CHAPTER 6. “Unalone and Unstressed”
In July 1993 the director of the Dalkey Archive, John O’Brien, and his son, met Wallace in front of his new house on North Fell Avenue in Bloomington. The two groaned as they carried Wallace’s weights up the stairs. Wallace had rented the house sight unseen from one of the members of the search committee. It turned out to be pretty, with a fireplace and a screened-in porch, opposite a park. Wallace brought his silver velour recliner, put a spit can nearby, and papered the bathroom with manuscript pages from Infinite Jest, tennis competition charts, and an adult diaper wrapper.1
Returning to the Midwest brought mixed feelings for the thirty-one-year-old writer. He was particularly wary about being so close to his mother while he was fictionalizing her in his novel. He was drawing her as the lens of therapy had revealed her to him. Avril Incandenza is the seductive puppetmaster of Enfield Tennis Academy. When she speaks, Wallace wrote, everyone inclines their heads to her “very subtly and slightly, like heliotropes.”
And Wallace missed Karr. He had spent the last few months of his time in Syracuse mostly in exile, anxious he’d have to be recording the arrival and departure of “different masculine-model cars” in front of her house, as he wrote Corey Washington in March. He had brought her with him though as a character in his book. Joelle Van Dyne, also known as Madame Psychosis, is a radio show host and drug addict in recovery at Ennet House, a woman who keeps her face veiled either because it is hideously disfigured or because she is so beautiful that every man who sees it falls in love with her. She stars in “Infinite Jest,” the lethal video cartridge.
Predictably, Wallace worried about going back to teaching. He had been writing at an unequaled pace for two years and feared the change to his routine. But he was also an adult now, a man three and a half years sober with a job and a house and an advance for the book he was well under way with. That’s what it meant to live under the new administration of fun: no more irony and distance, commitment not spectation (a favorite word of his), involvement. And even, where possible, the hope of redemption. “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished,” he told Larry McCaffery in the Review of Contemporary Fiction interview, which came out just as he arrived in Bloomington, “but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” The writer’s job was to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Wallace had always preferred certainty to unclarity, passion to incrementalism, and now he was a full-fledged apostle of sincerity. He had no tolerance for the person he was and gave no quarter to writers whom he thought were like the writer he used to be. When Steve Moore wrote him to recommend a novel he was publishing, praising its “sardonic worldview perfect for the irony-filled nineties,” Wallace shot back that this was “like saying ‘a kerosen[e]-filled fire extinguisher perfect for the blazing housefire.’”
Wallace was particularly allergic to those who dreamt of fame instead of achievement. He took every opportunity to point out to young writers the snares of the sort of early success he had had. He wrote Washington that whenever younger people asked him how to become an author his reaction was to be “polite and banal.” He pointed out, “The obvious fact that the kids don’t Want to Write so much as Want to Be Writers makes their letters so depressing.” To one such inquirer, a young man in his early twenties, he gave some unbending advice: “Take this time to learn to be your own toughest critic and best friend…. I wish I had…. Concentrate on the work, loving it and hating it and making it the best and truest expression of yourself it can be; the publishing stuff will come.” He added, “I’m mostly saying this to myself at 22, 23.” When Washington asked him if he himself had a swelled head, Wallace demurred: “Even a marginal soap-opera actor receives exponentially more mail than Bellow, I’m sure. And I’m no Bellow,” adding by hand “(yet!),” then a trademark smiley face to deflate his own boast. He went on:
I did, very briefly, at an artist colony called Yaddo in 1987, meeting McInerney and some of the other celebs, get a big head and believe for a few months that I was destined for celebrity, Letterman appearances. Etc. The rather brutal intervening years have taught me that, though there’s nothing de facto wrong with that stuff, it’s not for me, simply because it’s low-calorie and unstimulating and also highly narcotic. McInerney’s big job now is acting as a custodian for the statue of himself that celebrity has constructed.
