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

CHAPTER 4. Into the Funhouse

Wallace drove east to Saratoga Springs in July 1987. In Urbana, before leaving, he had spent his evenings relaxing with pot and bourbon and videos. Amy was also there. “God I feel lucky to have a sister who’s also a prized friend,” he wrote JT. But he’d also pushed forward quietly with his new story. One day Amy came downstairs to find her brother in the kitchen frying a rose in a pan and he said it was for something he was working on. At Yaddo he was taken, as so many writers had been before him, with the gothic main hall in the mansion, the smaller houses on the four hundred acres of grounds, the grand expanse devoted to literature and art. Roughly a dozen writers were in residence, alongside composers and other artists. Wallace felt proud to be among them. This was creative life as he had never experienced it, and, ever competitive, it excited him to be among the best.

Wallace had brought along his story-in-progress to work on. He quickly took it up again. The story takes as its point of departure John Barth’s long story “Lost in the Funhouse,” a touchstone of postmodern fiction written in 1967 that Wallace had long loved. “Funhouse” tells the story of two brothers, Ambrose and Peter, whose parents drive them to an amusement park in Ocean City, Maryland, on a summer weekend during World War II. The two boys are competing for the attention of a young family friend, Magda, who has also come along — and at story’s end we find Ambrose, the younger of the two, lost in the amusement park funhouse, literally and metaphorically left behind by Peter and the girl.

This is all conventional enough storytelling. As Wallace would promise in “Westward” of a similar plot in his own story: each character will experience “numerous insights, revelations and epiphanies; and will, ultimately, at the end of the time confront his future.” But within his conventional matrix, Barth consistently breaks through the narrative wall to remind the reader what he or she is experiencing as real is an artifact, words on paper. So the narrator keeps track of how long it takes his characters to get to the amusement park. He can be didactic, noting after a string of deftly turned images their function in fiction: “It is…important to ‘keep the senses operating’; when a detail from one of the five senses, say visual, is ‘crossed’ with a detail from another, say auditory, the reader’s imagination is oriented to the scene, perhaps unconsciously.” And when the three teenagers are horsing around a pool, he interrupts to note, “The diving would make a suitable literary symbol.” He interferes with the seductions of fiction by unmasking them.

It is easy to see why this sort of performance had for so long resonated with Wallace. Metafiction was the sort of technique that had first formed the bridge for him from philosophy to fiction when he was at Amherst. It contained that second level of meaning that made Wallace confident that what he was reading was intellectually richer than just entertainment (“meatfiction,” the narrator of his new story calls it), and it was clever and sardonic, just as Wallace was. Indeed, Barth had been one of the original stars in Wallace’s firmament, along with Barthelme. And in “Lost in the Funhouse,” he shows himself to be just the sort of fiction teacher Arizona lacked — Wallace’s own story featuring diving, “Forever Overhead,” had won great praise in Tucson, even as he saw how thin it was. Barth, then, was the teacher Wallace deserved, “Lost in the Funhouse” the wise, self-aware text his own teachers could never produce to help him on his own way.

And that had been Wallace’s whole response for a time. But as he finished his work at Arizona, he also had come to feel that there was something irritating about “Lost in the Funhouse,” condescending, and, if you were a recursive cast of mind, false about the way Barth kept breaking into the narrative to show readers falsity. Didn’t such an intrusion, in the end, just create more of a performance? Wasn’t it seduction pretending to be renunciation? How in the end did Barth really propose to challenge or reward the reader? Preparing to rebut Barth in his own story, Wallace scribbled notes in the margins of his paperback of the Lost in the Funhouse story collection, contesting sentences and penning criticisms like “Talmudic — obsessed w/its own interpretation” alongside Barth’s words. It was clear that metafiction no longer satisifed Wallace as it once had. But just after his last semester at Arizona, when he probably began his new story, he himself likely couldn’t tell whether he was writing an homage, a parody, a eulogy, or an act of patricide. The desire to get out what he had to say was made more intense by his sense that his old life was ending: this was the time for last things, for summings up, for boiling the whole of the fictive act, at least as practiced in MFA programs, down to, as he would later tell an interviewer, “this tiny, infinitely dense thing.” To strike down metafiction was also to show what was next, to point the way forward; it was also, in a way, a promise to go beyond what Wallace had been able to achieve in the stories he’d written at Arizona in their farrago of postmodern styles. As the poem by Bishop Berkeley from which the novella title derives concludes:

Westward the course of empire takes its way;

The first four Acts already past,

A fifth shall close the Drama with the day;

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.¹

Like “Funhouse,” “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is the story of a group of young people on a car trip. But instead of Barth’s ordinary American teenagers, Wallace gives us MFA students. And rather than go to a beach, they are on a more typically postmodern errand. They are on the way to the town of Collision, Illinois, for a reunion of the forty-four thousand “former actors, actresses, puppeteers, unemployed clowns” who have ever taken part in a McDonald’s commercial. At the same time there will be a ribbon-cutting for a “flagship discotheque” of a new company, whose goal is to “build a Funhouse in every major market.” Running this effort to add “a whole new dimension in alone fun” are two people: Leo Burnett, the advertising guru, and none other than John Barth, the metafictionist called her Professor Ambrose (for legal reasons Burnett’s name is changed to J.D. Steelritter in the published version of the book). Wallace’s suggestion is clear: advertising and metafiction share the same goal, to lull by pleasing, to fatten without nourishing. A third intoxicant is present in the story as well: a marijuana-like product derived from frying roses, which Steelritter has discovered and expects to serve the actors who participate in his great final commercial to some unspecified apocalyptic end.²

This two-sided slash at advertising and metafiction was where Wallace’s story began, but as he worked on it, it kept outgrowing its original shape, lengthening, if not deepening.³ Most notably, it came to annex the tempestous story of Wallace and Walden. Wallace felt their relationship was ending and their connection needed telling before, like his life in Arizona, it was gone forever. Wallace himself appears, altered, in two places in “Westward”: he bears a resemblance to one of the students in the car, Mark Nechtr, a competitive archer, fried rose addict, and MFA student at Ambrose’s East Chesapeake Tradeschool (note the initials), “a boy hotly cocky enough to think he might someday inherit Ambrose’s bald crown and ballpoint scepter, to wish to try and sing to the next generation of the very same sad kids.” For Nechtr, as for Wallace, metafiction is an addiction, exerting “a kind of gravitylike force” on him at the same time as he tries to fight its malign influence, “feel[ing] about Allusion the way Ambrose seems to feel about Illusion.” Nechtr is also Wallace’s inverse — full of promise but too blocked to write a word. At Nechtr’s side is Drew-Lynn Eberhardt, another student in the program. D.L. is at once alluring and off-putting. She has some of Walden’s affect, “reads painted Elkesaite cards, knows her own rising sign, and consults media.” She is also working on a long poem consisting only of punctuation. The couple are married but in a sexless relationship, D.L. pretending — or perhaps believing herself to be — pregnant.

As in “Lost in the Funhouse,” “Westward” alternates the seductive rhythm of realist narrative with authorial interruptions meant to remind the reader that the story is a fabrication. But Wallace then takes his writing to the next metalevel, striving to outdo “the locutionally muscular and forever terrible enfant” Barth. Thus one intrusion, billed as “A Really Blatant and Intrusive Interruption,” reads:

If this were a piece of metafiction, which it’s NOT, the exact number of typeset lines between this reference and the prenominate referent would very probably be mentioned, which would be a princely pain in the ass, not to mention cocky, since it would assume that a straightforward and anti-embellished account of a slow and hot and sleep-deprived and basically clotted and frustrating day in the lives of three kids, none of whom are all that sympathetic, could actually get published, which these days good luck, but in metafiction it would, nay needs be mentioned.

And he adds one last trill at the end. In the final pages, Nechtr himself becomes a writer of the story of two characters named Dave and Gale. Gale — changed to L in the published version—“is self-conscious, neaurasthenic, insecure, moody, diffracted,” the narrator notes. “Dave is introverted, self-counseled and tends to be about as expressive as processed cheese.” They love each other but battle constantly:

When the hottest darkest mood in L — s weather collides with his cold white quiet, they have violent arguments that seem utterly to transform them…. They scream and fight and carry on like things possessed.

But in the climactic fight, the Gale figure stabs not Dave, but herself, “which makes her climactic lover’s thrust at him sort of perfect in both directions.” It is the ultimate metafictional act, not homicide but suicide. (Wallace would say that one of the problems of metafiction is that there is no difference.) For good measure, it is a death the David figure watches not directly but in the “dead green eye” of his TV.

L— dead, “Westward” ends with a proffer of peace to the reader:

See this thing. See inside what spins without purchase. Close your eye. Absolutely no salesmen will call. Relax. Lie back. I want nothing from you. Lie back. Relax. Quality soil washes right out. Lie back. Open. Face directions. Look. Listen. Use ears I’d be proud to call our own. Listen to the silence behind the engines’ noise. Jesus, Sweets, listen. Hear it? It’s a love song.

For whom?

You are loved.

Few readers have taken Wallace up on this offer, and with reason. “Westward” feels like watching a family fight, worse because it is only the son who wants the combat and it may be himself he really wants to wound. The story is as much an attack on the work Wallace had done at Arizona with its mix of postmodern styles as it is on Barth. Wallace’s quintessentially metafictional mind is searching for something to move on to — but nothing is yet present. In its absence the story careers along like the car its MFA students ride in, endlessly, fitfully, and compulsively, battling the readers’ needs. But the story is also evidence of how readily at the time Wallace was seeing connections around him — between love and addiction, and storytelling and advertising, for instance — beginning to put together a worldview that would be fundamental when he turned his attention to Infinite Jest a few years later. Foremost is the idea he debuted in his Arizona stories that our passions are no longer our own. In the age of media, we are nothing but minds waiting to be filled, emotions waiting to be manipulated. There is a sense — again brought to full boil in Infinite Jest—that our obsession with being entertained has deadened our affect, that we are not, as a character warns in that book, choosing carefully enough what to love. And “Westward” suggests for the first time in Wallace’s fiction that not just he but his whole generation share this difficulty. He begins to take the key step of universalizing his neurosis. This is a tricky pass — Wallace hardly had a normal relationship with television, let alone life — but it is the very intensity of his engagement that seems to permit it. The potential payoff artistically was huge, and Wallace was beginning to organize his brief. The characters, the narrator tells us, are members of “this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear.”⁴ “Westward” also represented how seriously Wallace had come to take fiction, how much he believed that in the wrong hands it could demoralize and passify the unwary.

