband, Rudy, and his friend Ron prepare the actress for a segment in front of the talk show star. At first the actress resists the idea that to be on Letterman is any different than, say, to be on the talk show hosted by Johnny Carson. “I don’t see this dark fearful thing you seem to see in David Letterman,” she objects. Her handlers patiently explain that their coaching is about more than Letterman; it’s about understanding that the definition of what is admirable or acceptable behavior has changed. We no longer esteem those who know or care; we esteem those who affect not to know or care. There is no arguing with this cultural change, of which Letterman is just a symptom.

“Act as if you knew from birth that everything is clichéd and hyped and empty and absurd,” Ron says, “and that that’s just where the fun is.”

“But that’s not the way I am at all.”

The cat yawned.

“That’s not even the way I act when I’m acting,” I said.

“Yes, Ron said, leaning toward me and pouring a very small splash of liquor on my glass’s ice cubes, furred with frozen cola.

Ron and Rudy continue to talk, explaining that irony has become the language of the elite. “I think being seen as being aware is the big thing, here,” the actress’s husband stresses. The actress goes on the show, mocks herself lightly, and succeeds with her host — the fictional Letterman pronounces it “grotesquely nice to have her on”—but she feels somehow depleted afterward. This isn’t, after all, the way she is.

Wallace had already proposed to follow Broom with a collection of stories. Howard, after some hesitation — story collections didn’t sell as well as novels — came around to the idea and paid an advance of $25,000. This was great news to Wallace, confirmation that Broom had done what it had to — made him a writer with a publisher and a career. The new book, tentatively titled Long and Short of It, would give him, he wrote Nadell with delight in April 1987, a chance to “try…to fuck a bit with the fiction current on the scene.”

But if he was going to publish Wallace’s stories as a book, Howard said, he needed someone else to publish some of them first; Wallace had no reputation as a short story writer and he had had very little success with magazines so far. This had not been for lack of trying. “I am working on a lot of short fiction, and actually have a few stories together that I think are pretty good,” he had written to Dale Peterson the year before. He had asked Nadell to start sending them out: “I think they’re good — though somewhat off the beaten path.” He saw them for Esquire, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker. Nadell gently suggested that such mainstream publications would find them too avant-garde. The dominant genre in these magazines remained realism and minimalism — taut stories with bald denouements. That was not what Wallace was offering. Even Nadell found some of Wallace’s stories hard to like. “Not a nice noise, Bonnie,” he wrote after she had an unflattering reaction to “John Billy.” Nadell’s instincts were right. Playboy found the Letterman story “too smart for its own good.” The Atlantic wanted it cut down, as did Esquire, which turned down “Luckily the Account Executive” too. Said the Atlantic editor, “Wallace clearly is the talent Mary Carter has insisted he is,” but “Little Expressionless Animals” was “too long, too idiosyncratic, and too loosely constructed for our purposes.”

Wallace minded these dismissals less than one might have expected. The vagaries of magazine publishing barely touched his sense of what he should be doing. Instead he saw submitting stories as sort of a game, publishing-tennis, and offered to take over from Nadell when it was time to approach smaller magazines. He put a bulletin board on his wall where he pinned rejection notes. But in the meantime, the future was bearing down on him. He decided to try to get out of Arizona still faster. He had planned to return briefly in the fall of 1987 to finish his MFA but instead arranged to leave in May. Any leftover work could be done from home and the manuscript mailed.

But he still had no idea where he was going next. Dale Peterson continued to work on getting him a part-time job at Amherst. He thought about doing a road trip on a motorcyle à la Charlie McLagan or even going to Los Angeles to write television shows. In the meantime, he rewrote and organized his stories for his thesis committee. He was coming to the end of his complicated, unsatisfactory life at Arizona. When a presentation copy of Broom he had given one of his professors surfaced at a nearby used bookstore, he was appalled. In late spring, he left Carter’s condo, taking a print he liked from the wall with him, headed home, and set up in his old bedroom again to work. Quickly, his energy was focused on what he was writing. He was now busy with a new story that was meant to show the failings of metafiction. The story got longer and longer, Wallace’s old gigantism bursting the bounds of his newfound discipline. His new story, he wrote JT in June, now was “cruising…at a wildly disordered 150pp.” Wallace had only one certain engagement. He had applied and been accepted to Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, for late July,²⁶ but after that, what? “Maybe to Breadloaf,” he wrote JT, “maybe to Boston, maybe to Albany, maybe to L.A. Nothing is sure in the dry burg that is this boy’s future.”