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

CHAPTER 5. “Please Don’t Give Up on Me”

The four weeks Wallace spent at McLean in November 1989 changed his life. This was not his first or most serious crisis, but he felt now as if he had hit a new bottom or a different kind of bottom. For all that he had thought of “Westward” as an “Armageddon,” as he would later tell an interviewer, he had really expected it to be a phoenix. From the ashes to which he had reduced postmodernism a new sort of fiction was meant to arise, as laid out in “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.” How else to understand the love note to the reader at the end of “Westward”? But instead of rebirth, a prolonged dying had followed, and for the past year the corpse had moldered. Wallace hadn’t even been able to finish a nonfiction piece without help since 1987. Never before had he worked so hard with so little to show for it.

Wallace was placed in Appleton House. Outside, the building was attractive — colonial revival à la Harvard. Inside it had the look of a faded country hotel, with tattered wine-colored carpets, old brass lamps, and a deep smell of tobacco. Appleton was where the addicts went, with a large room for substance abuse recovery meetings. The medical staff interviewed the twenty-seven-year-old Wallace and told him that he was a hard-core alcohol and drug user and that if he didn’t stop abusing both he would be dead by thirty. Wallace in turn reported the news to Costello, who came the next day. “I’m a depressive, and guess what?” Wallace said. “Alcohol is a depressant!” He smiled through his tears, as if, Costello remembers, he “was unveiling a fun surprise to a five-year-old.” It was of course information Wallace knew already.

The program was meant to shake up the addict, and, with Wallace, it succeeded. Pulling him out of his old life and keeping him away from its temptations and habits helped. In the end, though, what mattered most was probably that the intoxicated Wallace was no longer writing successfully, which left open the hope that a sober one might. Wallace saw a therapist and went to substance abuse meetings every day. He detoxed from the alcohol. Nadell, back in the Northeast to be with her family for Thanksgiving, came by to see her author a few weeks after his admission. Wallace was already calmer by then. He met them in a brightly lit room full of other patients, all smoking and drinking black coffee and meeting with friends and family. Wallace looked so ragged that Nadell borrowed a pair of scissors from the staff and cut his hair. But she was happy to see he was writing in a notebook. His doctors gave Wallace a pass, and he and his friends walked in the woods at the foot of the campuslike property. McLean was the storied holding tank for many literary depressives, from Sylvia Plath to Robert Lowell, and it occurred to Wallace’s friends that this gave him at least some comfort, that he thought of himself as at a mental health Yaddo. Wallace’s cheerfulness, Nadell felt, kept breaking out.

It was Wallace’s expectation that he would go back to Harvard after his stay at McLean. He was, after all, still enrolled in the graduate program. But the psychiatric staff kept advising him against it. They told him that without continuing support he would just go back to his old habits. Returning to Somerville would be a catalyst for that mistake. Wallace was at first resistant — he did not recognize himself in their phrase “hard-core recidivist,” but as the weeks went by he felt farther and farther away from his old self and must have begun, amid his anxiety about writing, to concede the point that survival had to come first. In any event, he chose to go to a halfway house in Brighton run by a woman who had worked in a psychology lab funded by NASA before she herself went into rehab. He hoped she would understand what he saw as the particular problems of a person as intelligent and educated as himself and provide support. It would be the next best thing to McLean, which Wallace was — Costello noted — sorry to have to leave. He had gotten used to the routines — the meetings, the therapy, the order, the prepared meals — not entirely unlike home. Brighton was a world away from Cambridge, and he did not know what to expect. Despite having written a book on rap, his knowledge of anything other than middle-class academic life was minimal. He wrote Nadell at the end of November, “I am getting booted out of here and transferred to a halfway house…. It is a grim place, and I am grimly resolved to go there.”

Granada House was on the grounds of the Brighton Marine hospital near the Massachusetts Turnpike.¹ Wallace gives a good picture of its fictional counterpart in Infinite Jest, the novel it would help inspire:

Unit #6, right up against the ravine on the end of the rutted road’s east side, is Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, three stories of whitewashed New England brick with the brick showing in patches through the whitewash, a mansard roof that sheds green shingles, a scabrous fire escape at each upper window and a back door no resident is allowed to use and a front office around on the south side with huge protruding bay windows that yield a view of ravine-weeds and the unpleasant stretch of Commonwealth Ave.

The compound consisted of seven buildings—“seven moons orbiting a dead planet,” as it is described in Infinite Jest—all leased to various substance abuse and mental health assistance groups. Wallace met Deb Larson, the director, at his new temporary home. Tall and blonde, she walked with a limp: drunk, she had fallen down in her kitchen, hitting her head, causing a partial paralysis. Even then she hadn’t stopped drinking. Wallace respected her. She was pretty and smart and gave him a link to an old life that was still his present — you could almost see Harvard from the top floor of the building.² Recovery facilities tried to control the stress levels of their participants, and one activity they generally prohibited was school. Wallace had no choice but to call the philosophy department at Harvard and ask for a leave of absence. He was too humiliated to go back to get the vegetable juicer, a gift from his mother, that he had left behind in the graduate office.

As a new arrival, Wallace was not allowed out of the building on his own for the first ten days. For the next twenty he could go out only to substance abuse meetings. Then he was expected to find low-level work. Wallace, whose only real skill was teaching and writing, cast around and was able — probably thanks to the presence on his résumé of the head of Amherst College security as a reference — to get hired as a guard at Lotus Development, a large software company. Granada House rules stipulated a forty-hour workweek, so Wallace got up at 4:30 in the morning to take the Green Line subway and worked until 2 p.m., walking a vast disk packaging plant in Lechmere, clocking in his whereabouts every ten minutes and twirling his baton (or so he later said). He would tear pages out of his notebook and send letters to his friends, maintaining contact with the small group of editors and writers who were vital to him. The Lotus experience, he recalled in a later interview, reminded him of “every bad ’60s novel about meaningless authority,” but at the time he bore it well. “Give me a little time to get used to no recreational materials and wearing a polyester uniform and living with 4 tatooed ex-cons and I’ll be right as rain,” he wrote Moore with ironic brio shortly after starting. Even inside Granada House, he managed to attend to the business of being a writer — following up on submissions to magazines and reading pages of stories he had coming out. He could see the strange side of his situation. When the galleys of “Order and Flux in Northampton” arrived from Conjunctions with a page missing, he told Morrow he could send it at his convenience. “I’m not going anywhere for Xmas,” he wrote.

But in his heart he was stunned with what had happened to him. “I am,” he wrote Dale Peterson, “OK, though very humiliated and confused.” He was sharing a barracks-like room in Granada House with four men, one of whom, he wrote Rich C., had had a stroke while on cocaine and had a withered right side. “Mr. Howard,” he told his Norton editor, “everyone here has a tattoo or a criminal record or both!” To Peterson he reported, “Most of the guys in the house are inmates on release, and while they’re basically decent folk it’s just not a crowd I’m much at home with — heavy metal music, black t-shirts & Harleys, vivid tattoos, discussion of hard- vs. soft-time, parole boards, gunshot wounds and Walpole—” Massachusett’s toughest prison. Wallace continued at his security job for more than two months, and then, unable to bear getting up so early, he quit. He went to work as a front desk attendant at the Mount Auburn Club, a health club in Watertown. His job was to check members in — he called himself a glorified towel boy — but one day Michael Ryan, a poet who had received a Whiting Award alongside him two years before, came to exercise. Wallace dove below the reception desk and quit that day.

Wallace’s friends were accustomed to his exaggerations and inventions over the years — they came with his clownish, hyperbolic persona — but when they visited him at the halfway house, they found that what he said was true: he had stepped through the looking glass. His friend Debra Spark, a fiction writer, remembers sitting in on a group therapy session with Wallace one day and being amazed to hear someone recount killing someone while drunk. All the same, Wallace found his place; order, no matter how foreign the context, was always easier for him than the unstructured world. He met with a counselor, as required, and nearly every evening he drove to different parts of the city with other Granada House members for substance abuse meetings. His sponsor was named Jimmy, “a motorhead from the South Shore,” as he called him to David Markson, with whom he had begun a correspondence. Wallace read the Big Book and enjoyed making fun of its cheesy 1930s adman vocabulary to his friends: “tosspot,” “Dave Sheen heels,” “boiled as an owl.” “He laughed at them, but he also knew he needed them or he would die,” Mark Costello, who visited him at Granada House, remembers.

If Wallace found himself in unfamiliar territory, the residents didn’t know what to make of him either. One remembers wondering, “This guy can go probably go to Betty Ford. Why’s he here with us welfare babies?” No one really cared for his cleverness. He was to them a type they’d seen before, someone who, like the character Geoffrey Day in Infinite Jest, tries to “erect Denial-type fortifications with some kind of intellectualish showing-off.” Wallace was back in high school, trying to figure out his place in the pack. “It’s a rough crowd,” he wrote his old Arizona sponsor, “and sometimes I’m scared or feel superior or both.”

Yet a piece of him was beginning to adjust to the new situation. He remembered his last failed attempt to get sober and how he was no longer writing and asked himself what he had to lose. He came to understand that the key this time was modesty. “My best thinking got me here” was a recovery adage that hit home, or, as he translated it in Infinite Jest, “logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.” He knew it was imperative to abandon the sense of himself as the smartest person in the room, a person too smart to be like one of the people in the room, because he was one of the people in the room. “I try hard to listen and do what [they say],” he wrote Rich C., “I’m trying to do it easy…this time,” not “get an A+.…I just don’t have enough gas right now to do anything fast or well. I’m trying to accept this.”