At Yaddo Wallace was under considerable pressure to be done with his story collection — from his publisher, and from himself. He was working all the time and with a passion others noticed. Most writers spent the mornings in their rooms writing, and the afternoons lounging by the pool or going on outings. Wallace wrote always and everywhere: stretched out on the floor or wedged into an alcove or late at night. “I’ve never been in a work environment this powerful before,” he explained to JT in a postcard. An older writer warned him that his working so hard was unsightly — or so he told Mark Costello.

At the same time, he was aware of the opportunity Yaddo offered to meet other writers and networked enthusiastically. To this new group of colleagues, he brought his odd blend of arrogance and politeness, calling everyone “Mr.” or “Ms.” until told to do otherwise. Some of the other writers thought he was being ironic; the more prescient spotted him as midwestern, or just socially challenged. He was voluble at dinner and active on the tennis courts, where he beat Jay McInerney and lost to Stephen Dunn, a poet who had once been a semiprofessional basketball player. He met an editor from the Paris Review, Jeanne McCulloch, and offered to improve her serve if she would consider his story “Little Expressionless Animals,” which larger magazines kept turning down. He grew infatuated with a young woman composer who was writing a piece using the “devil’s interval”—the augmented fourth musical interval considered so seductive that the church forbade it. In general, he gyrated between wanting to impress and disliking himself for having such impulses, between making his mark as the genius in the room and getting his work done. One day he suggested to another resident, the composer Michael Torke, that they leave behind the chatter of the communal dining room and go for a silent dinner off the grounds to clear their heads, only then to surprise his new friend by bringing along a young woman.

During his stay, Wallace fell under the wing of the thirty-two-year-old McInerney. They would drink together in the evenings and read each other’s manuscripts. McInerney was writing his novel Story of My Life, the memoir of a twenty-year-old socialite and addict named Alison Poole. Wallace admired the older novelist’s control of voice, and also how he could work after a long night of drinking. Wallace liked pot, not alcohol, but he could find none at the retreat so he had to learn to deal with hangovers. The older McInerney was surprised to find Wallace so obsessed with postmodernism; for him and his peers it had largely ceased to matter. “All that tormented stuff about…whether fiction was the world or the word,” he remembers, “it seemed to my generation that Carver and Mary Robison and Tobias Wolff just pushed that question off to the side of the road.” “Forever Overhead” was in second person, and Wallace quizzed McInerney, who had used it memorably in Bright Lights. He made a trip to the Bennington Writers Conference to read at the invitation of Alice Turner, the fiction editor at Playboy, who had been impressed by his stories. They fell to intense talking in the common room — about his writing, her work, other writers. Wallace in the same breath said he was on an MAO inhibitor and refreshed their drinks. Eventually, the two went into a bedroom. Their noise disturbed the other writers, themselves hardly early-to-bed types. In retaliation the novelist George Garrett took Wallace’s boots and socks and hid them under the sink. The next morning Wallace had to read in his bare feet. Deeply embarrassed, he told Garrett, whom he did not suspect, “I hope you don’t think I’m a hippie.”

Yaddo turned Wallace’s head. In Arizona he had been the top student, his success the object of envy, even among some of the teachers. Now he would go by the mail table in the main hall and see messages from famous agents urging their writers to call them back about movie deals and foreign rights. McInerney had a Porsche and a girlfriend who was a model. While Wallace was at Yaddo, a feature from Esquire came out, “Who’s Who in the Cosmos,” an update of a graphic the magazine had first published in the mid-1970s, a map of the literary universe. Wallace was both pleased and disappointed to find he was among the writers “on the horizon”; better than being left out entirely, but not in the “media showers” section with McInerney, let alone in the “Red-Hot Center” with John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow. At the same time, he was mad at himself for caring about such trivialities — indeed caring about them obsessively, as he was discovering.

This seductive overload came at a delicate time for Wallace. He was still trying to come to terms with the fact that writers of interesting and challenging fiction had to teach. He had never met one who could make a living just on his or her writing until now. Writers like McInerney and Mona Simpson, who was also at the retreat, seemed to him to have found a solution, and their success suggested to him that he was maybe on his way to being famous enough that he might be able to avoid his fate. But what did you have to do to be a famous, rich writer? Wallace wanted to know. Could you still be serious? Or did success inevitably corrupt the artist? By concidence, he was about to answer that question for himself. Us magazine had approached Wallace to take part in a fashion spread at El Morocco, the reborn New York supper club. The shoot was to center around Tama Janowitz, whose story collection Slaves of New York had followed McInerney’s and Ellis’s books onto the bestseller lists. Us’s article was meant to convey — or if necessary invent — the excitement of New York literary life and put forward a cohort of hot young writers. In the middle of his stay at Yaddo, Wallace drove down to New York. The four authors other than Janowitz met in a trailer outside the club to choose their clothes. The others reached for loud checks and glistening sequins. Wallace somehow found an old T-shirt and ripped jeans, emerging even more himself than he had gone in. Exchanging pleasantries with the others, he bragged that he had just been at Yaddo, shooting pool with Jay McInerney.

The group gathered in the salon of the nightclub. Janowitz entered, her hair teased out into a mountainous coif, wearing a leopardprint dress. “You look beautiful,” Wallace told her quietly. The photographer began barking directions. He choreographed the other writers in attitudes of adulation toward Janowitz. “Look like you’re having fun!” he ordered. Wallace quickly walked out. He told Walden later it was the look of his fellow writers, their eyes as they stared at the camera, that made him flee.

He went to see his editor, Howard, who took him to lunch. Wallace was very shaken. He was confused by what he had seen; yes, this lust for fame, for recognition, he certainly had it too, especially if it could get him out of teaching. But where did it lead? To what he had just witnessed? What if he fired Nadell and hired a powerful New York agent? Might he then have the life he wanted? Of course he wanted bigger advances, more fame, a more powerful agent, but to have these things one had to write to please and was he really willing to do that? He did not even know how to do that — or maybe he knew it too well. If he was going to fight the devil would he have to spend his life teaching? His mind was stuck in a loop and he cried in anguish. He talked on and on. Howard was now getting a first glimpse of the “obscurely defective” Wallace, the one having so much trouble being “human in a human community.” He talked the twenty-five-year-old Wallace down, he remembers, as if he were on “a bad acid trip.” Finally Wallace calmed down and went off to Alice Turner’s house near Washington Square to spend the night.

An already hard visit to New York became harder. That night a bag with the manuscript of “Westward” was stolen from the trunk of Wallace’s beat-up Nissan. He found the bag in a nearby Dumpster but not the manuscript. He was devastated, but this turned out to be a break in a way, because he then had reason to race back to Yaddo, where he wrote a draft of the entire story from scratch in, he would claim, “like, a week.” He took cold baths every evening to stop his brain from whirring. He finished it just in time for the short-story manuscript Viking Penguin was planning to publish in 1988.

Wallace was proud of what he had achieved at Yaddo. He left with a feeling he had never had before of having done what he set out to do. “I’m sure page for page, it’s a better book than TBOTS,” he wrote Nadell of the collection, “maybe not as fun to read, but it’s smarter, and there’s a lot less deadwood.” He added that he hoped Viking Penguin wouldn’t see it as some sort of detour until “the kid can get back on track writing gags.” His unsual enthusiasm may have been more of a response to the stress he was under — withdrawal from pot made him highly agitated — than from what he had achieved on the page, but he was certain he had done remarkable work. He told Howard that with the story “Westward” he had “broken through.” Even two years after, he would write, in a letter to Jonathan Franzen, who had become a friend and, like nearly all Wallace’s friends, wondered why Wallace held “Westward” in such special regard, that the novella was

in my view far and away the best piece of sustained fiction I’ve ever written. It is exactly what I wanted it to be [and is] also truly about everything I either had to write about or die in ’87…. My hope is that it succeeds on about 12 different levels, depending on whether you’re more interested in advertising or 80’s fiction or 60’s metafiction or the revelations of John — disciple not Barth or etc.

The story served such a personal need that he did not care what anyone thought about it — or him. When Franzen told him that the effect of the story was as if the reader had walked into a party full of “asshole[s],” Wallace responded, “If the story seems pretentious maybe it is,” and went on:

I have met assholes, and if “Westward” strikes you as the work of an asshole I’ll smile and apologize and say I appreciate your letter.

If proud of his fiction, though, Wallace was ashamed of his behavior. He did not like to expose his fragility. “I actually cried in front of [Howard] at lunch in some 23rd St. Bistro—gak,” he wrote Nadell in September, still worried a month later. But she, he felt, deserved an even bigger apology: if he had offended her, it would give him “the howling fantods.” For the “dark time” in New York, he blamed the stress induced by writing “Westward” (“I sort of had to get myself in a State to finish that thing,” he explained), as well as

a very strange social, hierarchical Yaddo atmosphere, affecting the above Dark Time most directly as a bunch of advice from Older Writers that was, I’m sure, meant as helpful but turned out to be sort of misguided. Many of these Older Writers seem to have the equipment both to try to write OK fiction and to concern themselves aggressively with issues like money, representation, etc. I simply cannot.

He added, hopefully, “You and I have good enough communication lines that I don’t worry about irreparable offense to you.” He was right: Nadell knew Wallace better than he knew himself, and she knew he now knew how much he needed her.⁵

Fortunately, by now Dale Peterson had gotten Wallace the teaching position at his alma mater, a development that for Wallace held the hope of calm after the perturbations of Yaddo and New York. If he was going to have to teach, this seemed the way to do it. He would get $6,500 for just one weekly two-hour fiction workshop in the fall, considerably more than he’d been paid for an entire year of teaching at Arizona. The rest of the time was his for writing. And he could begin by staying at Peterson’s home, where he had housesat in his college years. He could have a bedroom—“like a real person,” Peterson offered in a letter — or sleep in the family room if he preferred, with Lolita, the parrot he had transfigured into Vlad the Impaler in Broom, until he found, he wrote, “less seedstrewn accommodations.” Wallace was superstitious. He thought if he could recreate some of the ambience by which that novel had coalesced like magic, a similar inspiration might strike again. He sensed that he was at a crossroads; it had been a long time since he had tried to write without teachers and workshops.

So by late August he was back at Amherst, slightly more than two years after he had left it. He moved temporarily into the Peterson home. It was perhaps a bad omen that Lolita had just died—“Her little ticker didn’t quite hold out long enough to meet her re-maker,” Peterson wrote. But he was happy to find that Andrew Parker, his favorite literature theory teacher, was willing to share an office. Peterson was lending him his cubicle in Frost too. Even so, immediately Wallace sensed that he’d made a mistake. Amherst in 1987 wasn’t his Amherst. Nearly everyone he knew was gone; he was alone. Walden and Wallace had left their relationship on hold over the summer, and now he reached out to her, suggesting marriage for the second time. Wallace told his friends they’d chosen a date in the late fall at a church in Cicero, outside of Chicago; Walden’s father, a minister, would preside. Wallace asked Costello to be best man. His friend suggested he make sure he was going in with his eyes open. “They’re saucers,” Wallace replied. But Walden was wary, understandably. She came east to be near Wallace, moving in with a friend in Belchertown, a few miles from Amherst, and she and Wallace made efforts to reestablish their relationship. But his drinking and depressiveness worried her and she kept her distance.