Alone in the summer heat of the Illinois flatlands, Wallace tried to make life as much like Syracuse as he could. He found tennis courts, a gym, a therapist, and a substance abuse recovery group. The group Wallace liked met in a church on Oakland Avenue at noon. It was made up mostly of working-class people. He was a surprise to them. When he walked in for the first time, in his torn T-shirt, work boots, and bandana, several members took him for homeless. Soon he had become a literal fixture there — he took the same seat at every meeting. The members loved the way he talked — for many he was the most articulate person they had ever met — and felt his elaborate, run-on narratives of the daily battle to maintain the equanimity that kept him sober expressed what they were thinking, only better. As ever, it fell to them to tell him not to live so much in his head. They made fun of him for being too analytical and offered him slogans like “Keep It Simple” and “Be Nice to Myself” and “Stop Trying to Figure Everything Out.” For God, they’d suggest, he should just substitute “Good Orderly Direction.” “A grateful heart will never drink,” they might add. The banality of the responses maddened Wallace, but here he was drug- and alcohol-free after almost four years, thanks to people like them. “It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliché, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers,” he would write in Infinite Jest. “I don’t know how recovery works,” he would tell friends, “but it works.” He was always available to help other members with both spiritual and practical questions, rewriting their job applications or professional correspondence. He attended a second recovery meeting at the Lighthouse Institute, where he sponsored addicts who had been ordered by courts to attend a recovery program. It came under the rubric of “pay it forward” that he had learned at Granada House: if you help someone, when you need help someone will be there for you too.
The other members began looking after him in turn. They saw him — and he played to this — as a sort of holy fool. A former judge started giving Wallace his cast-off clothes. The daughter of another recovery member brushed Wallace’s long, unruly hair (he refused her offer of conditioner). If his computer crashed, someone from recovery came and rescued his files. Familyless, he was adoptable — one couple hung a stocking for him every Christmas. Wallace went through a number of sponsors until he found one he liked, a man who had entered the program after falling out of a tree while high. The accident had broken his back, made it necessary for him to use two metal canes. He was incontinent and had to go to the “john,” Wallace wrote a friend in a later letter, “like every fifteen minutes.” But Wallace used him to tamp down his own self-absorption. “He’s extremely helpful,” he explained, “as just a plain nonverbal model of what Real problems are when I think I’ve got Problems.”
Since junior year of college, Wallace had never been without a girlfriend for very long. These women filled an important gap in his life. They were the clock by which he noted time’s passing and the mirror in which he examined his character. When he was having problems with Karr back in Syracuse, for instance, he had written to Franzen, “I’m having to countenance the fact that I just may be constitutionally unable to sustain an intimate connection with a girl, which means I’m either terribly shallow or mentally ill or both.”
As the summer wore on, Wallace was still getting his ex out of his system. His male friends in Syracuse had been enormously relieved when ISU had offered him a job; to them the Karr relationship seemed wholly dysfunctional. “Run for your life,” his sponsor, John F., remembers telling him. He now affected to have left Karr behind in letters to friends. “Unpacking, trying to write, chasing tail,” he boasted to Morrow, summarizing his activities his first summer in Illinois. But in fact several months after arriving many of his thoughts were still of Karr; he bought her expensive lingerie and perfume and mailed it anonymously. He even bought the right to name a star after her. He wrote in a notebook, “Now she’s in the sky and a little bit of her will always be overhead.” He sent her the box with the certificate. Around the same time, he wrote a Syracuse friend that he was “off sex” and promised himself he would never be in such a poisonous relationship again. “I won’t sleep with anybody who lives far away anymore,” he wrote her, “whom I can’t be with — I hope — from now on.”
Fortunately, his department head, Charlie Harris, and Harris’s wife, Victoria, also a professor of English at ISU, stepped in. Victoria had their twenty-four-year-old daughter Kymberly in mind for Wallace. Kymberly was an actress and aspiring playwright who lived in Chicago. On Wallace’s first visit Victoria had shown him her picture. “Isn’t she beautiful?” she’d said. “You should marry her.” The two began corresponding, and soon Harris, leaving behind personal problems in Chicago, had moved home. Wallace and her mother invited her out the next day to a movie. He chose Jurassic Park. The three went to downtown Normal’s theater to watch the blockbuster. Wallace was, as ever, also doing research. Steven Spielberg, the movie’s director, was someone Wallace had always been interested in. Though he’d seen the movie twice before in Syracuse, he enjoyed it again, getting, as he would say, his “dose.” Kymberly, on the other hand, had been so bored she’d walked out. Afterward, they went to the Gallery, a club where Wallace refused to join her on the dance floor. Despite their differences the two began hanging out; Wallace gave her sections of Infinite Jest to woo her, and soon they were a couple. In the empty Midwest, she felt, he was the most interesting man she knew; Wallace enjoyed her vibrancy and physicality.