Not that things came easily. The simple aphorisms of the program seemed ridiculous to him. And if he objected to them, someone inevitably told him to do what was in front of him to do, driving him even crazier. The logical tautology behind recovery bothered him too: that recovery defined an alcoholic as anyone who drank heavily and denied he was an alcoholic, which made believing you weren’t an alcoholic a symptom of the disease, whether you were or not. He was astonished to find people talking about “a higher power” without any evidence beyond their wish that there were one. They got down on their knees and said the Thankfulness prayer. Wallace tried once at Granada House, he told Costello, but it felt hypocritical.³

There were many times when he was sure he would start drinking again. “I’m scared,” he wrote Rich C. “I still don’t know what’s going to happen.” He asked his friend for some words of encouragement, and just when he thought he would give up, a letter arrived in which his former sponsor recounted the last time he had been in detox. “They gave me Librium,” he wrote Wallace, “and I threw them over my left shoulder for luck, and I’ve had good luck ever since.” The image, Wallace told his sponsor years later, was just the “good MFA-caliber trope” he’d needed.

Required to do chores in the house, Wallace helped out in the office. This gave him access to a typewriter. Stunned as he was, he understood from the beginning that his fall from grace was a literary opportunity. He had been hypothesizing beforehand about a nation in thrall to its appetites, and here he was living among its casualties. So in the midst of his misery, he was alive to the new information he was getting. The communal house, he would later write, “reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable.” Wallace was known for sitting quietly, listening as residents talked for hours about their lives and their addictions. (Later, residents would often be surprised to find that though he had heard their stories they had not heard his.) The explanations people gave for their behavior startled him with their simplicity, but their voices — always his way in to composition — were unforgettable, and their stories had a clarity his lacked. This was the sort of access to interior lives a novelist could not get elsewhere. He was finding, as he later told an interviewer, that “nobody is as gregarious as someone who has recently stopped using drugs.” Where else could a writer find, as Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest, in a passage that sounds as if Lester Bangs had written it,

twenty-one other newly detoxed housebreakers, hoods, whores, fired execs, Avon ladies, subway musicians, beer-bloated construction workers, vagrants, indignant car salesmen, bulimic trauma-mamas, bunko artists, mincing pillow-biters, North End hard guys, pimply kids with electric nose-rings, denial-ridden housewives and etc., all jonesing and head-gaming and mokus and grieving and basically whacked out and producing nonstopping output 24-7-365.⁴

Wallace and his notebook were a familiar sight in the communal rooms and recovery meetings, trapping little inspirations before they could get away.

Within a few months of arriving, Wallace had already drafted a scene centered on one of the most intriguing residents at Granada House, Big Craig. Big Craig — Don Gately in the novel — was one of the Granada House supervisors and sometimes the house cook. He had first met Wallace when he found the new resident’s stuff on his bunk and threw Wallace’s bag on the ground. Craig was in his mid-twenties, “sober and just huge,” as Wallace would later write in Infinite Jest, looking “less built than poured, the smooth immovability of an Easter Island statue.” Wallace quickly chose a different bed. Craig had grown up on the North Shore and been a burglar and Demerol addict. Friends closed elevator doors on his head for fun when he was a teenager, a detail Wallace would put into Infinite Jest too.⁵

But he turned out not only to come from a different world but also to be quite sensitive. And it did not take Wallace long to see the possibilities in a lug with an interior life. There was a sort of Dostoevskian gloss to him, the redeemed criminal, and Dostoevsky was on Wallace’s mind. He wrote to Dale Peterson shortly after arriving that “going from Harvard to here” was like “House of the Dead…with my weeks in drug treatment composing the staged execution and last minute reprieve from same.” The reprieve, he hoped, would spur the same creative surge it did in the Russian.⁶ But his sense that he could write fiction came and went. Fortunately, Wallace had nonfiction left over from before his intake. He had given up on the pornography essay, but he still owed his piece on Wittgenstein’s Mistress to the Review of Contemporary Fiction. “I think part of why WM is so hard for me right now is that I’m feeling very Kate-ish,” Wallace wrote Steve Moore a month after arriving at Granada House, meaning he was still battling to make a movie when snapshots were all his newly-sobered mind was offering. At Yaddo and in Somerville, he explained, he had also had a great deal of trouble with the project, giving it two tries, “one a vapid gushy book-review thing and the other — not yet typed — a 70-page screed that’s like Harold Bloom on acid.” All the same, he trundled his Tractatus and David Markson’s novel now to the nearby library and in a matter of a month produced a work several times the length of a typical essay.

A new clarity was beginning to emerge in his attempt to wrest such central concerns as self-consciousness and loneliness into controllable form. The prose style that would later separate Wallace’s nonfiction writing from that of his peers was taking form. The approach owed something to Cavell’s plainspokenness and to Bangs’s hipster idiom and yet it was distinctive. It combined informal diction—“way” as an adjective, “weird” and “sort of” where most would write “strange” and “to some extent”—with recondite polysyllabic nouns, a mixture that hinted at the way high and low culture were jumbled in his mind. “And but so” became a way to begin his sentences, an apt phrase to kick off his hurrying, zigzagging thoughts. Wallace was beginning to find the meeting place between a brain in overdrive and a language that had been invented for more leisurely use. It helped that the issues Wittgenstein’s Mistress raised were slightly behind him now. He could look back from his new position of sobriety when he wrote of Kate’s “continual struggle against the slipping sand of English & the drowning-pool of self-consciousness” or asserted that “the empty diffraction of Kate’s world can map or picture the desacralized & paradoxical solipsism of U.S. persons in a cattle-herd culture.” When Moore had editorial questions, he’d call the halfway house, and Wallace, at the front desk, would pick up.

Wallace also began to write book reviews for newspapers and magazines. Though he took them for money, these too helped him organize his thinking. Since his teenage years he’d had a taste for thrillers — they answered the need in his brain for instantly recognizable structures and cartoonish characters — so he was well suited to review Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show for the Washington Post, criticizing the writer as “one of those dreaded commercial successes who’ve become so impressed with themselves they no longer think they have to work at being interesting.”

Fiction was, of course, what Wallace really wanted to write, but here he was having less luck. Some piece of him still felt too fragile to attempt an effort so key to his well-being. The problem, he felt, was not really the words on the page; he had lost confidence not in his ability to write so much as the need to have written. Franzen offered to get together that April when he was in Boston, despite Wallace’s changed circumstances. Wallace said fine but stood him up after they made plans. But because one tenet of recovery is to make amends to those you have wronged, he sent a quick note to his friend explaining his behavior. “The bald fact is that I’m a little afraid of you right now,” he wrote. He begged to be allowed to bow out of their embryonic competition, to declare a truce against this writer who was so “irked by my stuff,” because Wallace was no longer “a worthy opponent in some kind of theoretical chess-by-mail game from which we can both profit by combat.”

He went on:

All I can tell you is that I may have been that for you a couple/three years ago, and maybe 16 months or two or 5 or 10 years hence, but right now I am a pathetic and very confused young man, a failed writer at 28, who is so jealous, so sickly searingly envious of you and Vollmann and Mark Leyner and even David Fuckwad Leavitt and any young man who is right now producing pages with which he can live and even approving them off some base-clause of conviction about the enterprise’s meaning and end that I consider suicide a reasonable — if not at this point a desirable — option with respect to the whole wretched problem.

His avoidance of his only literary friend made him mad at himself, as his anger looped, but to be sitting at a table discussing how to create art would be an inherently false gesture, he felt, because, as he explained to Franzen, he was no longer really an artist:

The problem’s details are at once shameful to me and boring to anyone else. I always had great contempt for people who bitched and moaned about how “hard” writing was, and how “blockage” was a constant and looming threat. When I discovered writing in 1983 I discovered a thing that gave me a combination of fulfillment (moral/aesthetic/existential/etc.) and near-genital pleasure I’d not dared hope for from anything.

He added, “I have in the last two years been struck dumb…. Not dumb, actually, or even aphasic. It’s more like, w/r/t things I used to believe and let inform me, my thoughts now have the urgent but impeded quality of speechlessness in dreams.”

Franzen quickly wrote to reassure him there were no hard feelings. He had only been hoping for “some laffs and companionship from a late afternoon with you in Cambridge.” He too had felt “joyless” in his writing lately. Wallace, though, like a cancer patient having to explain himself to a headache sufferer, did not think their discomfort was equivalent. Two weeks later, hiding out in the Brighton library instead of working on a rulebook for Granada House, he read a popular adventure novel—“a kind of a ripping good read”—and wrote his friend again to try to explain his problem: “I think back with much saliva to times in 1984, 5, 6, 7 when I’d sit down and look up and it would be hours later and there’d be this mess of filled-up notebook paper and I just felt wrung out and well-fucked and, well, blessed.” His anguish, he wrote, had multiple sources, from a fear of fame to a fear of failure. Behind the ordinary fears lurked the fear of being ordinary.

Even as Wallace was complaining that he had lost his old reason for writing, Franzen in his letters was quietly suggesting a replacement. He would remind Wallace of the pleasure Franzen took in creating characters he loved and how the stories he had liked in Girl with Curious Hair had given him the same satisfaction; both were part of “the humble, unpaid work an author does in the service of emotion and the human image.” A year before when Franzen had suggested something similar, Wallace had dismissed it as twaddle. Back then, in the same letter in which he said readers were welcome to think he was an asshole, he had made clear that

[f]iction for me is a conversation for me between me and something that May Not Be Named — God, the Cosmos, the Unified Field, my own psychoanalitic cathexes, Roqoq’oqu, whomever. I do not feel even the hint of an obligation to an entity called READER — do not regard it as his favor, rather as his choice, that, duly warned, he is expended capital/time/retinal energy on what I’ve done.