At the core the problem for Wallace was what to write next. He had said what he had to say in “Westward.” It was what he had been born to write, and having done so, as he would later explain to an interviewer, he had “killed this huge part of myself doing it.” Much like an addict looking back on a final binge, Wallace would later shudder at its memory, calling the effort “a horror show…a permanent migraine…crude and naïve and pretentious.” To Franzen he would reflect, “I wanted something utterly open,” like “the bleeding guts of a patient who should die on the table, aetherized, but won’t.” Since finishing the novella, he hadn’t written a word; the story, he realized, as he would tell a later interviewer, was also “a kind of suicide note”—if he wasn’t precisely a metafictionist, he was certainly someone for whom pulling off the façade of realism was congenial. The arrow he had killed the fictional Gale with had pierced him too.

At Yaddo he had drunk heavily as a replacement for pot, and because McInerney did, and a part of him wanted to be McInerney. But here at Amherst, still without pot, the alcohol itself became an issue. He wrote JT that he had “picked up a bit of a drinking problem and am currently grappling.” The blithe note belied his upset that what had begun as a placeholder was now a new addiction and thus a new source of disgust with himself. He might not have drunk if he had had some work to do, but his days seemed empty and pointless.⁶ When he got the news that the Paris Review had taken “Little Expressionless Animals,” he told JT that the sale made “Viking pretty happy,” but “at this point I don’t really care.” On arriving in Amherst, he had worked his way through Peterson’s liquor cabinet and then quietly replaced the bottles, only to work his way through them again. Soon he got an apartment in North Amherst—“not really all that nice, plus expensive,” he wrote Washington, and for a moment he was able to summon some joy at the sight of a New England fall again — at least from behind the scrim of his letter-writing. “I’m squatting amid boxes,” he wrote Nadell in early September, “offering prayers of thanks for some unfurnished privacy. The leaves are threatening to get pretty already.” But his good mood did not last long. “Please please get me out of here,” he pled to Nadell a few weeks later. He said he was listening to “sad Springsteen and Neil Young. I wander around Rick [Vigorous]-like, remembering disasters.” He wrote Forrest Ashby that he was thinking of moving to Canada to be a high school teacher.

Wallace was on the verge of falling into a new depression. The struts that held up his life — classes, his work, his relationships, his drug use — had all been removed. He turned to television now, his drug of last resort, soothing himself with hours of sitcoms, soap operas, and sporting events. He drank still more.⁷ “Do Not Send Any Bob, Please,” he wrote a connection in Tucson, knowing that marijuana was the last thing he needed. But then, later: “Bob’s presence urgently requested.”

Class began. Broom had done well for a first novel, but Wallace was far from famous.⁸ To the Amherst undergraduates, he was just a name on the syllabus. In fact, because he was a last-minute addition meant to fill a teaching hole, they knew less about him than about most of their instructors. The students who showed up for his class were surprised to find a man barely older than themselves, carrying a pink Care Bears folder and a tennis racket. Before the first seminar meeting, Wallace had asked for writing samples — admission to seminars at Amherst was selective. When one girl asked why she had to provide a sample of how well she wrote in order to get into a class to learn how to become a better writer, Wallace acknowledged the tautology — and perhaps her anxiety — and told her she could just submit a grocery list. In the end, he taught thirteen students.

Wallace knew that if he taught hard he wouldn’t be able to write, but he also knew that he wasn’t writing anyway, so he went at teaching with fervor, covering the students’ papers with pages of annotations, throwing himself into their work. Teaching brought focus and a sense of accomplishment and the knowledge that he was honoring his parents, and Wallace needed all that. The students were astonished at his intensity.

Feeling he had endured the scorn of the Arizona professors, Wallace made sure his comments were supportive and the tone of the class positive. He did not want to replicate the discouraging classroom atmosphere he had just left. He cautioned the students, as one remembers, not to “tap dance in cleats” on one another’s stories. His syllabus was conventional, meant to teach the basic tools of writing: character, dialogue, and plot. He gave his students Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” to illustrate the unreliable narrator and Lee K. Abbott’s “Living Alone in Iota” to showcase voice. “Just because it really happened, doesn’t make it good fiction,” he would remind them. He had the ability to shift gears in this way — to go from the pyrotechnics of writing “Westward” to teaching the rudiments of fiction; in fact, the simpler the teaching, the happier it made him. He did not go to class for challenges, personal or intellectual, he went to find certainties of the sort that eluded him in his own writing. Every meeting started with a grammar lesson — the difference between “between” and “among” or “further” and “farther.” “I’m a grammar Nazi,” he liked to tell his students. One day he put the words “pulchritudinous,” “miniscule,” “big,” and “misspelled” on the blackboard. He asked his students what the four words had in common, and, when no one knew, happily pointed out that the appearance of each was the opposite of its meaning: “pulchritudinous” was ugly, “miniscule” was big, “big” was small, and “misspelled” was spelled correctly. The students had rarely seen him so happy.⁹

To their eyes, the twenty-five-year-old Wallace was a mystery. He came to class in his Arizona bandana (some thought it was to keep his hair from falling out), Timberland boots, and plaid shirts, cursed, and took frequent smoking breaks. He was trying to quit smoking and so had begun chewing tobacco.¹⁰ He was happy to extend office hours for as long as students wanted, but if he bumped into them on the street he hardly acknowledged them. One student was reminded of Dostoevksy’s Underground Man. Costello came for a visit and found his old roommate strangely diminished. He remembers “everything happening in very slow motion — getting dressed to go out, finding car keys, finding dip, notebook, working pen, writing a phone message.” There were only blondies and mustard in the fridge. Wallace told his college roommate he worried that pot smoking had ruined his brain permanently and he would never be able to write again.

Depressed, he was still not without romantic appeal. Two undergraduate women in his class set off one day to see where he lived and were excited to find his apartment above a sandwich shop in a run-down part of Amherst. When two students in his class asked if he wanted to go hear an Irish band play in Springfield, forty minutes south on the interstate, he surprised them by agreeing. On the way home the car, which Wallace was driving, spun out, leaving them all scared by the side of the road before they climbed back in and returned to the college. They did not repeat the adventure. To them, he looked spooked, hollowed out, adult.

Toward the end of the semester, Wallace occasionally dropped hints of a different life. When he gave his class an excerpt from Story of My Life to read, he mentioned he had been with the author at Yaddo when he was writing it. That fall he went to New York to receive a Whiting Award, and afterward told the class he had met Eudora Welty. At semester’s end, Wallace gave his students his Jeopardy! story, “Little Expressionless Animals,” to read and critique. “I’ve spent all semester reading your stuff and now you can read something of mine,” he told them.

Wallace’s only obligations were his once-a-week class and office hours. “I’m basically on my own,” he wrote Ashby. He turned out to miss structure, writing in a letter later in the semester, “The view from my apartment, where I spend staggering amounts of time, always seems accessed through dirty windows, no matter how vigorously Windex is applied.” Andrew Parker, with whom he was supposed to be sharing an office, was surprised how little he saw of his former student. And when he was around, there was something about Wallace’s behavior that discouraged questions.

No one in his orbit guessed the intensity of Wallace’s suffering — the television he watched (six to eight hours a day, he told one of his students), the drinking, drugs, and loneliness. It was not that he was not trying to write; it was that he was not succeeding. He may have picked up some older stories at this time and reworked them, especially “Church Not Made with Hands,” an intricate story about an art therapist and a man coping with his daughter’s brain injury that he had first submitted in Mary Carter’s workshop at Arizona. He started two novellas sometime around this time, of which he would later say that they were “just so unbelievably bad…. Hopelessly confused. Hopelessly bending in on themselves.” (They have never surfaced.) The feeling he had said all he had to say in “Westward” still lingered. The story pointed backward but not forward; metafiction was done, but what was to come? He had no experience writing without inspiration — creativity was tied in to the manic part of his personality. Esquire was interested now in publishing his Letterman story, but he would have to cut ten to fifteen pages. Wallace dutifully tried but in the end the magazine turned it down.

Predictably, the planned late November wedding began to come apart. Walden had returned to her family in Chicago, worried about her fiancé’s drinking, and in mid-October he visited her there. They fought. One issue was that Wallace had invited Alice Turner to their ceremony, and Walden, when she discovered what had gone on at Bennington, refused to have her at the celebration. Wallace strove to explain, but Walden could not be convinced — at least this was the version Wallace gave Turner in a letter; Wallace may have been exaggerating or simply inventing. One way or another, the relationship appeared truly finished. Wallace went on a new bender, considering suicide. “I’ve hurt not just me but her and her family,” he wrote a friend three weeks later, saying the new break with Walden left him “feeling dead.”

But though breakups were often the prompts for Wallace’s collapses, they never quite seemed the cause. Indeed, the decision to force things with Walden may have been a deliberate whack of the Paddle of Immoderation, an attempt to shock himself into writing again. Whatever the motive, the break with Walden felt final.

Becalmed back in Amherst, Wallace began to yearn for Tucson. He had not particularly liked the city, but he had written well there. As the fall wore on, he asked JT to confirm the rumor of “gorgeous new poetesses” in the MFA program, and when the faculty invited him back to give a reading at the Poetry Center in January 1988, he went. He flew west and met up with old friends, many still in the writing program. He and Ashby went climbing in the Tucson Mountains west of the city. A new graduate student, Martha Ostheimer, whom Forrest was friends with, came along. Wallace strove to impress her by running up the mountain before the other two, but he was out of shape and wound up vomiting in some bushes near the summit. That evening there was a party, and afterward, he and Ostheimer talked for hours in her car about literature, particularly Pynchon. He wound up in her apartment, where they spent the next several days. A relationship no sooner begun, Wallace fled it. Quickly he flew off to San Francisco, where, he told Ostheimer, he had to see Nadell. He came back to Tucson for the reading and impressed his old pals by crumpling and tossing the pages of “Westward” as he read it. “It was,” remembers Ostheimer, “as if they no longer existed after he’d read them.” When Ostheimer went around to see him at JT’s, the former marine told him Wallace was not available. Afterward, Wallace sent JT a note thanking him for his help, but to Ashby he admitted, “I think I’ve again fucked up girl-wise.” He apologized to Corey Washington, who was at Stanford, saying he’d been “too hung over” to visit. One last note he sent was to Rich C., a friend from the writing program with whom he used to get drunk. Rich C.¹¹ had recently entered an alcohol abuse program. “Let me know how it’s going,” Wallace wrote. He saw that things couldn’t continue this way indefinitely.