Both in therapy, they spent a lot of their time discussing their painful pasts and how they had come to be the way they were — a catalog of ex-lovers and family, with Wallace focused on Karr and his mother. They talked about wanting community and children. Kymberly was astonished at the intense way Wallace listened. He had become interested in Buddhism through a woman he met in Syracuse and gave Kymberly works on the religion that had been suggested to him, plus the Big Book. One day Victoria Harris found them deep in conversation on the couch in the Harrises’ living room. “Stop talking about your relationship and start having it!” she admonished them.
Michael Pietsch read the portion of Infinite Jest that Wallace sent as soon as he got it in May 1993. He made his way through the 750 pages Wallace had mailed off and responded just as Wallace was getting ready to leave Syracuse. His letter was remarkably insightful, given how little time he’d been able to spend thinking about the partial manuscript of a very complicated book:
You ask what I think it’s about. Since it’s not all here my answer to that (and all my suggestions) will have to be tentative…. It’s a novel made up out of shards, almost as if the story were something broken that someone is picking up the pieces of. This fits with the broken lives the novel’s about; also as a way of recreating two worlds, the halfway house and the tennis academy….[O]ccasionally there surfaces through the stories an “I” who may be the one trying to put everything together.
Pietsch wrote Wallace that he was “seriously loving being inside” the “huge roiling story about addiction and recovery, their culture and language and characters, the hidden world that’s revealed when people come in and tell their stories.” But he also saw a major problem on the horizon: length. Good as it was, the book was on its way to being too long. Wallace had tried to trick him with narrow margins and a tiny font in sending the first 400,000 words, but Pietsch had pulled out a calculator and tallied that if what he had on his desk was two-thirds of the finished book, Infinite Jest would be twelve hundred pages, at the least. He doubted the marketability of such a tome. “This should not,” he lectured Wallace, “be a $30 novel so thick readers feel they have to clear their calendars for a month before they buy it.” He urged Wallace to “try cutting now,” even while he finished his story. His other major editorial worry related to the physics of reading. The fragmentary structure of the book — three plot strands that seemed to come to the fore and then recede without pattern — was a lot. A little structural innovation was enriching, but too much and you lost the reader entirely. This was a harder problem for Wallace to solve, because the book consistently confounded the reader’s expectations on purpose. If reality was fragmented, his book should be too. It was also in keeping with Wallace’s insistence that the story not be so amusing that it re-create the disease he was diagnosing. It must not hook readers too easily, must not allow them to fall into the literary equivalent of “spectation.” Infinite Jest had to be, as he subtitled it, “a failed entertainment.” To the extent the novel was addictive, it should be self-consciously addictive. That was one reason he’d structured the story like a Sierpinski gasket, a geometrical figure that can be subdivided into an infinite number of identical geometrical figures. The shape of the book — following Wallace’s natural cast of mind — was recursive, nested. Big things—Infinite Jest, a novel you keep having to reread to understand — find their counterpart in smaller things: “Infinite Jest,” the video cartridge, which itself plays in an endless loop. One character fears she is blind, so she never opens her eyes. Another has an answering machine message that is like one of those infinite man-holding-a-book-whose-cover-is-the-man-holding-a-book visual regressions: “This is Mike Pemulis’s answering machine’s answering machine.” The effect is to emphasize the characters’ isolation, their lives in a funhouse that isn’t all that fun. As in Broom, the apparent casualness of the structure was intensely thought through.
What Pietsch found most off-putting was the political overlay Wallace had given the book centering on the attempts by Quebecois terrorist groups to wrest back their province from O.N.A.N. “Almost everything that matters emotionally works without reference to the time frame or the interAmerican huggermugger,” Pietsch noted, wondering about the necessity of what he called “the ornately bizarre-to-goofy superstructure” of the book. He warned, “the dog is awfully shaggy already.” The letter left Wallace upset and unsatisfied. “He seemed to agree with most of it, glumly,” Pietsch scribbled on a copy of the letter he later sent to Nadell.
Wallace had not been waiting for Pietsch’s response to resume writing. By the time he left for Illinois in July 1993, as he later told an interviewer, he had reached the scene in which Gately is shot protecting his charges at Ennet House, nearly three-quarters of the way through the story. Likely Wallace had more in rougher form. But the combination of the memo and the move to Illinois deflated him. He was home in Illinois again, or nearly, and near home he often found his momentum dissipating. He spent many summer days staring at the ceiling of his new home. He asked a friend from Syracuse to call him every night to make sure he had written, hoping that guilt would spur him to productivity, but the trick did not work.