But now he wondered if his resistance toward a more supportive idea of the writer’s relationship with the reader wasn’t the cause of his blockage. He responded to Franzen:

I’d love to hear more on what “humble, unpaid work an author does in the service of emotion and human image” is…. And how, as a vastly overselfconscious writer, might one still go on having faith and hope in literature and some kind of pleasure…? I admit it: I want to know. I have no clue. I’m a blank slate right now. Tabula rasa or whatever.

He reluctantly acknowledged that he might suffer from “a basically vapid urge to be avant-garde and poststructural and linguistically calisthenic — this is why I get very spiny when I think someone’s suggesting this may be my root motive and character; because I’m afraid it might be.”⁷

Wallace’s stay at Granada House finished in June. Where he chose to go next, he knew, would be important. He had not drunk alcohol or gotten high for seven months. He considered Somerville, Urbana, and Arizona, but instead moved into a transitional facility on Foster Street, just a few blocks away, with Big Craig and two other men from Granada House. The “sober house,” as it was called, was split into men’s and women’s sections. The residents spent most of their time at work and the building had an empty feel compared to Granada House — Amy Wallace visited and found it remarkably clean, considering more than a dozen adults lived there. When the other residents went off to their jobs, Wallace would head for the library in bandana with knapsack to spend the day trying to write. He still did not feel well. He wrote David Markson that he was “so blank and depressed and befogged” that he couldn’t even tell if he liked what he was reading. He and Costello went around Harvard Yard, Wallace showing his friend all the places he had tried to study when he was a graduate student and failed. When he got to Emerson he said he often thought of throwing himself down the stairs. With his friend Debra Spark he went to his Somerville apartment and emptied his things out. He threw out books and piles of manuscripts and drove his computer to the Costello family house in Winchester, Massachusetts. Spark urged him not to throw the material out, saying he’d want it later. “I cannot sit still,” he wrote Markson, “can barely read, and have thoughts that don’t race so much as intertwine in a boily and clotted and altogether nauseous way. Fiction-wise I’m dead in the water.” How he yearned, he said, for “just one tall cool frosted bar-glass of Wild Turkey.” For his nine-month anniversary of sobriety, in July, Wallace’s sponsor gave him a Jolly Pecker, “a squat little fireplug of a phallus, with feet, which when you wind it up hops up and down in a plaintive eager way that just breaks hearts. It seems to capture my state…so aptly I can’t even be bothered to think the guy’s a dork.”⁸

Wallace had paid $20 a week in rent at Granada House. He had had few other costs as he worked to kick his addiction. But now he was facing the ordinary expenses of a Boston-area resident. Book reviews paid a trifle; he had no grant money left. He was back against the old problem that if he taught he might not write but if he didn’t teach he would not eat. It was the one thing he knew he knew how to do, the only thing he thought he could do. Determined to stay in Boston, where he had made a new beginning, he applied to Tufts and Harvard as a creative writing instructor.

Someone new came into his life now, as if to counter this disappointment: Mary Karr, a poet. The Texan-born Karr was in her mid-thirties, seven years older than Wallace. She lived in Belmont with her husband and young son, drove a station wagon, and had the stability and the grit that Wallace felt he lacked. They had in fact met once at a party before he’d gone to McLean and he’d been very taken with her; she was witty and had a raunchy vocabulary. Soon after he moved out of McLean, he saw her at a meeting in Harvard Square. That she was a recovering alcoholic too seemed like serendipity. He quickly grew infatuated. When his friend Mark Costello came up to visit him, the two waited in the back of a meeting hall in the hope that this extraordinary woman would come by. (She did and seemed pleasant but harried to Costello, who was used to his friend’s exaggerations.)⁹ There were warnings Wallace was well aware of against pursuing another person newly in recovery. (Ignoring the prohibition is derided by members as “thirteenth stepping.”)¹⁰ It did not matter to him: here was a kindred spirit, another writer struggling to surrender to a greater power but for whom phrases like “One day at a time” and “Do what’s in front of you to do” hurt the brain.

Deb Larson counseled Karr and Karr also volunteered at Granada House, so Wallace often had occasion to see her. Immediately, he wanted to be involved, but Karr, who was in a shaky marriage and trying to protect her son, says she had no interest. She sensed instability and trouble. “We were both just shocking wrecks,” she remembers; he bragged that he had perfect SATs, and called her Miss Karr “in this obsequious, Charlie Chanish fawning kind of way.” He saw her, she realized, as some sort of mother/redeemer figure.

Wallace did not hear subtle variations in no; he knew only one way to seduce: overwhelm. He would show up at Karr’s family home near McLean to shovel her driveway after a snowfall, or come unannounced to her recovery meetings. Karr called Deb Larson and asked her to let Wallace know his attentions were not welcome. Wallace besieged her with notes anyway. He called himself Sorrowful Werther. She was “Sainte Nitouche,” the saint who cannot be touched, a reference to her favorite book, Anna Karenina. She felt an affinity for him, considered him brilliant but also unsound. One day, she remembers, he arrived at a pool party she was at with her family with bandages on his left shoulder. She thought maybe he had been cutting himself and wouldn’t show her what was underneath — a tattoo with her name and a heart. He called Walden, with whom he was not much in contact anymore, to tell her what he had done. He clearly felt he had made a commitment there was no retreating from. The details of the relationship were not clear to others though: Wallace told friends they were involved, Karr says no.

Karr did not admire Wallace’s writing. She read Girl with Curious Hair and “told him it was not a great book,” she remembers, praising only “Here and There”: “His interest in cleverness was preventing him from saying things.” She advocated more direct prose.¹¹ But Karr was not impervious to his restless mind and contacted a friend who ran the writing program at Emerson College, DeWitt Henry, to recommend Wallace for a job there and assure him that if he proved too unstable to teach the class, she would step in. Henry agreed to take Wallace on as an adjunct professor in the fall of 1990.

In that month he began his reluctant return to academia. He took the Green Line subway to Emerson, “a hip kids’ college in the Back Bay,” as he described it to Markson. The combined rejection of the stories he most admired by the two people whose opinions he admired most — Franzen and Karr — was beginning to tell. When DeWitt Henry put up an advertisement for Girl with Curious Hair on a bulletin board, Wallace pulled it down, saying he was embarrassed by the book. A few weeks into the semester Wallace checked in with Franzen. “Teaching is going OK,” he wrote his friend. “I’d forgotten how young college students are. They’re infants, though: you can see the veins in their little eyelids, you almost have to cradle their heads to help their necks support the skull’s weight.” He found he was popular, known for a loose style and an appealing willingness to digress. “We spend most of our time talking about Twin Peaks and The Simpsons so they think I am an okay caballero,” he told Markson. This was clearly a very different approach than the one he had taken at Arizona and Amherst, where his commitment to his students was preternatural and even a little maniacal, but Wallace was tired and confused: the stage didn’t feel like a stage without drugs and alcohol; it felt like a classroom.

Wallace did have one literary project in which he was putting his energy. Harper’s had asked him to write a 1000 word piece on television for a forum. It had of course sprung to larger-than-life dimensions, consuming his untapped energy. TV remained a subject of paramount interest to him. When he had accepted the assignment, he had joked to Markson, who had been a friend of Malcolm Lowry, that having him write about television was “rather like asking the Consul in his late stages to write a haiku on the history of distillation.” He found interesting tidbits in Widener Library at Harvard to suggest he might be an outlier but he wasn’t a singleton. In recent years, he learned, for instance, educated viewers had come to watch as much TV as uneducated ones; six hours a day was now the national average. He wrote page after page as he tried to wrestle the filthy machine to the mat. He had little hopes of the work being published, so what he was doing was memorandizing himself, though, as he told Markson, even the kill fee — around $1,000—would be “sumptuous.”

The assertion that television promoted passivity was not new — it was standard in the works of cultural critics like Todd Gitlin and Mark Crispin Miller — but for Wallace the charge wasn’t theoretical; it was personal, crucial. TV’s treacly predictability held him in strange thrall, and during periods of collapse he seemed almost literally attached to it. The students he was teaching made him feel the problem was worse than he had known. They were the Letterman generation he had imagined in “My Appearance,” proud of their knowingness. “They’re all ‘television’ majors, whatever that means,” he complained to Markson, adding that he’d had his wrist slapped by his department for “‘frustrating’ the students” with a DeLillo novel (he does not say which) by which he meant to wake them up: “Most…desire to read nothing harder than news headlines off TV cue cards.”

Wallace knew he did not want to stay at Emerson long. He thought about applying for a fellowship but realized he had nothing to propose to fund. “I want to start trying some creative writing again,” he wrote Moore in November 1990, “but I find now that I am terrified to start, have forgotten most of what I (thought I had) learned, and feel like the little reptile section of my brain that used to be in charge of really good writing is now either dead or playing possum in protest.” But whereas a few years before his frustrations would have sent him on a pot binge, his daily recovery sessions taught him how to wait it out. He had just finished his first year of sobriety, a significant event for him. There were still meetings, time with his sponsor, and he also eventually saw a private therapist at Karr’s urging. Predictably, he found therapy both appealingly and apprehensively absorbing. But it gave him another tool to deal with moments of frustration such as this one. “There is absolutely nothing I can do except accept the situation as it is and wait patiently for some fullness-of-time-type change,” he wrote Moore. “The alternative to patience is going back to the way I used to live, which Drs. and non-hysterics at the rehab told me would have killed me, and in a most gnarly and inglorious way, before I was 30.”

Still, acceptance wasn’t a lesson that he took in evenly in all aspects of his life. Where the alcohol and pot had held sway there was now an enormous amount of anger that was not easily acknowledged. Big Craig happened to watch a car cut off Wallace one day when the latter was driving near Foster Street. In fury Wallace rammed his car into the other person’s. “He got out of the car, scratching his head,” Big Craig remembers. “‘Oh Gee, what happened?’”

Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, Wallace’s collaboration with Mark Costello, who was now an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, came out in November 1990, a volley from the past. “Signifying Rappers is the first serious consideration of rap and its position as a vital force in American cultural consciousness,” an ad for the book in the Voice Literary Supplement declared. But Wallace cautioned in the book’s pages, “If you’re reading this in print it’s already dated.” And he was right. By the time the book was published, rap had ceased to be a revelation, though it was still in the news. Its threat to be, as Wallace put it in the book, the “prolegomena to any future uprising,” had been contained. Tipper Gore and George Will had denounced it, the noted professor Henry Louis Gates supported it, and a Florida prosecutor was bringing charges against 2 Live Crew for obscenity. The publisher’s press release offered, “The Authors — white, educated, middle class — occupy a peculiar position, at once marginal and crucial to rap’s us and them equations.” Few reviewers or readers seemed to know what to make of the joint effort. The authors’ stance that rap was “quite possibly the most important stuff happening in American poetry today” felt at once too clever and obvious. The way their alternating short takes on rap resembled rap’s own samplings went unappreciated. At the least, Wallace got to set out his new awareness of the power of addiction. He might have been looking around the Granada House common area when he wrote of a

centerless pop-culture country full of marginalized subnations that are themselves postmodern, looped, self-referential, self-obsessed, voyeuristic, passive, slack-jawed, debased.¹²

Or it may have been his idea of the student body at Emerson.

Though the book attracted little notice, Wallace welcomed its appearance. He was happy to have it in his hands at a moment when he had so little else to show for his work. “I’ve gone from thinking it slight and silly to something I want to send to friends,” he wrote Moore, who arranged a review of the book in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Wallace was so poor that Moore gave him a free subscription so he could read the piece. Wallace asked him whether he might help him find a way out of teaching. “I am the best copyeditor I’ve ever seen,” he bragged, wondering if he could make enough at the trade to “move to the midwest and live in a hovel.” Moore responded that the Dalkey Archive at Illinois State University was looking for a publicity director. Wallace begged off, saying he “couldn’t even take prom-rejection in high school.”

The relationship with Karr was not moving forward, becoming another source of anger. Karr and her husband were still living together. She says she had cut off all contact. Still, Wallace thought if he could have Karr, his life would come together. His time in the house of the dead would be over. She worried about his tendency to what he called “black-eyed red-outs.” She took a fellowship at Radcliffe. He went to the Harvard Law Library and wrote her a note explaining how she could divorce her husband and still keep custody of their son and a share of their assets. She showed it to her spouse. One day she looked out her office window to find Wallace cursing her and demanding the return of a Walkman he’d lent her. When she threw it down to him, he took it, stomped off, and put his fist through a car window.

Several months later, in April 1991, he wrote to Markson that he had torn the ligaments in his ankle playing softball and refused the painkillers the doctors offered him, a decision that took “every shred of will I’ve got.” “What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all,” Don Gately thinks in an important scene in Infinite Jest, as he lies in the hospital with a gunshot wound, refusing any drugs. “But he could choose not to listen.” Real life was not so heroic: “I am not taking it well,” Wallace remarked to Markson. “I have substituted chronic complaining for analgesic, and so far it’s worked OK.”¹³ He walked with crutches but could not sit up, which meant he could not type, which in turn excused him from book reviewing, a relief. He read for pleasure instead, enjoying James Baldwin a lot and Thomas McGuane much less. Walker Percy gave him “the creeps.” He started The Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer and hated it, admitting in a letter to Markson that he found the writer “unutterably repulsive. I guess part of his whole charm is his knack for arousing strong reactions. Hitler had the same gift.” He read Vineland and discovered his love for Thomas Pynchon was gone, whether because he had changed or his hero had. He wrote Franzen that he found Pynchon’s first novel in nearly two decades “flat and strained and heartbreakingly inferior to his other 3 novels. I get the strong sense he’s spent 20 years smoking pot and watching TV — though I tend to get paranoid about this point, for obvious reasons.” Franzen and he were continuing their bumpy version of bonding. He scolded Franzen for moving back to New York City. “The people I’ve known there who’ve led real lives there never seem quite to escape,” he wrote. In response Franzen sought to cheer his friend with a gentle cuff: “I think that eventually you’re going to start doing fiction again and that it will be even better than what you’ve done so far — as funny, as smart, but with some clearer connection to the soul.” He quoted Wallace a poem by Emily Dickinson to underscore his point:

Mirth is the Mail of Anguish

In which it cautious arm

Lest anybody spy the Blood

And “you’re hurt!” exclaim.

Wallace finished up the academic year amid disappointment. He told people he and Karr were growing closer but she had decided to move with her family to Syracuse, where she had been offered a teaching job. In a postcard to Franzen Wallace recorded his amazement at her departure. “I finally told Mary I’d marry her,” he complained, “and within 3 weeks she’d decided she couldn’t divorce her husband. She’s moving away with him in August. I am not pleased, but there is literally nothing I can do. I am sad.” (She says they were not in contact.) He spent a confused summer in Boston, pining for Karr. “Nothing is new,” he wrote to a college friend, “I go to…meetings, volunteer on their phone lines, read a lot, write a little.”

In late September Wallace moved out of the “sober house” on Foster Street and into a double-decker clapboard one on an anonymous stretch of Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington. He shared the apartment with another recovering substance abuser, probably a pairing Granada House had arranged. The man had a large collection of Tito Puente records, which Wallace called “crime jazz.” (He would work the witticism into Infinite Jest.) “The apartment is strange,” he wrote Franzen in October. “Most everything is still in boxes. I have a mattress on the floor and wake up with dust on my tongue.” Franzen visited and found his friend in a messy bachelor pad, cold and dimly lit, a place to pass through. Wallace bumped into Gale Walden on the T — she had a research associate position at Harvard — and when she came by, she saw draft pages of a novel spread everywhere.

When a second year at Emerson began, Wallace undertook his work without pleasure. He had increased his load to three classes to make more money, teaching “back to back in the afternoon three days a week.” “All I do is work,” he complained to Franzen in October, threatening to sell his computer for cash. He still did not like the students and sedulously kept apart from his colleagues. Some of the other teachers in turn found Wallace standoffish, odd. One thought he seemed like he had Asperger’s syndrome and remembers him as theatrical in his isolation, taking up “some position from which the staff could view him, and from his small corner of the room stage he would pose as if in deep contemplation, or emotional pain or genius.” Wallace wrote Franzen, “I’ve had to educate myself about people like Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton. Actually that’s been a blast. I had no idea they were so good. I remember reading them a little in high school and mostly wondering when they were going to get done so I could go eat something sugary and then masturbate.” Liking “the canon” was one way of signaling to Franzen his aesthetic voyage. If he could read realist fiction, maybe he could write it. “The last thin patina of rebelliousness has fallen off,” he reported proudly to his friend in the same letter. “I am frightfully and thoroughly conventional.”

For nearly two years, Wallace had been living a hectic, unbalanced life. If he was no longer a substance abuser, he was still a drama junkie, a man afraid to be alone with his own thoughts. But Karr, around whom his every emotion orbited, was gone for good — or appeared to be so — and in early November 1991, Wallace suddenly collapsed again. It was his first breakdown since quitting drinking, and it devastated him. He was admitted to the Newton-Wellesley Hospital psychiatric unit with a diagnosis of suicidal depression. He lay in a locked ward for several days. Afterward, Debra Spark brought him student papers, because he wanted to keep up with his grading. “The people here are crazy,” he told her. She found the ward he was in scarier than McLean, where she had also visited him, and Wallace more frightened and depressed. The doctors at Newton-Wellesley increased the dose of Nardil he was on and he began to improve. After two weeks, he was released. He would write in a later medical history that depression and desperation came and went in the ensuing months, but over time the Nardil coursing through his blood relieved his condition and gave him back hope. Immediately, he was making plans. He had called Karr just before he was admitted to the hospital to tell her he loved her; now, as Karr remembers, he called her mother to say he was going to marry her daughter. “Didn’t you just get out of someplace?” she responded.

Wallace had not forgotten his literary hopes. Throughout 1990 and into 1991 he had fought off the worry that, sober, book reviewing and essays were all he was capable of. He wrote Nadell in the spring of 1991, as much to reassure himself as his agent, that things would change:

Please don’t give up on me. I want to be a writer now way more than in 1985. I think I can be better than I was but it’s going to take time — and believe me, I know that quite a bit of time has elapsed already…. Do not assume, please, that I am being slothful or distracted because I have not sent you any fiction to publish. Do not assume I’ve given up in despair, or that I’ve burned out. I haven’t, I swear. It may be a couple more years before I finish anything both long and respectable, but I will. Please don’t forget me, and please don’t let Gerry forget me either…. I write daily, on a schedule, am at least publishing hackwork and I will be a fiction writer again or die trying.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction had decided to devote an issue to Wallace and Vollmann and another young writer, Susan Daitch. In a long interview for the magazine that Wallace gave to Larry McCaffery that April, he hinted how much trouble he was having writing. “It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies…in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.” But by August 1991, four months later, the courage was mysteriously back. In that month he wrote Forrest Ashby that he was “slowly trying some fictional stuff, which so far is not very good, and almost completely unrecognizable vis a vis the stuff I was doing before I well, whatever,” and to his old professor Dale Peterson he spoke of “writing quite a bit and enjoying it for the first time in years.” What had helped him break through? Part of the credit should go to the Harper’s essay Wallace had been writing. The subject of the essay had expanded from how television changes our perception of reality to the crisis in the generation of which Wallace was a part, the two being, of course, to him, closely related. Since Arizona, Wallace had been calling for a fiction that captured how thoroughly television had altered the minds of its watchers. But since McLean and recovery, he had begun to realize that portraying such a world in fiction might be just as harmful as TV itself. There was no reason to think that limning a hopeless condition would show a way out; it might just make imprisonment more pleasant. Now Wallace reformulated his goal: American fiction was not in just an aesthetic crisis, but a moral one. Exhibit A was a writer he had once lavished a great deal of affection on, Mark Leyner, whose novel My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist he had touted when he lived in Somerville. The novel, really seventeen linked stories, is clever and almost schizophrenically scattered, embodying less a plot than an attitude toward modernity. One story — it might almost have been a set piece in Broom—features a character named Big Squirrel, who is, in Wallace’s words, “a TV kiddie-show host and kung fu mercenary.” In another story a father lives in his basement centrifuging mouse hybridoma. One section is entitled “lines composed after inhaling paint thinner.” When Wallace first read the book, he had reveled in its aggressive, postrealist stance, its avant-pop insistence that the overwhelming incoherence of modern culture was a joyride for the brain. But the new Wallace, in his television essay, would call the book “a methedrine compound of pop pastiche, offhand high tech, and dazzling televisual parody,” and quote the jacket copy’s claim that the book was “a fiction analogue of the best drug you ever took,” a description that anyone aware of Wallace’s situation would have recognized as far from an endorsement on his part. America was, Wallace now knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see that what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied. The effect of Leyner’s fictional approach to life — mutated, roving, uncommitted — like that of Letterman and Saturday Night Live—was to make our addiction seem clever, deliberate, entered into voluntarily. Wallace knew better.