Wallace had returned home to Urbana by January 1988, his semester appointment over. He had tried to find a job after Amherst but failed. One place he approached was the MFA program at the University of Arizona. “I asked the fiction faculty,” remembered Steve Orlen, then the director. “They didn’t want him.” Frank Conroy, with whom he had read at the West Side Y in spring 1987, was a fan but told him that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop had no positions open right now. The Provincetown Fine Arts Center said he was “over-qualified” for a residency. Wallace had no choice but to turn to his parents, resubscribing to what he later called “the Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Fund for Aimless Children.”

Six months had passed since he had received his MFA. Little had gone right in that time and nothing had gotten written. He finally recognized that he had a drug and alcohol problem. In February, he began going to weekly sobriety meetings. Wallace would later tell friends he enjoyed them and also that he could see that what they were asking him to do was extremely hard. He had smoked pot heavily for most of the past decade. Pot had opened the door for him as a writer. Now he was targeting it in the hopes his life, haunted by anxiety, failed relationships, and a feeling that he could no longer write well, would improve.¹² One comfort was that his story collection would be out in the fall. Alice Turner had bought the Letterman story for Playboy and Conjunctions, a literary journal, had even taken “John Billy,” the Gass homage. All seemed aligned for Girl with Curious Hair to appear, a second book from this promising young author.¹³

Instead, things were about to get worse. Shortly before the Letterman story went to press, a different editor at Playboy had happened to watch a rerun of a Letterman show and been amazed to hear some of the dialogue from the story spoken by the actress Susan Saint James. He passed the news on to Turner, who, astonished, reported the lift to the magazine’s lawyers. For Wallace to take dialogue from a living person was a legal problem on many levels, not least because the character, also called Susan in the story, has an addiction to Xanax. (Wallace would later explain to the lawyers that the detail came from his own addiction at the time.)

The lawyers at Playboy told everyone to just stay quiet and hope for the best — it was too late to make changes in the story and likely no one would notice. All that happened on the Playboy side was Turner sent Wallace a furious letter. “Much fiction,” she wrote him, “is based on fact; as an experienced editor, I know how to deal with that.” She warned him that his reputation was at severe risk; that writers who committed plagiarism were never forgiven. “I hope this letter scares you,” she concluded. “It’s meant to scare you.”

The June 1988 issue of Playboy came out, the story ran, was well received, and nobody representing Saint James ever contacted the magazine.

But Playboy had also passed on the news to Viking Penguin that Wallace had not told them about lifting the material. Gerry Howard defended his author. (He suggested, for instance, to Turner that the whole thing was a “postmodernist prank.”) But Viking Penguin had recently suffered two expensive lawsuits and was not eager to take any chances. The publishers’ lawyers asked Howard to ask Wallace about the real-life models for stories in the collection. They wanted the source of every fact and assertion, paragraph by paragraph. Howard remembers it as “the literary equivalent of a strip search….‘Spread ’em.’”

From his parents’ house, Wallace became a writer in reverse, laying bare sources of fiction some of which he’d written two years before. He whipped off an eighteen-page response to Howard.¹⁴ He was still not sure how much trouble he was in. In his letter he tried at times to be coy:

p. 148 David Letterman has never to my knowledge said “Some fun now, boy”—at various intervals or not. It is, though, weirdly just the sort of thing he’d say.

Other places he was apologetic. He admitted he’d seen Saint James on Letterman in late 1986 or early 1987 and had thought her appearance might be

a neat device for exploring both the way Letterman’s program’s humor and interaction worked and the feelings a mildly famous person who must confront, publicly, the fact that her fame is and is deservedly mild must be experiencing.

While admitting that the essence of the story had been taken from real life, Wallace was disingenuous about the implications:

While the main character is in no way supposed to represent the person Susan St. James, her interview with Letterman, their discussion of the Oreo subject, and her way of insisting to Letterman (with much more sarcasm than is in the story) that she did the commercials for fun is truly both a subject of the story and a purloined piece of actual public data. That this might suggest to people that the story is “about” Ms. St. James the person never crossed my mind.

He remembered Turner’s asking him where he’d gotten the dialogue for the story from but said it just “did not occur to me as a thing to tell about.” Nor had he thought to mention the source of the protagonist’s name, Susan—“a colossal boner.” There was, he admitted, giving up, “at least a line a page that’s either lifted or I just don’t remember.”

“My Appearance,” he knew, was a lost cause: “In terms of legality and fairness to editors, it’s a fucked piece of work,” he wrote Howard. But he continued to fight for the other stories in the collection, where he felt less indebted to real-life models. He annotated “Little Expressionless Animals” for Howard:

p. 11—John Updike is the name of a real writer whom the character Julie dislikes a lot.

p. 20—Some of the tics mentioned here, i.e. antipathy toward digital watches and caffeine, fear of flickering fluorescence, are tics of girls I’ve gone out with.

And when he came to his beloved “Westward,” his wit revived:

p. 260—Kierkegaard is long dead, and I think his ideas are public domain — either that or a lot of professors everywhere are doing actionable stuff.

Behind the snark there was also a germ of true confusion, of mystification. If you were exploring the nature of reality, especially media reality, didn’t you have to enfold that reality in your work? Since he was a boy, Wallace had expected to know the reason behind the rules. Why could you use the names of characters from “Lost in the Funhouse” in one story, he asked Howard now, but not incidents from a Letterman show in another? “Maybe I’m stupid; I don’t see the difference.” Howard passed on the long letter to the lawyers for Viking Penguin. The stories were riddled with legal issues; Wallace had proven anything but reliable; short stories were not moneymakers. Though galleys had already been printed, they decided not to go ahead with publication, to its editor’s and author’s horror. “They didn’t even think they were gonna lose, they just thought they’d get sued,” Wallace complained to an interviewer almost a decade later, still appalled:

They invoked the principle of what they called the right of publicity. Not right to privacy, but a right to publicity, such that publishing the Jeopardy! story would be the equivalent of my capitalizing on a physical resemblance to Pat Sajak — like running around at mall openings as Pat Sajak, and receiving income that was rightfully his. Which seemed to me so utterly bizarre.

He had a point. What had he done besides what a writer must do? He had taken several entertainments most Americans were so familiar with that they could not see how important they were and showed why they mattered. He had pointed out toxins in the culture and warned readers against them. He had been enormously but not falsely entertaining. Far from trying to make money off Pat Sajak’s or David Letterman’s reputations, he had showed how they made money off of us, off of our flaccid idea of humor and our corrupted sense of self. And for this he had received an unceremonious dumping.

The turn of events would be a terrible blow to any writer, but to Wallace, who felt he had traveled so far in his work from Broom, it was particularly devastating. The demise of “Westward” was especially upsetting, as it had found no magazine publisher. He had written a suicide note that no one would ever read. But even as this debacle was unfolding, Wallace was pushing forward with his career. While he had been teaching at Amherst, he had gotten a request from the Review of Contemporary Fiction, a small avant-garde journal, to contribute a piece to their “Novelist as Critic” issue. Other participants included Gilbert Sorrentino and Barth himself. Wallace was to represent the younger generation, his pay $250. He found the company “daunting…but that obviously makes the whole thing an honor,” as he wrote to the editor, Steven Moore.

Wallace responded with a long essay, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.” For those who had read only the soufflé-light Broom, the intensity with which he explicated the current malaise writers found themselves in might well have come as a surprise. “Our generation,” Wallace began, “is lucky enough to have been born into an artistic climate as stormy and exciting as anything since Pound and Co. turned the world-before-last on its head.” In his view, the key force in this unstable environment was the ubiquity of television, which creative writers and their teachers had not yet grasped fully:

The American generation born after, say, 1955 is the first for whom television is something to be lived with, not just looked at. Our parents regard the set rather as the Flapper did the automobile: a curiosity turned treat turned seduction. For us, their children, TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We quite literally cannot “imagine” life without it.

There was more than a bit of self-reference in this point: if anyone couldn’t imagine life without TV, it was Wallace. But the personal was becoming the societal for Wallace, and in his cosmology, TV was an enormous force. It had already remade narrative by breaking stories up into short, palatable, and reassuring segments. Everything from our myths to our relationships was succumbing to this great dispenser of pabulum.

Wallace believed the “three dreary camps” of current fiction writers corresponded to three different responses to this insidious force. One camp consisted of the young hip brat pack writers like McInerney and Ellis, whom he defined as practicing “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, declaimed via six-figure Uppies and their salon-tanned, morally vacant offspring.” A second camp were the minimalists. He characterized their style as “Catatonic Realism, a.k.a. Ultraminimalism, a.k.a. Bad Carver.” And the third was just about every other writer he’d ever read, especially those favored by his teachers at Arizona. These writers practiced

Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words “competent,” “finished,” “problem-free”: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to “show” what’s “told”; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by any Freitag [sic] on any Macintosh.¹⁵

Wallace allowed that some critics might see minimalism or postmodernism as attempts to escape the prison of modern television-shaped reality, but he argued forcefully that they were each too limited to solve the problem:

Both these forms strike me as simple engines of self-reference (Metafiction overtly so, Minimalism a bit sneakier); they are primitive, crude, and seem already to have reached the Clang-Bird-esque horizon of their own possibility.

For Wallace, the great flaw of most fiction was that it was content to display the symptoms of the current malaise rather than to solve it. Wallace wasn’t even sure exactly what fiction that surmounted television-mediated reality would look like, but he believed that any writer who figured it out would sound different from one who didn’t:

If one can stomach a good dose of simplification…there can be seen one deep feature shared by all the cutting-edge fiction that resonates with the post-Hiroshima revolution. That is its fall into time, a loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread. Its unblinking recognition of the fact that the relations between literary artist, literary language, and literary artifact are vastly more complex and powerful than has been realized hitherto. And the insight that is courage’s reward — that it is precisely in those tangled relations that a forward-looking, fertile literary value may well reside.¹⁶

Of course readers who knew his recent work from magazines would realize that this wasn’t a bad description of the stories Wallace had collected in Girl with Curious Hair, but Wallace could hardly put himself forward as an ideal anymore: he wasn’t writing and even worse, just as the article was appearing, it was becoming clear the volume of stories his essay was meant to gloss were not going to come out. His prolegomenon would have no follow-up.