Wallace had been stumped in a similar way when he moved to Syracuse, and he drew again on the patience and endurance he had learned in recovery to try to get past the roadblock. But as he was settling down to get back to work, a distracting nonfiction project came his way. The editors at Harper’s were longtime fans of his writing. In 1991, they had published “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” his fanciful remembrance of his high school sports life, and, a year later, an adept parody of John Updike’s Rabbit books called “Rabbit Resurrected.” Updike had been an early love of Wallace’s, before he had awoken to literature, and even now he was stunned by the grace and ease with which Updike wrote. But as he’d changed his attitude toward his own work he had reconceived of Updike as part of the American problem, and of Rabbit Angstrom, his principal character, as symptomatic of the prison of self-absorption and egoism that afflicted so many Americans. There was nothing outside his priapic neediness. Rabbit had died in the fourth installment in the series, Rabbit at Rest, published in 1990. Wallace imagined the next chapter in the pages of Harper’s, resurrecting Rabbit into “a solipsist’s heaven, full of his own dead perceptions.” Rabbit asks, “Would there be vaginas, where he was going, vaginas finally freed from the shrill silly vessels around them, bodiless, pungent, and rubicund, swaddled in angelic linen…the odd breast or two, detached, obliging?”
Despite not having taken his television essay, the Harper’s editors were again on the lookout for assignments to give Wallace. So, soon after they learned he was returning to the Midwest, they asked him if he wanted to go to the state fair. The fair was a massive event, with thousands of booths and tens of thousands of visitors attending its 4H shows, dance competitions, and junior boxing tournaments. Wallace hesitated. He worried that he had never done reporting — to his mind the failed pornography piece no longer counted. But he was intrigued too, eager to make some money, and happy for the chance to escape his own head and see a different side of his native region.
Wallace cast around for someone to go with him, asking Costello, Charlie and Victoria Harris, and in the end chose their daughter, whom he then barely knew. In August, in the sweltering Midwest summer heat, he and Kymberley drove to Springfield, the state capital. At the fair, they visited the Horse Complex and the Swine Barn, and then went on to the amusement ride section. Harris took a ride called the Zipper, a steel cage that spun at the end of a long elevated arm. Wallace was not thrilled to watch his new friend get lifted away, and was thoroughly mortified when the ride operators — he called them “carnies”—kept flipping the cage around to make Harris’s skirt fall up. When they finally brought her back to earth, Wallace was furious. He wanted to press charges. Harris told him it was no big deal, but Wallace remained upset. Harris went home the next day, and Wallace continued his reporting. He chatted with the local evangelists and watched a car race without interest (“Certain cars pass other cars, and some people cheer when they do”). A dance competition touched him more deeply, when he saw how sincere was the pleasure the ordinary midwestern couples took in it, a moment worthy of Sullivan’s Travels.
Back home in Bloomington, surrounded by his Infinite Jest research material, he sat down to try to organize his notes. He put a layer of myth over his experience. In Wallace’s telling, the Illinois fair grew increasingly Boschian as the days went on. Drawing on his gift for comic exaggeration and not particularly worried by veracity, by the end, bald men farted as they arm-wrestled, vomit spewed from the mouths of patrons being spun in the Ring of Fire, and, at the “Illinois State Jr. Baton-Twirling Finals,” the insanity reaches a kind of climax as
a dad standing up near the top of the stands with a Toshiba video camera to his eye takes a tomahawking baton directly in the groin and falls over on somebody eating a funnel cake, and they take out good bits of several rows below them.
Harris became an old heartthrob, someone who “worked detasseling summer corn with me in high school.” She was in real life neither “a Native Companion,” as Wallace called her in the article, nor a graduate of Urbana High — that was more Susie Perkins or his sister. And when it was time for Native Companion to speak, Wallace gave Harris the voice of the woman whose star still twinkled over his head. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Native Companion reproofs the upset Wallace after being exposed during the Zipper ride, “it was fun — son of a bitch spun that car sixteen times…. Buy me some pork skins, you dipshit.”