And now he was far clearer on why we were all so hooked. It was not TV as a medium that had rendered us addicts, powerful though it was. It was, far more dangerously, an attitude toward life that TV had learned from fiction, especially from postmodern fiction, and then had reinforced among its viewers, and that attitude was irony. Irony, as Wallace defined it, was not in and of itself bad. Indeed, irony was the traditional stance of the weak against the strong; there was power in implying what was too dangerous to say. Postmodern fiction’s original ironists — writers like Pynchon and sometimes Barth — were telling important truths that could only be told obliquely, he felt. But irony got dangerous when it became a habit. Wallace quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued:

This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.

That was it exactly — irony was defeatist, timid, the telltale of a generation too afraid to say what it meant, and so in danger of forgetting it had anything to say. For Wallace, perhaps irony’s most frightening implication was that it was user-neutral: with viewers everywhere conditioned by media to expect it, anyone could employ it to any end. What really upset him was when Burger King used irony to sell hamburgers, or Joe Isuzu, cars.¹⁴

What was really behind this objection, which gathered strength with the years? The stance was a nearly complete turnaround for a young writer who had made his identity as a clown and then a parodist and whose gifts as a “weird kind of forger” hardly depended on clarity of intent. Suddenly, in his eyes, sincerity was a virtue and saying what you meant a calling. Nostalgia seemed to play a part, as well as discontent with the person he had grown up to be, the two intertwined. Wallace was signaling that cultural health lay in a return to the earnestness he’d grown up with. Back then in his midwestern boyhood, a person said what he or she meant. It did not matter that he had never really been that person nor that his mental health issues had walled him off from ever becoming that person; it was reassuring for him to imagine it.

This led Wallace to conjure — easy enough since he was simultaneously already working on it — a new kind of fiction that might one day displace the Leyners of the world:

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entrendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.

He continued:

The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “how banal.”

Wallace knew whose thinking had influenced his own. He sent Franzen a draft of the piece, “mostly just to see what you think about all the anti-irony stuff. You’ll see I’ve adopted a Franzenian view of Leyner, too.” And he dedicated the article to M. M. Karr, his other fount of sincerity. Crucially, Wallace was confident that his malaise was not just a personal issue but a societal condition. He sensed that there were others like himself. He mentioned to an interviewer after the publication of Infinite Jest that it was in Boston that he had

decided that maybe being really sad, and really sort of directionless, wasn’t just that I was fucked up. Maybe it was, maybe I was, maybe it was interesting in a way…. I just had so many friends who went through terrible times exactly when I did. In so many various different ways. And so many of them seemed to have so much going for ’em…. We’re talking lawyers, stockbrokers, young promising academics, poets.

His new commitment to single-entendre writing, writing that meant what it said, brought with it a surge in confidence that Wallace hadn’t felt in years, not since his 1987 visit to Yaddo. Not even his breakdown in November could stop it. And Karr’s departure for Syracuse didn’t hinder it: in fact it may even have been the spur for it, leaving Wallace with the need to prove he deserved her love. At any rate, he later wrote about the following year in the margin of a book, “The key to ’92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were).” “The writing is going surprisingly well,” he wrote Karr, probably in the spring of that year. “I’m scared, and physically I write very slowly, rather like a small child. It’s a long thing I want to do, and I’d started it before, so right now I divide my time between writing new stuff, which is a little disjointed…and looking back through two Hammermill boxes worth of notebooks and notecards and incredibly pretty laser print from my computer, which is now with Mark.”

He had been eyeing his old drafts for a long time without knowing what to make of them. He hadn’t known what the right or wrong track was because he didn’t know where he was going. That explained his fitful efforts since Yaddo. He told Karr, “I’d remembered the old stuff, a couple years old, as being just awful, but it turns out it isn’t; it just doesn’t go much of anywhere and is way too concerned with presenting itself as witty arty writing instead of effecting any kind of emotional communication with people. I feel like I have changed, learned so much about what good writing ought to be.”

There is no clear start date for Infinite Jest. Pieces of the novel date back to 1986, when Wallace may have written them originally as stand-alone stories.¹⁵ The work contains all three of Wallace’s literary styles, beginning with the playful, comic voice of his Amherst years, passing through his infatuation with postmodernism at Arizona, and ending with the conversion to single-entendre principles of his days in Boston. These three approaches correspond roughly to the three main plot strands of the book: the first, the portrait of the witty, dysfunctional Incandenza family; the second, the near-future dystopian backdrop of the book, in which the United States has united with Canada and Mexico to form the Organization of North American Nations (“O.N.A.N.,” its symbol an eagle crowned by a sombrero, maple leaf in claw), spawning a Quebecois separatist movement; and the third, the passion of Don Gately, set in the thinly fictionalized version of Granada House. Some parts of the book had already been with Wallace for five years by the breakthrough of 1991–92. In the fall of 1986, in Arizona, for instance, Gale Walden noticed a draft of some pages with her sister Joelle’s name under Wallace’s bed. She asked what he was working on and Wallace said it was fiction about a terrorist organization in Canada. “At which point,” she remembers, “my eyes glazed over and I didn’t ask any more.” This is at least the beginning of the dialogue between the two secret agents, Marathe, of Québec, and Steeply, of the U.S., which takes place on a mountain not unlike the ones Walden and Wallace liked to hike outside of Tucson, where the desert had, as Wallace writes in Infinite Jest, “the appearance of [a] mirage…. The sun of A.M. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and businesslike and harmful to look upon.”¹⁶

On his first application for Yaddo, filled out in September 1986, Wallace wrote that along with “Westward” he was also working on a novel with the tentative title Infinite Jest, adding that one reason he wanted to go to the retreat was to “try to determine just where and why the stories leave off and the novel begins.” Likely, by then, the Incandenza family’s follies were already in draft. Stylistically, they follow closely in the hyperverbal footsteps of the Beadsmans:¹⁷ Hal, the family’s “tennis and lexical prodigy,” corresponds to Lenore of Broom; his father, the brilliant suicide James, a filmmaker, tracks to Lenore’s great-grandmother, another absent genius. In addition, without the Incandenzas the title on the Yaddo application makes little sense. You can’t have Hamlet without a ghost.¹⁸

But at Yaddo, Wallace clearly found writing “Westward” more urgent, and it was likely not for several years that he returned to the novel. The third strand, the pages on Don Gately, could not have been begun before early 1990, by which time Wallace had entered the real-life counterpart to Ennet House. By fall 1991 he had likely begun interweaving his narrative; the delicate design of the novel was beginning to fall into place. On one side were the Incandenzas led by Avril, the dominating and complex matriarch. Hal, addicted to pot, is the youngest of her three sons, the emotional center of this part of the book, except that one of the points of the book is that that center is empty:

Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being …when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.

Hal’s two older brothers are Orin, a professional football player and womanizer in Phoenix, and Mario, who suffers from a cognitive and physical disability. Avril is now in a relationship with her late husband’s brother, another of the many whiffs of Hamlet in the story.

The family runs the Enfield Tennis Academy, where perfection is the goal and the best of the players are trained to satisfy, through their tennis games and commercial endorsements, the appetite of the consumerist culture they came from. On the other side are the residents of Ennet House, led by Gately. The Ennet House addicts are not being cultivated to feed America’s obsessions; they are the people who’ve OD’d on them.¹⁹ The two worlds, as in real life, live in parallel, interacting only when they have to, with only a “tall and more or less denuded hill” separating them. Yet they are thematically joined — the Enfield Academy world is preppy, team-focused, and saturated with drugs; the Ennet House world is poor, crime-ridden, and shattered by drugs. Both are hemmed in by self-absorption: for the Enfield players their solipsism is narcissism, the risk that all the attention being focused on them will make them believe they are blessed in some more than ordinary way; for the Ennet House residents the solipsism is that of despair, but also the self-centeredness at the heart of therapy and recovery, a world where the self is so damaged that nothing else can get near it. Character after character there sees his or her wounded past and nothing else, while up the hill player after player sees only his or her potential. Overseeing both sides, literally, are Marathe and Steeply, competing (or possibly cooperating) secret agents, whose function in the novel is to sound the themes as well as give a motor to the plot, which centers on the idea that before committing suicide James Incandenza had made a movie so absorbing that anyone who watches it succumbs to total passivity. The original of the video cartridge — Wallace imagines cartridges as something like minidiscs — has disappeared and if the Quebecois find it they will have the ultimate terrorist weapon to use against their decadent neighbors to the south.