As the spring of 1988 passed, Wallace’s thoughts turned again to Arizona. If he could get back there, he became increasingly hopeful, he could return to the work and the pleasure in the work he had known during his previous stay. Even if the creative writing professors at the university there did not want him, the undergraduate writing program staff still remembered his extraordinary teaching and the award he’d gotten. They were happy to have him back as an instructor, to start in the fall. Wallace decided to go west in May, rather than spend the summer months as an overgrown child in his parents’ house. “I miss the heat and the plethora of feminine pulchritude,” he wrote Corey Washington, acknowledging that “I return less than triumphant to Tucson.”

In Tucson, Wallace first stayed with Heather Aronson’s sister Jaci, in a house with a swamp cooler. He slept in the living room, where there was a stereo, so he could listen to meditation tapes he had brought. He ate all the Pop-Tarts in the house and tried to give his hostess money for them and never unpacked his computer, saying he was worried about the humidity.

With Heather’s help, Monica’s, a local bakery, hired him. His job was to come in early and prepare the sourdough bread for baking. The proprietors loved his company, Aronson remembers — Wallace could turn on his “jus’ folks” quality when he wanted to. And he found relief in the physical labor — it requires a lot of upper body strength to stir sourdough mixture. “I mark time by the number of headbands I soak and have to put in the sink,” he wrote Nadell in July, with some satisfaction. But within he was unhappy, nervous, and felt now like whatever could go wrong would. He wanted to know what had happened to the Jeopardy! story that the Paris Review had taken almost a year before. It had been awarded the John Train humor prize and $1,500, money he could use. “Do you suppose,” he asked his agent, “they decided I was playing a joke on them with the story and decided to play an even crueler one on me?” He did not realize or had forgotten that the story had come out in the spring, while he was explaining himself to the Viking Penguin lawyers.

He spent time with Rich C. It was he who had sent Wallace the tapes, actually testimonials by Bob Earl, an alcoholic whose talks on faith and recovery had inspired many addicts. Rich C. was a member of a more focused recovery group than the Urbana one Wallace had attended. They derided the therapy-like techniques of such chapters as, he recalls, “tissues and issues.” The members of the Tucson chapter, were, by contrast, “Big Book fundamentalists” who emphasized a careful adherence to the twelve steps to sobriety that the founding text of alcohol recovery prescribed.

Rich C. became Wallace’s sponsor in the Tucson chapter, the more experienced recovering addict to whom he could turn for practical and spiritual help. One step in the program required the alcoholic to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of his life and all the decisions that had gotten him to this point — this Wallace did in a ten-hour-long monologue in which he recounted to Rich C. everything from his childhood anxieties to the troubles in his parents’ marriage to his worries about not being able to write. Another step required the alcoholic to apologize to people he had harmed. Wallace went to see Ostheimer and said he was sorry, explaining that there had been another woman waiting in San Francisco the weekend he had left her and that he suffered from a sex addiction. He wrote to Professor Kennick at Amherst and admitted that, against the rules, he had consulted secondary sources for papers he’d written in his class. He sent Dale Peterson money for the alcohol drunk from his cabinet. “I’m enclosing a small but I think accurate sum to reimburse you for liquor-losses,” he wrote, saying it would be “a personal favor” if Peterson took the money. “This stuff is no fun,” he added, “but I absolutely ran out of rope last winter, and I simply have got to find a different way to live.” He said the group he had joined “has an incredibl[e] success rate for people even more f — ed up than I, and I am just doing what they tell me.”

Wallace moved out of Jaci’s house and in with Rich C. Part of the time sobriety left him so confused that he just lay on the couch and watched TV, but slowly he regained his footing and began to participate in the recovery group. He apologized to Heather Aronson for exaggerating his SAT scores (in fact it was to Forrest Ashby he had claimed they were perfect) and to Amy for his cruelty when she was younger. He asked his sponsor whether it might be possible to smoke pot if he dropped the drinking; after all, that had been his routine for almost a decade. “Why not just shoot heroin to avoid alcohol?” Rich C. replied, unconvinced. His sponsor taught him the Saint Francis prayer—“Lord, make me a channel of thy peace”—and he recited it often. A key part of the recovery program is to surrender to “a power higher than ourselves.” This was the hardest part for Wallace. He came from a family of skeptics. He claimed that his parents refused to let him or his sister go to church because it would contaminate the rigor of their thought; believers were little better than dupes.¹⁷ Yet Wallace was also a habitual top student; when he took a class he wanted to ace it. He invoked thinkers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein in an attempt to understand just what or whom he would be surrendering to. Rich C. sought to simplify the challenge: “All this step says is are you willing to make a decision.”

For the first time in his life, Wallace found his outsized intelligence a liability. To do well in recovery required modesty rather than brilliance. It was not easy for him to accept humbling adages like “Your best thinking got you here.” But then how smart could he be, the other program members would remind him at their meetings, if here he was in a room in the basement of a church with a dozen other people talking about how he couldn’t stop drinking? Wallace looked for other ways to excel. Some recovery fundamentalists insist that a true return to health means abstaining from all substances, including prescription drugs. So despite the reminders Wallace was getting to “Just do what’s in front of you to do,” as another of the program’s slogans goes, he quickly found himself with a new goal. To do without the Nardil, on which he’d relied for the past four years, would mark him as an exceptional recovery member. He hoped for an additional benefit — it was always possible that getting completely clean would jump-start his writing. His concentration was often poor, though whether it was the pot and alcohol or the Nardil and Xanax and other prescription drugs he sometimes took he did not know. When he bruited getting off the Nardil to his sponsor, Rich C. gave him an organization pamphlet emphasizing that meetings were not a substitute for a medical opinion. Wallace may have gone to talk to a psychiatrist (he noted on a medical history years later that he had consulted a doctor “only slightly if at all”), but whatever it was he heard or didn’t hear, he emerged ready to be completely drug-free.

He stopped taking the Nardil in mid-August and for a while seemed fine. Earlier in the summer he had moved to a cabin in the foothills to the west of the city, far from the campus and his past. He was determined to avoid his drinking and drug buddies, most of whom were still in Tucson. They worried about him and asked him if he was okay. “I’m lonely but I don’t want to come out of my house,” he told Jaci when she called him. “The effort is really hard for me.” From his kitchen he had a view of saguaro cactuses and sandy hills.

While he was in the cabin, a publisher sent him a galley of a novel by a writer he had barely heard of, one that impressed him deeply and seemed to embody all the literary qualities he had called for in his “Fictional Futures” essay. The book was Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City. Set in St. Louis, it mixed postmodernism and traditional storytelling and showed a familiarity with its chosen city that Wallace could only marvel at. It decanted a Pynchonesque conspiracy in media-mediated language; it was about the word and the world, realism for an era when there was no real. Wallace responded with enthusiasm to its editor, Jonathan Galassi:

I’m having a lot of trouble with my own stuff right now, and this book, a freaking first novel, seems so much more sophisticated than anything I could do plot-wise, so precocious in its marriage of theme and character and verisimilitude and phantasm, so simultaneously wild and controlled, that I found myself hugging criticisms of it to myself in unabashed self-defense (a subspecies of envy).

The novel was so good, Wallace concluded, that it “depressed” him. Later, he saw a copy of Franzen’s novel in an Arizona bookstore and was disappointed to see that the blurb he had given wasn’t used.

The semester started. Nardil leaves the body slowly, over weeks, and Wallace was by now feeling what it was like to be in an unmedicated depression, as he had not since his breakdown the summer after graduating from Amherst. His friends in recovery told him they were worried. He looked haggard, withdrawn, with slumped “barstool shoulders,” as Rich C. remembered it.

He began teaching a fiction writing class. He gave his students Updike’s “A&P” to read, and also the first paragraph of Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People,” to show the different ways you could describe a woman’s expression. He also threw in more innovative writing, such as Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight, the book he’d fallen in love with his first year in the MFA program, and a story by his friend Forrest Ashby. But within a few weeks he knew he was not going to make it through the semester. When Franzen asked where to write him — the two had struck up a correspondence after Wallace’s note to Galassi — he replied that by mid-October the chances of his still being in Tucson were “remote.” And in fact in late September, only weeks after the start of school and about a month after stopping the Nardil, he called his mother and asked her to come and get him. Amy Wallace called Heather Aronson, who with her sister Jaci went and looked after Wallace while they waited for Sally to arrive. They found their friend lying on his couch under blankets. His eyes were glued to the TV and he refused to drink or eat. A pot of weeks-old chili sat on the stove, and the computer that he had brought to Arizona was still in its boxes. He said he’d befriended a tarantula on his back porch.

A few days later, his mother came. The two rented a U-Haul, piled his stuff in the back, and took turns reading a Dean Koontz novel on the sixteen-hundred-mile trip back to Urbana. At twenty-six, Wallace was home for the fourth time after a breakdown. He was bitter and humiliated and felt as if his life was over. The same psychiatrist who had prescribed Nardil for him the first time put him back on the drug, but it did not have the same effect. For Wallace, life without any protection from depression was unlivable. His agony deepened. The Bad Thing was taking over again, eating him up. One night he took an overdose of Restoril, a sedative he’d been given for insomnia. His father found him the next morning, and an ambulance rushed him to the hospital, where he was put briefly on life support and had his stomach pumped.

Despite this near-tragedy, Wallace continued to write letters — the need to express himself in words never flagged. He wrote to Nadell on October 23 from the intensive care ward:

By now I expect maybe you’ve heard…I finally did something stupid last Wednesday simply because it hurt so bad I was willing to kill myself to have it end. A lot of the trouble has to do with writing, but none of it with having stuff to send you or publications or careers, nothing to do, really, with anything exterior to me.

He explained how hard the past few months had been on him: “I just seemed to lose my will to work as well as the ability to organize myself or my thoughts…. So far these haven’t come back and my confidence as a writer has left too…, confidence in being…a minimally functional human being. My ambitions at this point are modest and mostly surround staying alive.” He promised he would not try to kill himself again for the sake of his family, instead swore he would “try…to find a way to live and find a way of writing even if it’s not for publication. It’s what I really love to do. I’m figuring now, though, better an alive janitor than a dead whatever.”

The Nardil didn’t stabilize Wallace and his psychiatrists recommended electro-convulsive therapy. Wallace felt he had no choice but to try it. His sister came and sat with him the day before the treatment. She tried to distract him, but she could see how terrified he was. He had six courses of ECT, and afterward Wallace’s mother remembers that he emerged as delicate as a child. “He would ask, ‘How do you make small talk?’ ‘How can you know which frying pan to pick out of the cupboard?’”