Wallace took pleasure in writing the piece. For him, the challenge in nonfiction was always what to leave out, but the state fair was a subject with natural boundaries and one that invited a light style that moved to bigger, more serious questions: What made Americans so obsessed with entertainment? Could whatever void they were trying to plug ever be filled? It helped that at the fair the people were gluttons and the animals miserable. It was another chance to assert the thesis of Infinite Jest, to anatomize the unending American quest for distraction, the failure of his countryman, as Remy Marathe, the Quebecois terrorist agent,2 says in Infinite Jest, “Choose with care. You are what you love. No?”3
Shortly after, Wallace sent in his long draft, several times the possible length of the piece. Colin Harrison, the editor, set to work cutting with Wallace. The process reminded Harrison of a game of tennis, the prospective edits turning into “here’s-what-I-think, what-do-you-think rallies that sometimes went on for many minutes,” as he wrote in a remembrance, and ended with a cut accepted or partially accepted or traded off for a cut somewhere else. Wallace was strategic and aggressive, but when he lost a point, he moved on. Together they shortened the piece almost by half. Harrison, an experienced editor, was aware that Wallace sometimes embellished. At one point, he asked Wallace if a vial of crack that Wallace reported had fallen out of the pocket of a young man on the Zipper had really “direct-hit a state trooper alertly eating a Lemon Push-Up on the midway below.” Wallace was coy. “I’m going to give you this one,” Harrison remembers saying. He wanted Wallace to pursue his comic vision. “I drank the Kool-Aid,” he recalls. So if Wallace wrote it, it aided the narrative energy, and could not be disproven when the piece was fact-checked, it could run.4, 5
The article, which came out the next July, also unveiled a new Wallace to readers, neither the creator of elaborate fictional worlds nor the Cavellian essayist but someone more of a piece with the characters in his fiction. At one point, Wallace describes being too afraid to go into the Poultry Building, explaining that as a child he had once been attacked by a chicken “without provocation, flown at and pecked by a renegade fowl, savagely, just under the right eye.” The story was likely made up, but its exaggerated stance toward the traumas of childhood captured something readers began to want from him. They, too, this affluent and confused generation, had felt the large reverberations inherent in small events. That Wallace was a slightly more neurotic version of his reader helped forge a bond, a bond that would carry over when he published his very big novel.
For the fall 1993 semester, Wallace was assigned a fiction workshop for undergraduates and another for more advanced writers, mostly graduate students. He taught around thirty pupils in all. He gave his classes in Stevenson Hall, a midcentury building that hummed with overhead lights. Claiming that his time as a security guard at Lotus had made fluorescent lighting unbearable for him, he asked his students to bring in lamps, creating a cocktail lounge atmosphere in the classroom. Then, with the excuse that there were not enough plugs for them, he moved the class to his home, where the students made themselves comfortable amid The Compendium of Drug Therapy and Psychiatric Nursing and wondered at the junior circuit tennis championship chart on his wall. In his bandana and untied work boots, a cup at hand to spit into, he was like no professor they had ever met. During smoking breaks, he would go to the bathroom and brush his teeth.
Wallace’s informal, rule-bending appearance was misleading. He had revived as a teacher since Emerson, just as he had revived as a writer, and ran his class tightly, a pedagogic hardass. He penalized for lateness and for absence and grammar and spelling errors, trying to wean a lazy generation from dangling participles and subject/verb disagreements. “Don’t give your talent the finger,” he would tell the students. For tricky grammar questions, he would step out of his office and call his mother — even when they were supposedly not speaking, they could speak about this.
In his undergraduate class, Wallace was kind to the clueless but cruel to anyone with pretensions. When a student claimed that her sentences were “pretty,” he scribbled lines from her manuscript on the blackboard and challenged, “Which of you thinks this is pretty? Is this pretty? And this?” He continued to battle any young man who reminded him of his younger self. When one student wowed his classmates with a voicy, ironic short story, he took him outside the classroom and told him he had “never witnessed a collective dick-sucking like that before.” Wallace promised to prevent the “erection of an ego-machine” and strafed the student with criticism for the rest of the semester. The young man, Ben Slotky, found it odd that Wallace kept inviting him to play tennis though he did not know how. Wallace took pleasure in telling undergraduates who expected creative writing to be a gut that they should get out before they learned they were wrong. No one could call themselves a writer, he added, until he or she had written at least fifty stories.
He asked for a high level of commitment, but he gave it too. No one worked harder. He read every story three times and marked it up with each pass — once for first impressions, a second time to evaluate how well it did as a work of fiction, and a third time as if it were about to go to press. He would append long letters of analysis and critique to even routine undergraduate efforts. And for the graduate students, many of whom had been drawn to ISU by its reputation as a safe place for theoretical fiction, the first day of class Wallace sometimes put the names of major literary theorists on the blackboard and said, “I know about all this stuff. You don’t need to remind me of it.” Anyone who thought he was going to champion the department’s tradition soon realized he or she was wrong; his goals were traditional. The story should connect reader and writer. “Go somewhere it is difficult to get to. Try to tell about something you care about,” he would say. Or, “What is at stake in this story?” he would ask, parroting just the question he’d found so irksome from the professors at Arizona almost a decade before. If a story shied away from its emotional potential, Wallace would write on their papers, “This is a skater. See me.” And to those who insisted on the intellect over the heart, he’d order, “Write about a kid whose bunny died.” He was making a clear statement about the purpose of fiction. If the heart throbbed, who cared what the head did?