For Wallace to orchestrate his material was enormously complex, and as he rewrote scenes he must have had to work hard to keep straight the various voices he was using. He had always been good at mimicry, but the voices in the recovery house chapters are subtler and truer than in the other sections. They seem to descend from a caring narrator rather than be roused up as proof of his talent. Wallace created dozens of characters, many capturing aspects of how he saw himself. There is Kate Gompert (her name borrowed from a woman who had played on the junior tennis circuit with Wallace and would subsequently sue him unsuccessfully for libel). Addicted to pot and brutally depressed, Gompert casts a practiced eye on the psych ward where she finds herself:

Kate Gompert was on Specials, which meant Suicide-Watch, which meant that the girl had at some point betrayed both Ideation and Intent, which meant she had to be watched right up close by a staffer twenty-four hours a day until the supervising M.D. called off the Specials.²⁰

Another pot addict, Ken Erdedy, embodies a different side of Wallace. We first meet him barricaded in his apartment as he waits for an obliging young female acquaintance to bring dope—“a fifth of a kilogram of marijuana, 200 grams of unusually good marijuana.” The woman — the friend of a dealer — has promised it to him so he can go on one last binge before quitting for good, spurring an obsessively branching set of contingencies in Erdedy’s mind:

Where was the woman who said she’d come. She said she would come. Erdedy thought she’d have come by now…. He did not use the phone to call the woman who’d promised to come because if he tied up the line and if it happened to be the time when maybe she was trying to call him he was afraid she would hear the busy signal and think him disinterested and get angry and maybe take what she’d promised him somewhere else.²¹

Once Wallace had his setup, he seems to have worked with remarkable speed because by April 1992 he had 250 finished pages for Nadell. He was not just in the grip of inspiration. The point was to get a contract for the book. It was “the bravest thing” he had done since getting sober, he would later tell an interviewer, but he believed the work was going so well that he could deal with the pressure. “Life is good. I’m trying to get together enough of this Long Thing to plead for an advance,” he wrote Brad Morrow with uncharacteristic confidence that March.

As promised, on April 15, 1992, he was ready with his proposal and partial manuscript of Infinite Jest, “a novel,” he noted in his cover letter, “although structurally it’s not much like any other novels I’ve seen.” “Plot-wise,” he added, “this thing proceeds according to something more like a broad arc than a Freytagian triangle. The low gear in which plot stuff proceeds in sections 1 and 2 is intentional.” He warned of footnotes that were “just brutal.” He addressed his note to “Bonnie and Gerry and Whatever Other Trusted and Hopefully Trustworthy Persons End up Reading this,” and urged everyone to mail the manuscript back or destroy it when they were done. He sent the package off to Nadell.

Wallace’s literary rebirth did not coincide with any calming of his conviction that he had to be with Karr. Indeed, the opposite. In fact, one day in February, he thought briefly of committing murder for her. He called an ex-con he knew through his recovery program and tried to buy a gun. He had decided he would wait no longer for Karr to leave her husband; he planned to shoot him instead when he came into Cambridge to pick up the family dog. The ex-con called Larson, the head of Granada House, who told Karr. Wallace himself never showed up for the handover and thus ended what he would later call in a letter of apology “one of the scariest days of my life.” He wrote Larson in explanation, “I now know what obsession can make people capable of”—then added in longhand after—“at least of wanting to do.” To Karr at the time he insisted that the whole episode was an invention of the ex-con and she believed him.²²

By the spring of 1992, Karr’s marriage was finally at an end and Wallace had new hope he could be at her side. He was ecstatic. He was ready to leave Boston. He had come to hate “this soot-fest city,” as he called it to Morrow. And he was sick of teaching. If he could get an advance, he could have the life and the woman he wanted. He had suffered beyond what he knew possible for her, and the suffering felt like an act of absolution.

In April, just before sending in the manuscript pages for Nadell and Howard, Wallace took the train down to Swarthmore College, outside of Philadelphia. Franzen was teaching a class there and had invited him to judge a fiction competition. Wallace also read from Infinite Jest. Playing to his young audience, he chose a section about Don Gately that predates his admission to Ennet House. In the segment, the young addict and a partner break into a local assistant district attorney’s house, take pictures of themselves with toothbrushes up their anuses, and send the pictures to him. Beforehand, Wallace asked for a chalkboard and wrote down words and abbreviations that might not be familiar to the students. Infinite Jest was filled with the languages Wallace had learned in Boston — from drug addict lingo to Alcoholics Anonymous slogans. One word that Wallace had recently learned was “shunt”—to disarm an alarm system by creating a new circuit for the electricity. Wallace had gotten the word in an interview with a retired burglary detective whom Mark Costello had met working as an assistant district attorney. Wallace had listened for an hour, overwhelmed by the fact-heavy conversation. When Costello looked, “shunt” was the only word he had written in his notebook.²³

At Swarthmore, Wallace stayed with Franzen, who remembers “an endearingly eccentric figure,” a tobacco chewer with a love of showering, Diet Dr Pepper, and blondies. They hardly knew each other, despite having become, as Wallace would later put it in a letter to his friend, the “best of pals and lit combatants.” Wallace was urging Franzen and his then wife to join him and Karr in Syracuse, and after the reading the two young men headed north in Franzen’s old Saab to check out the city, Wallace upset he had left his favorite scarf, in the colors of the family tartan, behind.²⁴ They took turns driving, the weather was bad, and Franzen was amazed at how much wiper fluid his friend used.

When they got to Syracuse, Wallace was surprised to find himself relegated to Karr’s floor for the night alongside Franzen. She appeared not to have the same expectations for his visit that he had. And when Wallace, Franzen, and Karr drove through the town, she asked him to crouch down out of view — apparently she was worried that news of his arrival would reach her husband, who was still nearby. Wallace and Franzen drove back down to Swarthmore the next day, discussing the purpose of literature nearly the whole way. Wallace argued that it was to alleviate loneliness and give comfort, to break through what he characterized in Infinite Jest as each person’s “excluded encagement in the self.” He wanted Franzen to know that he had become a different person and a different writer in the four years they’d known each other. After he got home, he wrote Franzen that their chat had been “among the most nourishing for me in recent memory” and suggested that his friend read Brian Moore’s Catholics, a story of a man who pledges everything for his faith. Franzen read the book and was unimpressed — his disciple had surpassed him in his quest for sincerity — but then Wallace rarely did things by halves.

A month later, in May 1992, Wallace packed up what little he had and drove to Syracuse. He had rented a first-floor apartment in a house around the corner from Karr and a few blocks from the main campus. It was in a typical graduate-student neighborhood, full of warping clapboard houses and semi-kempt lawns and right across from the food co-op. But being near the woman he loved made all the difference. “Syracuse,” he wrote Debra Spark later in the month, “is very cheap (not to mention lovely to live in, with grass and trees and terrific parks and absurdly little traffic and M. Karr).” Costello came up and brought Wallace’s old college computer. Wallace, he saw, was scribbling eagerly in his spiral-bound book whenever he had a moment. They went with Karr and her son for a tour of the hippie thrift shops in the tiny towns of Onondaga County. Costello bought a leather jacket, and the couple teased him. He also noticed that Wallace and Karr behaved like friends rather than lovers, probably because Karr wanted things to look ambiguous to her son or maybe because they were still ambiguous. “He really could have been her gay friend, from body language,” Costello remembered.

To Costello’s eyes, Karr seemed like a tougher version of Gale Walden. She had his friend’s number. When she would tease him about his work he would put up with it, to his old roommate’s surprise. He also saw how much Wallace liked being with Dev, Karr’s young son. Wallace told the boy there were talking spiders in his beard and, when Dev asked, explained that the purpose of his bandana was to keep his head from exploding. Children had a quality Wallace would increasingly crave in those around him: they were drawn to him without crowding him. They were part of that group of people — students, recovery friends, ordinary people unconnected to the fiction business — whom he admitted to his circle because they left him room. Such people, he wrote to Franzen, “make me feel both unalone and unstressed.”²⁵ Costello spent the weekend nights of his visit on chair cushions in his friend’s tiny apartment, Wallace in the bed. He explained that he was banned from sleeping at Karr’s while Dev was there.

With Karr still not quite available, Wallace made do as best he could. He lived on chocolate Pop-Tarts and soda, too poor to eat properly. Getting fed was a priority. So when he met Stephanie Hubbard and Doug Eich, a couple in the orbit of the recovery group he had just joined, his interest was both literary and culinary. He would go to Hubbard’s house, where she would cook and he and Eich discussed language and fiction. Eich misused nauseous for nauseated and Wallace corrected him, adducing his mother. Eich, a graduate student in linguistics, called his new friend “a smug prescriptivist douche-bag.” Wallace was chewing tobacco again, which he would spit into a soda can, apologizing profusely to Hubbard and Eich while enjoying their attention. Then he would take a toothbrush he kept in a Ziploc bag in his sock and brush his teeth in their bathroom. The three would discuss the day’s recovery meetings. Eich and Wallace shared a passion for DeLillo and also Cormac McCarthy. Wallace had discovered McCarthy late, when he was teaching at Amherst. “Something like Faulkner on acid,” he had written Richard Elman at the time, in excitement. Eich and Wallace agreed that the gritty portrait of the alcoholic in Suttree was far more interesting than the self-pitying Consul in Lowry’s Under the Volcano.²⁶

The three would talk for hours. The conversation often turned to faith. Wallace said he was trying to pray, because, even though he did not necessarily believe in God, it seemed like a good thing to do. Karr had become attracted to Catholicism — for her baptism would be a key moment in her recovery from alcohol. So for a time Wallace too hoped to receive the sacraments, thinking that if he and Karr were to marry they could have a religious wedding. (Ultimately the priest told him he had too many questions to be a believer, and he let the issue drop.) Wallace’s real religion was always language anyway. It alone could shape and hold multitudes; by comparison God’s power was spindly. That was why he was obsessed with grammar; as he put it in a letter to Franzen, “If words are all we have as world and god, we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship.”