His friends who came to visit him then were upset to see his short-term memory gone, but time passed and the depression eased and Wallace thought the treatments had been worth it. “They were unpleasant,” he wrote to his former sponsor in Arizona a month or so later, “but they helped quite a bit.” The Bad Thing had been beaten back. He also finally got some encouraging news about his writing. Gerry Howard had changed jobs, presented the same legal problems to the lawyers for his new employer, W. W. Norton, and gotten an answer opposite to the one Viking Penguin had given. At the end of November Wallace signed a letter consenting to the transfer of publishing rights to Norton, who then paid Viking Penguin the $25,000 it had advanced and became Wallace’s publisher. With a few changes, Norton felt they could publish Girl with Curious Hair. “Isn’t it a marvelous feeling to see the light at the end of the tunnel — and not just another tunnel?” Howard wrote Wallace in late December, with a list of proposed legal alterations. Among the few changes was that the words “moist loincloth” out of Alex Trebek’s mouth had to go. “Please find another ‘favorite word’ besides ‘loincloth,’ one without homoerotic associations,” Howard wrote. Wallace agreed to the changes—“loincloth” became “induce.”

“My favorite word,” says Alex Trebek, “is moist. It is my favorite word, especially when used in combination with my second-favorite word, which is induce.” He looks at the doctor. “I’m just associating. Is it OK if I just associate?”

At last the book would be published, small consolation for what was, Wallace wrote his sponsor, “far and away the worst year of my life.” He added: “I think I got the idea that if one got clean & sober and worked very hard” on the program, “life couldn’t help but get better. Well for me it’s not been true.”

Amazingly, the beginning of 1989 found Wallace at work. He had begun something, he wrote the editor of Conjunctions, Brad Morrow, in mid-January, “that’s shaping up to be very long and very strange.” And to Steven Moore, at the Review of Contemporary Fiction, he added the same day, “I have only very recently been able, emotionally and time-wise, to start on a new project.” He began sending out his work and collecting rejections just as he had at Arizona. He wrote to Brad Morrow in an upbeat mood three weeks later:

Personally I love sending stuff out — the careful Xeroxing, the cover letter that talks the thin line between unctious [sic] and arrogant, the SASE, the plumpness of the envelope…I’m the only Aspiring person I know who actually kind of likes (the first few) rejections, because that means I get to send it out again. I’d love to send you something out of the hopper, but as I said all I’ve got is a hundred or so pages of something that’s shaping up to be very long, possibly incoherent, and almost completely unexcerptable.”

What Wallace was working on is unclear — it may have been the pages that frustrated him at Amherst pulled out again or a reworking of the short story “Order and Flux in Northampton,” which he would shortly offer to Conjunctions.¹⁸ And his rediscovered élan seemed slightly forced — even to him.¹⁹ In his heart he was aware that something had to change. He could not go on this way forever. He was about to turn twenty-seven and he was still dependent on his parents for food and housing. His encounters with the mental health system had cost his insurance company a lot of money, and when the insurance ran out, his family had had to foot the bill, filling Wallace with guilt. To Morrow he wrote, “I figure if I ever want a mate and kids with straight teeth and command of the language I’m going to have to figure out a way to ensure income. The stuff I’m working on now is almost incoherent, and it would be at least two years before it was either done or any good or both.”

Remembering his early years at Amherst, he thought perhaps he might turn back to a professional career in philosophy. There was a literary precedent for such a decision — William Gass taught philosophy at Washington University — and he would have both structure and health insurance. Wallace applied to the graduate programs at the University of Pittsburgh, Princeton, and Harvard. One advantage of this last was that Mark Costello lived in nearby Boston, working as a legal associate. All three schools admitted Wallace and offered aid: he still had his remarkable college transcript, as well as stellar recommendations, a well-reviewed novel, and a second book on the way. What was troubling him was hidden. He chose Harvard. It had prestige, Costello, and three renowned philosophers, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, and Stanley Cavell. To be admitted alone was an obvious honor, one his father would appreciate. He wrote a friend that he thought he could get a doctorate in two or so years. The average student took almost a decade.

By the time Wallace arrived in Boston in April 1989, Costello had already found them a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a clapboard house in Somerville, near the Cambridge line. The neighborhood was known as Little Lisbon, described by Wallace in a letter to Franzen as “95 % Portuguese and Brazilian aside from the young paleface refugees from the prices of H[arvard] Square and Back Bay.” On his way east Wallace’s car broke down in Ohio in front of a bar with a cigarette machine, which prompted him to take up smoking again (he had likely already started with pot and alcohol when he began to write again). He and Costello built cinderblock bookshelves and bought a futon and two thrift shop easy chairs. One smelled so bad that Wallace took it out to the curb and bought a new silver velour recliner instead. He took the front bedroom, Costello the back.

Costello would leave every morning in his suit and tie for his work as a lawyer, while Wallace stayed behind in the same Clearasil-stained bathrobe he’d worn since college, his shower towels spread out to dry. Wallace was writing, Costello saw, and filling notebooks — he came with a maroon spiral-bound one — though Costello did not know with what and Wallace did not tell him. Costello would come home and find his friend where he had left him, in his recliner, many hours and several showers later, a pen in his mouth and the notebook on his lap. “How was your day, honey?” Wallace would call out. For Wallace it was fun being back with his old roommate in the Northeast, and he was riding a high, not unlike the one after he had begun Nardil just before graduate school. Everything must have looked like it once had. “It’s lovely and crowded and ethnic and a far cry from flat black land straight to the world’s curve,” he wrote Steven Moore in mid-April.

Professionally Wallace was in a holding pattern combined with a juggling act. He was waiting for the Norton publication of Girl with Curious Hair in August and the start of graduate school a month later. Most of his time was taken up with nonfiction pieces, one a review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a book he’d bought because he found the advertisement in the Review of Contemporary Fiction irresistible. “I may well be,” he acknowledged to Moore, “the world’s most kindly predisposed reader” of the novel.

But he found out the hard way that not everyone admired the book as much as he. Downstairs from Wallace and Costello was a freelance intellectual and part-time furniture mover, who called himself “the World’s #1 David Foster Wallace fan.” “Not that Broom of the System isn’t a piece of shit, mind you,” he would tell Wallace. “It’s just less of a piece of shit than anything else being published.” Wallace was drawn to this “failed english grad student,” as he called him in a letter to Moore. The two would watch police shows — the mover called such viewing “monitoring the popular culture,” a congenial phrase for Wallace. The mover’s girlfriend was a beautiful heiress from Texas, whom he had nicknamed “the Lizard.” Wallace began a relationship with the young woman, and he and her boyfriend wound up fighting — though not over the Lizard. It was over Markson’s novel, which Wallace had recommended to him.

Thinking and writing about the novel was an enormous gift and time-snare to Wallace. The book narrates the thoughts of Kate, a woman who is either the last person on earth or else deluded that she is. The novel dramatizes the Wittgensteinian stance that the world is nothing but observed facts, a proposition that leads, as Wallace would write in “The Empty Plenum,” his essay on the book, to the belief that “one’s head is, in some sense, the whole world.” Kate’s affectless thoughts thus could be a record of Wallace’s mind at its most depressed:

There is nobody at the window in the painting of the house, by the way.

I have now concluded that what I believed to be a person is a shadow.

If it is not a shadow, it is perhaps a curtain.

As a matter of fact it could actually be nothing more than an attempt to imply depths, within the room.

Although in a manner of speaking all that is really in the window is burnt sienna pigment. And some yellow ochre.

In fact there is no window either, in that same manner of speaking, but only shape.

So that any few speculations I may have made about the person at the window would therefore now appear to be rendered meaningless, obviously.

Unless of course I subsequently become convinced that there is somebody at the window all over again.

This was not a book that spoke to most readers — Kate does not, cannot, find a way out of her prison, and the book ends where it begins, with her isolation — but it spoke to Wallace. His downstairs friend was not convinced. He felt that Markson’s novel was finally conventional and found Kate’s voice “inauthentic.” Wallace, having written a novel from a woman’s point of view, considered himself the authority here. In any event, he loved the book — in his essay he would declare it “one of the U.S. decade’s best”—and wasn’t going to see anyone tap-dance in cleats on it. The dispute turned into a fight — at least according to an account Wallace wrote Moore. His downstairs neighbor swung, Wallace swung back, the mover swung a second time and broke Wallace’s nose—“the exact part of my nose that was already x’rayed and covered with a useless bandage” from a basketball injury, Wallace wrote with pride in a letter to his editor.²⁰

Wallace’s other big project was a long piece on rap music. In Somerville, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, by the late rock critic Lester Bangs, was required reading. Wallace admired Bangs’s exultant prose, which probably came closer to the way Wallace talked than any other writing. Bangs’s phrase “an erection of the heart” became one of Wallace’s favorites, leading to the definition of great fiction in his essay on Wittgenstein’s Mistress as “making heads throb heartlike.”²¹ Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train was another book the roommates handed back and forth, in part an exploration of Elvis Presley’s musical roots. Bangs and Marcus had found their subject in the music of earlier eras, but Wallace became increasingly interested in whether a parallel effort might be able to extract some larger meaning from current popular music. Early in the spring, a slacker friend of Costello’s from New York brought up a cassette of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy, and the roommates were intrigued. Rap was just entering the mainstream, a mixture of verbal innovation and societal defiance. N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton had just come out, and Tone Lōc’s “Funky Cold Medina” was one of the fastest-selling singles ever. Rap was on its way to becoming gangsta rap, nihilism replacing hedonism, but at the moment the claims that could be made for it as serious art were enticing. One night, at a diner near their house, the two young men took stock of the situation. They read, as Costello remembers, in the Boston Globe that cars were being stopped just for playing N.W.A.’s “Fuck tha Police.” Wallace admired the energy in rap, its careless creativity while he felt so burdened. He found the way the singers played with their own fame in their lyrics intriguingly postmodernist. There was also the irony to be explored that rap musicians were able to lift from others without fear to create their own art, just the transgression for which Viking Penguin had punished him.

Wallace’s passion for rap was theoretical, verbal, abstract. The music never touched him as did the stoner songs of high school or the moody tripping songs of Amherst. His interest had the quality of a very smart kid slumming it. But he was drawn to its defiance, its opposition to the authority and decorum by which he had lived his difficult life. There was an element of self-hatred to his stance. If his world had collapsed, let art collapse with it. One day the two young men went to a concert of Slick Rick and Gang Starr at a Roxbury high school, but the sound system failed and the gym grew hot. Wallace, as often happened at concerts, had an attack of claustrophobia, and Costello drove him home.

Wallace no longer felt he was writing well — the lift post — shock therapy had dissipated — and even nonfiction was bringing problems. He was, remembers Costello, writing seventy-five-word sentences, all the information in his head pouring out at once. “No one writes nonfiction like this,” he told his roommate. Sometimes he would write twenty-five thousand words in a day, Costello remembers, then cut them the next. Wallace’s relationship with the page was now so confused and volatile that he felt he needed a collaborator to face what in his Wittgenstein’s Mistress review he calls “typing paper’s blankness.” He began to leave the portions he’d drafted for Costello to comment on when he got home. Soon the roommates were alternating writing sections of the essay, Wallace by day, Costello by night. (“Chess by mail,” is how Costello describes the collaboration.) Wallace’s gesture to include his roommate was at once generous — he knew Costello still held literary aspirations — and defensive, even desperate.²² He lived on Pop-Tarts and cigarettes and listened to Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship” over and over. When Gale Walden came by, he told her he was in bad shape and she should stay away.

Still he had escaped the Wallace Fund for Aimless Children and was having at least the semblance of a good time. He invited Bonnie Nadell to come and visit in June. “Boston is fun,” he wrote her. “We’ll have laughs, listen to rap and James Brown.” Whatever warnings he had gotten in his Arizona recovery group if he returned to substances, as drugs and alcohol were called, had not come to pass — at least not yet. He would get high or drunk most nights and, as he later told an interviewer, “fuck strangers.” Another nonconformist industry now caught his eye: the pornography business. Pornography fit well into Wallace’s ongoing areas of inquiry: it linked to advertising — the thing really being sold was the idea that we are all entitled to sexual pleasure, which in turn feeds the secondhand desire that Wallace saw at the root of the American malaise, our lives lived, he wrote in his Wittgenstein’s Mistress essay, in “an Information Age where received image & enforced eros replace active countenance or sacral mystery as ends, value, meaning. Etc.”

Wallace began his investigation as a novel. He immediately ran into difficulties. “I’m bogged down in research for something that’s scaring me a lot,” he wrote Franzen in May. “It’s so big and complicated and requires a voice I don’t seem to have in the old quiver.” He told his friend he was lucky to be enjoying his talent and wondered where his own voice for fiction had gone, putting his writing at “3.5 on a 10 scale.”²³ He pushed forward and the pornography project gyrated between fiction and nonfiction. In a later essay in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Costello remembered Wallace’s frenetic and intensive research method this way:

Wallace set timetables for his work, intricate as the Croton-on-Hudson local. Get up. Talk on phone with porn actress famous for giving screen blow jobs. Hang up. Ask: is the porn queen an actress? Look up actress in the OED. Actress: a female actor. Look up actor: one who acts in a drama. Surely a blow job is an act. OK then: is a blow job drama?

At some point, Wallace thought some actual on-set knowledge might help. He explained to Nadell, “You’d be surprised, or maybe not at the paucity of material on the actual nuts and bolts (no pun) of the adult film business.” He went on:

I just need access to sort of mundane facts that I think only hanging quietly out in the background of the real thing would afford: Questions of scripting, average time of shooting, average time of production from purchase of treatment through casting through rehearsals (are there rehearsals? I’d guess rarely) and choreography (obvious) and straight shooting and position-shooting (money shots, come shots, facial reactions, etc.) to editing, printing, distribution negotiations.

Always interested in how media changed the reality it was meant only to record, he focused on porn movie conventions: why the lesbian love scene, the masturbation scene?

Why do many of the movies have a kind of shadowy, dramatically superfluous character who seems to stand for the man watching film (truck driver in Debbie Does Dallas II, obnoxious airplane passenger in Mile-High Girls) and whose final access to female lead(s) effects film’s closure?

Nadell promised to try to help, as did Alice Turner at Playboy. Hurt feelings had healed between them; the two met again in New York when Wallace visited there. “Alice has been marvelous and generous as usual,” he wrote Nadell in late May, “and looks to have ways to pretty much grease the skids.” Turner told him he could use Playboy’s name in his research. She had hopes he might write a novelist-visits-a-porn-set piece.

Nadell came to Somerville in June. Wallace moved to the futon and Nadell slept in his bed. She found her writer writing every morning. In the evening she would go with the two young men for cheap falafel or hamburgers or stay in and listen to music. Soon afterward in New York, she met Lee Smith, an editor at Antaeus who had been in touch with Wallace and Costello. She suggested that their rap collaboration would make a book and he agreed. Smith paid $2,000 as an advance. Wallace was pleased but scared; he wasn’t confident the world needed his nonfiction. Signifying Rappers, as the book was called after a song by Schoolly D, he wrote Steven Moore, “was not meant to carry a cardboard-bordered burden all by itself; it wasn’t meant to.”

In early July, Wallace started a long second visit to Yaddo. Just before, he flew to Los Angeles to research his porn novel and decided definitively while there that his approach to the subject ought to be through nonfiction. He was intrigued by how the women seemed to boss around the men, despite the latter’s large sex organs, and admired the veteran actresses in porn who handled desire with the cool of businesswomen. He watched dozens of sex scenes and interviewed some of the actors. He asked Joey Silvera, a porn actor in his thirties and the star of Slick Honey, how he could have so many erections in a day: “Is it natural glandular horniness or is it a professional thing? Are you all trained to be that way?” He was impressed, he told Tori Welles, the star of Torrid Without a Cause, by how much nicer porn actors were to one another than writers. While in Los Angeles, he also finished up another pass on his rap book and went to Compton to hear some rappers but got so scared he had to leave before he could find the concert — or so he told a friend. He signed a note to Nadell just after returning, “Stay Fly, and Shit…DF Fresh W.”

All this made it hard for him to settle down in Saratoga Springs afterward. The retreat felt different two years after he had last been in residence. The trendy writers whose camp follower he had at times wanted to be were gone and he himself was less impressionable. He believed he knew the limits on his audience and accepted them. “The thing I like about my own prison,” he wrote Moore shortly before arriving, “is I have tenure in my prison.” He had a room in the old main house, on the top floor, and he set up fans facing out of the windows (writers were not allowed to smoke in the building). He had brought along an impossible amount of work: William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, a postmodern novel he had always meant to read, his pornography manuscript, and his research material for his article on Wittgenstein’s Mistress. He assured Steven Moore that he would “carve out two days at Yaddo to reread the book, reread the Tractatus (gulp), and do the piece.” While there he also went quickly through Russell’s Foundations of Logical Atomism, to which Wittgenstein had been responding in the Tractatus. “Fine prep. For the innumerable times I’ll be having to do this sort of instant-mnemonic-pretense shit during the upcoming year,” he told his editor.

He was a dominant figure this time at Yaddo, one of the best-known writers there, with a book published and another soon to come out. Intriguing packages came for him at the mail table. “Let’s move on to the next vector,” he liked to say, when he meant: Let’s get out of here. He would play tapes of his interviews with porn stars for the curious in the common areas, but if you wanted to hear Tami Monroe, you had to come to his room. The others were amazed to learn he was giving up a career in fiction for one in philosophy. He told them it was to free himself from publishers and editors and their demands but at the same time opined that writers were tired of freedom and experimentation and looking for something to believe in. He said he was less worried that the New York Times Book Review would ignore Girl with Curious Hair than that they would put it in their “Briefly Noted” section. He met and became involved with Kathe Burkhart, a conceptual artist. Just as Gale Walden was less conventional than the young women he grew up with in Urbana, Burkhart was less conventional than Walden — he was curious about bondage, so one time she tied him up, using a jump rope he’d brought to exercise with.

Wallace had learned from past mistakes. This time he made sure he had pot at the retreat, and when he ran out, Burkhart flew to New York and got more. When her stay was over and she returned to New York for good, he took up with the novelist Ann Patchett. He wrote Nadell, astonished at the complexity of his dating life, that he was “looking into celibatee orders’.” One day, on a visit to his father’s family in Troy, New York, he drank most of a bottle of Glenlivet and threw up in his sleep: “Thank God I don’t pass out on my back; what a dumb way to die,” he wrote Burkhart, imagining the headline: “SENSITIVE AESTHETE DROWNS IN OWN PUKE! ARTISTE’S ASPIRATIONS ASPIRATED!” He added in another note, “You seem doomed to be involved with addicts.”

Yaddo the second time was a hurried-up parody of the first. He worked late into the night — Burkhart guessed he was taking speed to stay up — but he had no satisfying project to commit to. He worked mostly on the pornography manuscript, struggling to separate what was interesting from what was not and always feeling he had failed. He came to think that what was needed was a reported piece on how the industry had changed as the so-called golden age of porn gave way to the era of inexpensive and inartistic video.²⁴ Inevitably, he returned to Somerville dissatisfied, nothing finished, the time nearing when he would have to, as he wrote Franzen, “toddle off with my Get Smart lunchbox for the first day of grad school.” He had ambitions beyond the rational at this point. He wanted to write full-time, fulfill his first-year graduate philosophy student requirements, plus “intro german plus intro library science plus a seminar on Cowper, Collins and Smart in the English Dept., plus probably a part-time job,” he had written to Moore in the spring, adding without irony, “I’m leery of committing myself to more.” Having no center to his work, Wallace seemed to have no limits either.

The final weeks of the summer were hectic. He was often drunk or stoned, but also snuck off to recovery meetings, at least fitfully. Costello would come home from his office and find that Wallace had turned on the fan in his room to disperse the smoke. Since Costello did not care if his roommate got high, he concluded that the only person Wallace could have been hiding his habit from was himself. One night the two went to a party; Costello came home first and Wallace appeared in the early morning with a bloody hand. Remembering that part of recovery was the obligation to make amends, he went back to the grocery whose window he had busted and shoved $200 into the surprised cashier’s hand. “There was no shortage of chaos around 35 Houghton Street, apartment 2,” Costello wrote in summary in his memoir of his time there with Wallace. “Lost bills went unpaid. The phone rang at 3:00 A.M. and women banged on the back door two hours later.”

Everything was coming to a head as Wallace got ready for school. The piece on Wittgenstein remained unwritten, and the porn essay was a mess. He had written an unsuccessful “short journalistic version…a waste of 2 Yaddo weeks,” as he wrote Nadell. He’d thrown that away and now it was again, he added, “horribly long…. I’ve got about 200 pages and am only half done (‘NOT a nice noise, Bonnie’).” Yaddo seemed a complete washout. When he looked for comfort he realized his relationship with Walden was past repair.

Even Alice Turner was furious with him again. She had thought he was researching a novel, but it had turned out he wanted her to publish his insights on the pornography industry. “This magazine is way beyond you,” she lectured him. “We already know the things that you are offering as new discoveries.” Wallace hemmed and hawed, apologized for the “confusion, misunderstanding, deception, whatever,” explained he was trying to get out of the “rut of ‘self-conscious meta-shit’ you seem to think is my only interest and forward gear.” “I must say,” Turner wrote back, “you’re like one of those Bozo bags that bounces back every time you take a shot at it.”