At first, in Syracuse, Wallace had trouble pushing Infinite Jest forward. Change always derailed his writing. Costello had added a new keyboard to Wallace’s college computer. “I simply have to pound to get the letters to register,” he complained to Franzen. He couldn’t read some of his old drafts; he was too poor to buy a table to put it on; there were too many distractions. Wallace was, he wrote Franzen, “in a real funk about the Project” and worried his current inertia would “become a stasis that threatens to accumulate its own inertia, etc.” Franzen had made a second visit to Syracuse, this time with his wife, to look at the possibility of moving there again. The three drove down the street on which Raymond Carver had lived when he taught at the university in the 1980s. His old house was for sale. They were amazed to learn that the price was $10,000 higher because it had once been the home of a famous writer.²⁷ Now Wallace again tried to lure him, advertising that “it’s awfully pretty here now—60s, clear, sunny, every kind of floral scent known to Linnaeus floating around.”

Over the next few months Wallace fell back into his routines. He would get up and go to a 7:15 sobriety meeting, then come back and work, next go to a gym to work out. Seeing the size of Big Craig and the other men in Granada House had made him serious about weight lifting: he now drank a protein shake every morning with raw egg in it, which he called his “breakfast vomit.”²⁸ In the evening there was another sobriety meeting and then he would go back to work, altering and typing into his old computer what he’d written in the morning. This arrangement brought out his best writing, he felt, because the process of writing by hand and then transcribing forced his brain to wait for his hands. When he tried composing directly on a PC, it felt wrong.²⁹

The work moving forward again, Wallace discovered that his tiny apartment felt just right, a counterpart to the bungalow in Tucson and his senior single at Amherst, places where he didn’t feel his ass in the chair. He had gotten hold of the silver velour recliner and put it in the living room. He piled his books and papers on his bed. To sleep he moved them to the floor. He was so happy he sent Franzen pictures of his narrow slice of paradise.

For evening company, there was, by August, Mary, with whom a relationship had finally begun in earnest. “The Era of Skulking seems to be drawing to a close!” Wallace told Spark, reporting that Karr’s estranged husband had begun seeing someone. They would watch action movies together at night, both loving, as Karr told a later interviewer, “movies where shit blew up.” They worked out together and played tennis. Karr cooked for both of them and for her students. They read books out loud to each other and exchanged drafts (Karr was working on The Liar’s Club and he poached material from her life.) This was their happiest time. They went to her twentieth high school reunion in Texas and “had big big fun,” Wallace told Spark. Wallace even was willing to dance, though only to the slow music.

But no sooner were he and Karr finally a couple than problems emerged. By the fall he was mad at her for never quite integrating him into her family; she was mad at him for never thinking about anyone’s needs but his own. He responded with more protestations of love, writing from around the corner, as she remembered. “I want you to know that I AM here,” he wrote her, “I AM with you…. Mary, I am going nowhere but to you if you will have me. As you move closer to being available to me…I become more, not less, devoted to you and to my love for you and to my desire to have a life with you if you want me.”

He went on in loving quasi-complaint:

What I feel is that I’ll find no other woman whom I love this way, who makes my nervous system shimmy and Poor Old say Sig Heil as you do, who makes me laugh as belly-deep, who teaches me in so many ways she doesn’t know — as people who are real to each other teach each other, without intent or agenda — with whom I disagree in such interesting ways.

Wallace turned to his recovery groups for companionship. His sponsor, a garrulous older real estate investor with, as others remember, a spectacular sock collection, was there to give him counsel. Mostly Wallace talked to him about Karr and their unhappy relationship. “I had the impression of hurling things,” the man remembers; “you could not please Mary.” He invited Wallace to join a men’s group he was involved in, which Wallace nicknamed “the catacombs.” They would meet at different members’ houses each week, and when they got to Wallace’s they sat amid the tower of manuscript pages and piles of books. He told them he had always looked on how to get women into bed as “a physics problem”; Mary, though, obeyed no law he understood.

That fall Mark Leyner was invited to Syracuse as part of a reading series at the university. Leyner was at the height of his celebrity. He had just published Et Tu, Babe and been on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, where he had been surprised to find Wallace, with whom he had previously been friendly, call him “a kind of antichrist.” Now he smoothly worked his way through his material to the large crowd. As he riffed, he bobbed back and forth like a boxer, or the writer of the moment he was. He singled Wallace’s fiction out for praise but then made fun of alcoholism and said that people who wore bandanas reminded him of the cabin boys on The Love Boat. He insisted that the goal of writers was “to entertain,” if “in a very unique way.” At the very end, a hand came up from the back row: it was Wallace, scruffy, in a bandana. “Is it sufficient to entertain people as spectacularly as you have,” he asked now, in his thin voice, “or should there be a further moral purpose to your work?” Leyner replied that he felt entertainment was itself a moral goal and mentioned the well-known moment in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels in which a Mickey Mouse cartoon helps convicts forget their hard lives for a moment. Wallace clearly wasn’t satisfied with Leyner’s answer — to give addicts more of the drug wasn’t to cure them — but time was up. Karr drove Leyner to the train station. Wallace, along for the ride, seemed to him grateful to be in her presence.

Ever since Boston, Wallace had been seeing therapists. Unsurprisingly, during these sessions his attention came to rest on his mother. Sometime in therapy he became certain that his mother had been abused as a child by her father. As he understood it, she had repressed the memory of the transgression and thus repression and control had become her way of dealing with the world, including the problems in her marriage. From this Wallace grew convinced, as he wrote Karr, that his mother’s hidden life—“so much hidden pain and lying”—was key to understanding his own situation. Her insistence that all was well, her desire to protect him, he believed, had set the stage for the denial of his own pain that lay behind his drug use and alcoholism. The link was so clear, he wrote Karr, that his mother might just as well have taught him “how to bartend and de-seed dope.” Once her story was unearthed, the healing might begin. The truth hurt, he wrote Karr, but, he was convinced, “it heals too.”

Wallace had entered therapy with some trepidation. He was not from a culture that routinely dug up past upsets. But Karr had encouraged him in his investigations,³⁰ and by the time that he left for Syracuse he had blossomed into a committed therapand, as eager to ferret out the roots of his personal malaise as he’d once been to crack logical paradoxes. He went to group therapy and also had a private therapist, whom he paid cash because he had no health insurance. His hope was that his background or upbringing might at least partly explain his depressions and addictions. Yes, he had a chemical imbalance, but why? What had happened to make him into this anxious, agitated, and needy thirty-year-old?

He wrote some speculations in the margins of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, a book Karr gave him. He recognized himself in Miller’s description of the unhappy, talented child. “Ouch” and “Gulp,” he speckled in the margins. After Miller wrote:

As soon as the child is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his vital growth will be violently interrupted.

Wallace penciled “SFW,” his mother’s initials. (Inadvertently proving her reach, next to the word “effect” in the same paragraph, he wrote, “s/b [should be] affect.”) He ascribed his current predicament to having a “narcissistically-deprived Mom.” There is an intemperateness to Wallace’s explorations of his childhood here, the anger he felt at his mother’s supposed obfuscations unleashed again as he discovers his own — but then he had come to believe the one had led directly to the other.

He read John Bradshaw’s Bradshaw on the Family, a pop bestseller on dysfunction and childhood, and where Bradshaw wrote that low-self esteem translated into “believing that your worth and happiness lie outside of you,” he noted, “Writing Success Fame Sex.” Wallace wanted to become the sort of person for whom desire for the last three did not motivate the first. That was one of the goals of the therapy, as it was, indirectly, of recovery. As he worked his way through his past, on the advice of a therapist he told his mother that they should stop talking, which led to an estrangement that would last on and off for some five years.

As the fall turned into a remarkably snowy winter, Wallace’s relationship with Karr deteriorated further. The two fought bitterly. Karr, Wallace wrote Franzen, was prone to “terrible temper-outbursts.” She found him spoiled, a mama’s boy using rehab as an excuse for self-absorption. Her needs were more concrete — food, money, child care for her son. He still wrote her constantly, even though he was just around the corner. He printed out in huge letters on a computer the words “MARRY ME” and added, “No shit, Mary Karr, do not doubt my seriousness on this. Or the fact that I’m a gila-jawed bulldog once I’ve finally made a commitment, a promise. My expectation is not that it would be easy, or all the time pleasant. My expectation is that it would be real, and illuminated.” Karr knew it would not work out, she remembers, when one day she asked Wallace to pick up Dev from school and Wallace said he needed his car to go to the gym instead. Thinking back on all his failed relationships, in the margin of Bradshaw he blamed them on his “fantasy bond” with his mother.

In April 1992, Nadell submitted the first 250 pages of Wallace’s novel—“structurally…not much like any other novels I’ve seen,” as Wallace had written in his cover letter — to Howard at Norton. The submission contained the major lines of the novel — the Incandenza family, Gately and Ennet House, and the plot to find the master copy of “Infinite Jest,” a movie so absorbing that watching it could kill you. In a country addicted to television, it would be the ultimate weapon, an entertainment neutron bomb. The novel was set in the near future but no reader could mistake it for anything other than a commentary on the present day. Reading the manuscript, Howard was amazed by the changes he saw in his author’s writing. Wallace had gone from a clever writer to a profound one, from one with lots of ways to say little to one with one way to say something important. He now saw Wallace’s addiction, descent, and recovery as “a ceremony of purification.” He was eager to publish the new work, but Norton was a conservative house. Its taste was mainstream (it would soon have a huge success with Patrick O’Brian, the purveyor of seafaring tales), and did not put out much in the way of avant-garde writing—Girl with Curious Hair was an exception, but it had sold only twenty-two hundred hardcover copies. Howard went to his editorial board and asked how much he might offer. They authorized him to pay an advance of $35,000. Wallace calculated what would be left to live on after expenses and his agent’s commission. He was taking the psychic risk of asking for an advance so he could write without teaching, but $5,000–$6,000 a year wouldn’t do it.