In August 1989, Girl with Curious Hair came out at last. “The stories in his first collection,” Norton’s catalog stated, “could possibly represent the first flowering of post-postmodernism: visions of the world that re-imagine reality as more realistic than we can imagine.” These words perfectly captured Wallace’s hope for the book. Kirkus Reviews, though, found the writer “too much impressed with his own gifts and with some current critical theory.” It was, Wallace wrote to Morrow, “a real brown helmet…. I’ve told Gerry I’m just not going to read fucking reviews, good or bad, this time.” On the plus side, the New York Times Book Review gave the book a full review. Written by Jenifer Levin, a young novelist, hers was the most positive notice his fiction would ever get in that paper. It praised Wallace as “a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent” and singled out not just “Lyndon” but the little-loved “John Billy,” his Gass homage. An even brighter spot was an essay by Sven Birkerts in Wigwag. Birkerts was Wallace’s natural reader, because he too was keenly interested in how writers adapt to a changing world. To the question “What is the fiction writer — the writer who would try to catch us undistorted in our moment — to do? What prose will raise a mirror to our dispersed condition?” he put forward Wallace:

We sense immediately that Wallace is beyond the calculated fiddle of the postmodernist. He’s not announcing as news the irreparable fragmentation of our cultural life; he is not fastening upon TV and punk culture and airport lounges as if for the first time ever. Wallace comes toward us as a citizen of that new place, the place that the minimalists have only been able to point toward. The rhythms, disjunctions, and surreally beautiful — if terrifying — meldings of our present-day surround are fully his. Wallace is, for better or worse, the savvy and watchful voice of the now—and he is unburdened by any nostalgia for the old order.

Few other critics felt as Levin and Birkerts did. Most newspaper reviewers skipped the book entirely, and those who wrote about it mostly evaluated the individual stories. Wallace felt that missed the point — who cared if one story was better than another? The point was that the collection as a whole was meant to open the door to a new kind of fiction. “A lot of it is like being told your soup needs less salt,” he complained to Moore.

Not that Wallace himself didn’t have clear favorites in the collection. These are evident in an exchange of letters with Franzen. Wallace had never had close literary friends; he was too competitive, judgmental, and self-absorbed. Most literary fiction he did not care about, and what few books were worth reading were worth writing, which meant in turn that he wished he’d written them. The no-writer-friends rule was not conscious but grew out of his personality, and like most of Wallace’s behavior, had a refractory edge: he also felt guilty that he felt this way, which made him all the more want to avoid the whole issue.

But the past few years had been humbling ones for Wallace, and the humiliation had made him more open to other writers’ writing. In fact, in such moments some aspect of his self-anger made him overestimate the work of others in order to diminish his own. Thus, during his time in Somerville two authors had earned his intense admiration. One was William Vollmann, whose collection The Rainbow Stories Wallace had read three times that spring in galleys and thought evidence, as he wrote to Moore, of “the best young writer going.” In that collection, the novella “The Blue Yonder,” half expressionist nightmare, half reportage, “simply separates sock from pod,” he reported to Franzen. Vollmann reminded Wallace of Pynchon, Coover, and William Burroughs but was “remarkably unselfconscious” in his debts, a writer whose every word satisfied Wallace’s call for fiction that subtly parried the media that saturated it in creating a new kind of art.²⁵

In person, though, Vollmann was too odd for the fundamentally bourgeois Wallace. The two had had dinner that spring in New York with Brad Morrow, and afterward Wallace reported to Moore that his counterpart was “more than a bubble off plumb — prefers bloody venison and chocolate cake washed down with Stout for supper, speaks easily of blow-jobs and cooze while we’re eating.” Franzen, the more conventional of the two and a midwesterner, was the better match for Wallace. For one thing he was hungry for the company of other writers. A friendship for him consisted in equal parts of affection and challenge, a dynamic Wallace knew well from his days on his high school tennis team.

Wallace had been exuberant in his praise of The Twenty-Seventh City. Now Franzen wrote Wallace after reading the galleys of Girl with Curious Hair to tell him that he thought he’d written half of a great book. He particularly loved, he wrote the author, “Here and There,” the story of the young man who begins by trying to reinvent literature and ends up failing to fix his uncle and aunt’s old stove; and he particularly hated “Westward,” which he felt provided none of the nourishment of good fiction. For him the heart of the story was the coda, the part with the David and L. — ’s relationship that climaxes in L. — ’s suicide-by-arrow:

By merely abstracting this story, aren’t you showing pretty much the opposite of what you’re telling? That you’re too impatient and too proud to do the stoop-work of creating character, suspense and emotional involvement? For something that’s “NOT metafiction,” the piece, as it stands, is awfully short on these commodities. I think it should have been mailed to Barth, not Norton.

Franzen felt he’d gone too far and crossed out the last line before he mailed it, but even so Wallace, opening the envelope at Yaddo, was stunned to read that Franzen had liked only “stories 1,2,6,7, and 8” in the collection, leaving out “Westward,” “Lyndon,” “John Billy,” and “Girl with Curious Hair” among others. Wallace had never been written to in this way before. “This Jonathan Franzen guy,” he wrote to Moore in mystification a month later, “keeps sending me these 15-page missives describing how I’ve violated every precept of ‘fiction as a moral exercise, an affirmation of life’.” His own favorites in the book were nearly the reverse of Franzen’s: only the Letterman story, the Jeopardy! story, “Lyndon,” “John Billy,” and of course “Westward” deserved to be in the collection. The other tales, he wrote Moore, had been part of the trade-offs he had had to make with Howard to get “Westward” into the book. “Here and There,” he wrote his new friend, was nothing but “sentimental pretentious pseudo-autobiographical crap.”

Yet he was happy to be attacked in this way; just beneath his self-confidence was always plenty of doubt, and the attention was flattering. He thanked Franzen for his critique, adding that he found his “extensively explained dislike for Westward fascinating.” It was “in its violence immensely gratifying.” He hoped they could meet in Boston soon to “drink or eat or whatever.” Franzen in turn suggested a Red Sox game. Wallace agreed to write a recommendation for his new friend’s Guggenheim Fellowship application.²⁶

Meanwhile, Wallace was facing the reality that few readers cared as much as Franzen about his attempt to remake literature. He hoped for a tour to go with the publication of Girl with Curious Hair, but there wasn’t much of one. He gave a reading at the Cambridge Public Library with a handful of people in attendance, including a schizophrenic woman who kept shrieking. He went down to New York and appeared with Vollmann at Dixon Place, a performance space. At the reading, Vollmann accompanied a story with a starter pistol shot into the air, Wallace covering his ears in pain. Afterward, he and Gerry Howard and a few others went to Café Pig, a restaurant on Houston Street. Howard was unsettled to see Wallace drink three bourbons “in dismayingly quick order” and then disappear downstairs into a bathroom for a half hour with a “proto-Goth girl with black lipstick”—Kathe Burkhart. He realized that the innocent boy in the U2 T-shirt was gone.

Girl could barely be found in bookstores, Wallace observing the increasingly unpromising situation. “The book is not yet out anywhere in New York or Boston,” he complained to Nadell in early November, “and apparently likewise in the Midwest. Curioser and curioser.” The nonreception of Girl was making its author more and more upset — after all, he had no new fiction with which to follow it. He saw the publication, he later told an interviewer, as “a kind of shrill jagged laugh from the universe. About, you know, I’m done, and now this thing, what was it like? This thing sort of lingers behind me like a really nasty fart.” He had risked a psychotic breakdown to create really serious work and hadn’t even gotten a review in the daily Times. He inscribed a copy to Rich C., praising the “pretty jacket” but adding, “This book is dying. You probably have the only copy in Tucson.”

Improbably, come September, the twenty-seven-year-old Wallace became a student again. The philosophy department at Harvard was located in Emerson Hall, a turn-of-the-century redbrick building in the Yard with a quotation from the Psalms inscribed on its façade. Wallace was among only six students admitted from hundreds of applicants. Nearly all had been graduate students in philosophy before. Yet within the department the students were considered beginners, neophytes. “There is no fathoming the subdoctoral mind,” was a phrase one professor liked to invoke, quoting the famous retired departmental head W. V. O. Quine.

As often happened with Wallace, the realization he’d made a mistake was nearly immediate. He went to a seminar taught by Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who held a special place in Wallace’s esteem. Cavell’s lively, learned, but friendly approach to philosophical investigations in books like Must We Mean What We Say? was the closest Wallace knew to his own; indeed Cavell may have been one of his literary models. But in person Cavell seemed to be talking only to himself and his initiates, who circled him like acolytes. Wallace, one student remembers, interrupted the professor and asked him to “make himself intelligible please,” a snarl on his face. Shortly afterward, he stopped going.²⁷

There were other problems. He took a first-year colloquium with John Rawls and found the reading, an anthology called Free Will, impossibly dense. He realized he was too old to go back to school; his classmates in the program seemed academic and sheltered to him. One time he went out with two of them to the Hong Kong, a Chinese restaurant near Harvard Square that specialized in heavily alcoholic drinks, and in the midst of a conversation between the two on semantic externalism, he interrupted to ask, “Have you ever tried LSD?”

His fellow students in turn regarded Wallace as a curiosity, a mystery, almost a primitive type, with his interest in porn and rap. One remembers thinking he’d gone back to school as “an anthropologist.” It was clear to most that he did not have the focus to keep up with the pitiless workload. He was still trying to finish his various freelance projects, and he looked tired and wrung out when he came to class. Gerry Howard visited Wallace around this time and found him in an apartment “messier than any I had been in since college.” He remembered philosophy and mathematics textbooks so abstruse he “could not even understand their titles,” and his author “shaky and unhappy.” Toward the end of Wallace’s brief stint at Harvard, one student came upon him fast asleep under one of the old wooden desks in the library on the second floor of the philosophy building.

Wallace wrote on the dedication page of the copy of Girl with Curious Hair he sent to Rich C. that he was “fucking up.” He added that he still attended two recovery meetings a week, but often hungover, and now had the shakes.²⁸ Faced with the possibility that he would fail at the second of his chosen careers, the one his father had pursued so admirably, Wallace found his stunning energy collapsing in on itself again. It was, he later told an interviewer,

as though the entire, every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you couldn’t function.

Wallace went to a doctor who told him he needed to quit drinking and go to a rehab facility. But Wallace was worried that Harvard would fail him if he took a month off. In late October he forced the issue. He called Costello from the Harvard Health Services and said that he had told the school he was thinking of hurting himself. Once you did that, he explained, the university had no choice but to put you on suicide watch. He asked Costello to bring his bathrobe, his cigarettes, his notebook, and a small TV and meet him at McLean Hospital, the psychiatric institute in Belmont affiliated with the university. “The lovely medical staff at Harvard is putting me in an alcohol rehab and detox center on 11/2,” he wrote Brad Morrow. “Apparently I have liver problems. No joy in mudville.”