Nadell quickly found another bidder, Michael Pietsch, an editor at Little, Brown, who in June 1992 bought the book for $80,000. Pietsch had worked with other innovative writers like Rick Moody and had been quietly supportive of Wallace’s work when few were — when Wallace had just graduated from Arizona he had tried to help him place some stories in magazines. Pietsch told Nadell he wanted to publish Infinite Jest “more than I want to breathe.” Wallace wrote Pietsch to accept his offer, citing his “gut instinct (I have so few gut instincts I am reverent when one manifests).” He thanked him for advancing enough money that he could “get health insurance and fix my car if it breaks and buy books so I can mark them up.”

Wallace avoided confrontation with authority figures, so it is a testimony to his faith in his judgment this time that he now wrote Howard with frankness, assuring the editor who had been through so much with him that his decision to sign with Little, Brown was not “a…go-for-the-gold-type pressure situation.” He explained, “I not only wanted to quit dicking around with teaching and try to be a professional writer, but also wanted to try to live like a grown-up while I did so…. If that compromise seems venal or ungrateful,” he added, “so be it.” He said he was “qualmless” but finished on a more conciliatory point for the editor who had meant so much to him:

You have believed in me and supported me and given me good counsel and good faith at every turn; you are more important to me than I bet you could believe.

With Pietsch, Wallace had some immediate damage control to do: his new editor also edited Leyner. How to tell him that in his essay on television, still forthcoming, he spent a half dozen pages flaying one of Pietsch’s best-known writers? Harper’s and he had finally agreed that the television piece was wrong for the magazine, but Steve Moore had picked it up for the Review of Contemporary Fiction and, titled “E Unibus Pluram” (“Out of One, Many”), it was to come out the next summer. Wallace wrote to his new editor to explain what he found missing in Leyner’s writing, almost as if writing a review of his earlier self:

Brains and wit and technical tightrope-calisthenics are powerful tools in fiction, but I believe that when they’re used primarily to keep the reader at arm’s length they’re being abused — they are functioning as defense mechanisms. Leyner is a hidden writer, as so many exhibitionists and actors and comedians and intellectuals are hidden. I do not wish to be a hidden person, or a hidden writer: it is lonely.

He promised Pietsch that Infinite Jest would supply the element missing in Leyner’s work, would make, as he’d written about Wittgenstein’s Mistress, “the head throb heartlike”:

I want to improve as a writer, and I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff, and my gut tells me you can help me.

As an editor, Pietsch was used to being in loco parentis; he felt no need to take sides. He responded, “My notion about Mark Leyner is that he doesn’t feel any compulsion to do more in his work than entertain, surprise, and dazzle…. It’s fine to want more from a book but that doesn’t lessen the legitimacy of his accomplishment.” But he added, “All that notwithstanding, it was with delight I read of your intention to pursue selves and stories.”

Wallace returned to work. “I am both bogged down and forging ahead on the Project, if that’s coherent,” he wrote Franzen in September. “Word on the streets is that fall here is beautiful but very brief: snows swirl by Halloween.” He worried what winter would be like, though on the plus side his apartment was so small that his body heat or “at the very outside one space heater is apt to warm the whole facility.” To escape the town he had taken to calling “Drearacuse,” he sometimes drove to New York for the weekend and stayed with Costello. He would make an arrangement to meet a young woman for coffee and then, as Costello remembers, come back Sunday night and get his bag.

Other than women and his old friend, New York held little interest for Wallace. (“My whole nervous system seems to be on the outside of my body when I’m in NYC,” he would later protest to Alice Turner.) One exception was a community garden on Avenue B and 6th Street in the East Village, near where Costello lived. There a street sculptor was engaged in building a monument called the “Tower of Toys.” Homeless and barefoot, the sculptor would climb up and nail or attach yet one more plank or pole. While he watched the seemingly endless project, Wallace would complain to Costello about Karr.

In the spring of 1993 Wallace got an unexpected job offer. The English department at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal, about an hour from where he had grown up, was hiring. The school was an oddity, a large public college with an interest in avant-garde fiction. The English department ran something called the Unit for Contemporary Literature,³¹under which auspices it hosted the Review of Contemporary Fiction and the Dalkey Archive Press, the publisher of Wittgenstein’s Mistress. When he had heard of the job opening, Steve Moore had contacted Wallace. Wallace had promised himself not to teach while he finished Infinite Jest, but he had been writing the manuscript steadily and successfully. So in bandana and boots, he went for a brief interview at the MLA conference in New York in December 1992. He was unusually self-confident, perhaps buoyed by a sense that Infinite Jest was on target. “You should know I am really really smart,” he told the English department members who met him. He sent a résumé with his publications and on the second page added entries for “REVIEWS IF ANYBODY CARES…” and “PRIZES &c (IF ANYBODY CARES…).” In February he flew to Illinois for two days of interviews and readings. To a small group of faculty and students he read the Don Gately crime scene and a section about Lyle, the guru who haunts the Enfield Academy weight room licking sweat off the players and dispensing advice in return. During a question-and-answer session, when a faculty member asked why they should hire him, he responded, “Who else?” Then the faculty committee went out with him to a local Chinese restaurant, where he told the department chair, Charlie Harris, a Barth expert, that Barth was dead.

By now the department was getting the idea that this was not the same author who had written Girl with Curious Hair, but they did not mind, it seemed. They found Wallace stunningly smart and committed. In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace quoted Emerson that once or twice in a lifetime one met a man who “carries the holiday in his eye.” Wallace seemed to them such a person.

Good as the visit was, Wallace still did not expect to get the job. “I alert you in advance,” he had joked in a note to Harris when he first applied, “that I am both caucasian and male.” The department was under pressure to hire more women, but everyone was deeply impressed with Wallace. They did not know what had happened in Arizona or Amherst or Boston, though Wallace’s fragmented teaching history must surely have suggested problems in the past. “What we wanted was the writer,” remembers Curtis White, a professor in the department who had helped organize the Unit for Contemporary Literature. “We hoped for the best on the rest of it.”

Wallace wanted the job as much as ISU seemed to want him to have it; he was ripe to go somewhere. He had been working at maximum speed. Fiction wasn’t the problem, for once. “Full-time writing is going OK volume-wise,” he wrote Debra Spark at the time, “but I find the isolation and lack of contact with people awfully hard to take.” He explained, “Things are sad here. Mary and I have agreed, not as amicably as one might wish, that we do not work as a couple…. We are both angry at one another, though in my case the anger’s just about been replaced by a very dark sadness. She was my best friend in the world, and we both gave up a lot and worked very hard to try to make this work.” One night Wallace tried to push Karr from a moving car. Soon afterward, he got so mad at her that he threw her coffee table at her. He sent her $100 for the remnants. She had a friend who was a lawyer write back to say she still owned the table, all he’d bought was the “brokenness.”

Portions of Infinite Jest were beginning to appear in literary magazines. “Three Protrusions,” the excerpt in which Ken Erdedy waits for his pot, had been the first in a widely read one, appearing in Grand Street in the spring of 1992. It was a virtuoso, voicy story, not dissimilar in style to Wallace’s earlier work. A year later, a more intriguing excerpt about Ennet House appeared in Conjunctions, in its “Unfinished Business” issue. Wallace wrote a preface assuring readers his would not remain so: “NYC guys in serious business suits have paid $ for something they’re legally entitled to by 1/1/94.” Aware that he had an opportunity to introduce a different David Foster Wallace, a writer with deeper goals and purer motivations, he continued:

Under fun’s new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don’t want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers everywhere share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.

The fifty pages that followed were a kaleidoscope of first-person testimonials — stories of “hitting bottom”—lifted from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, with rummies and meth heads taking over a fictional world where, since he began tearing through his senior thesis, no one had ever known pain deeper than a breakup before. Gately made his appearance too, another new kind of character for Wallace:

And that was the first night that cynical Gately willingly took the basic suggestion to get down on his big knees by his undersized Ennet House bunk and ask for help from something he still didn’t believe in, ask for his own sick spidered will to be taken from him and fumigated and squished.

The response to the Conjunctions publication was highly favorable. “Fun’s new administration” was finding Wallace readers. And as the Conjunctions excerpt appeared, Illinois State had written to offer Wallace a job that would lead to tenure. Wallace was thrilled, even more so when Charlie Harris agreed to let him teach just two classes a semester. The arrangement was so generous that Wallace immediately worried it wouldn’t last. He had visions of a replacement department head “upping it to three or four and you being in Burma or something” on sabbatical. Could he get, he asked Harris, kind of joking, a letter “preferably notarized by at least an appellate-level jurist” confirming the arrangement? Harris promised him it was forthcoming.

Despite, as he wrote to Don DeLillo, with whom he had struck up a correspondence with the encouragement of Franzen, “a certain icky sense about availing myself of academic patronage,” he felt he had made a good decision.³² It did not bother him overmuch that, as he wrote Washington, he would be “the least weird writer there.” He explained to Dale Peterson at Amherst, “The chairman is a dreamboat, everybody seems at once passionate and low-ego about teaching writing, and there was an utter absence of the Machiavellian politics that made Arizona such a gnarly place to be…. If I do not like teaching at ISU,” he explained, “I won’t like it anywhere, and I can retire from the field assured that I’ve experienced academia at its nicest.”