Wallace was relieved to find he could work on Infinite Jest and teach at the same time. The first semester he taught he was also moving forward again on the book. As he had with Karr, he gave Kymberly Harris new sections to read and comment on. But Harris had not come to Bloomington to be a muse or literary widow; she wanted Wallace to go out with her for dinner, to see her in plays, to be available for conversation. Wallace wanted to work. They broke up, got back together, each iteration making their mutual need more intense, a pattern he knew from Walden and Karr. He closed the door and wrote; she went out without him. Yet he did not want to be as alone as this left him. Writing all day was too solitary; being with Kymberly was too much company. So Wallace adopted a rescued Labrador pup that he named Jeeves (formally, Very Good Jeeves, the name of a story collection by P. G. Wodehouse that Wallace had loved as a boy). The dog gave Wallace great pleasure. He had the run of the house, slept in Wallace’s bed, and ate food out of his mouth; Wallace particularly liked a little sideways dance Jeeves did before he got his dinner. He understood that a dog was not a relationship with another person and yet he saw the advantages. Dogs didn’t have acting careers; they didn’t compete with you for grant money; and when you lavished love on them it made you feel good about yourself. As he would tell an interviewer after Infinite Jest came out, “It’s just much easier having dogs. You don’t get laid; but you also don’t get the feeling you’re hurting their feelings all the time.”
But it turned out that Wallace was too busy for the demands even a canine made. Jeeves would chew on his foot while he typed, then hump the velour recliner. He would relieve himself in the living room. Harris would come over to find her $100 pairs of shoes ruined and her underwear eaten. And Jeeves’s barking drove Wallace crazy; he tried to wear earplugs while he worked, then added airline headphones. He found himself unable to set limits. In some way Jeeves was an avatar of him — or of how he saw himself — ungainly, honest, quick to give his love, a rebounder from constant disappointment. Any form of discipline for Jeeves just seemed to him cruelty; he felt keenly the least whimper of pain from the animal. It was easier for him to be mean to a person than a pet.
In desperation, Wallace reached out to his friends from the university and in his recovery group. John O’Brien sent over his dog trainer, but Wallace couldn’t bear to see Jeeves disciplined. His sensitivity became a joke among his friends — this was after all farm country. Finally, a retired engineer from his recovery group started taking the Lab puppy for walks in nearby Miller Park, while Wallace strove to work. Still, he complained when Jeeves came home covered with green slime from the pond there. “What am I supposed to do,” he demanded, “send him through a car wash?”
Gale Walden had appeared in Illinois to look after her grandfather in Champaign, who was ill. She had also gotten a job at the Review of Contemporary Fiction. She and Wallace had barely been in touch since he had warned her away in Boston. Sometimes the two would meet now at diners, halfway between Champaign and Bloomington. They picked corn together on her grandfather’s land, and she cooked it for him. A more mature friendship was emerging. She would sometimes come by his house and be amazed at the chaos—“papers, file cabinets, multiple Harper’s magazines, toys Jeeves had torn up, and really a lot of herbal tea, which I thought was probably a female influence,” she remembers. He had papered the bathroom with pages from his novel. He told Walden he was putting everything he had into it. To her he seemed happy in a new way.
As 1993 drew to a close, Wallace had nearly finished his draft. He had made some of the cuts Pietsch had suggested and he had continued to expand Don Gately’s role, so that Gately was beginning to take the book over from Hal Incandenza. The change limned his own journey post-sobriety, from clever to mindful. Late in the novel, Gately is shot trying to protect his Ennet House charges and lies in a hospital, enduring the pain without morphine. In what is effectively the climactic scene of a novel without climaxes, he resists artificial pain relief with great effort:
He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear.…It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. …He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all…. But he could choose not to listen.
In November, Wallace returned to Boston for a panel at the Arlington Center for the Arts. The subject was the future of fiction. There were about thirty people in the audience and the host was Sven Birkerts. Birkerts and Wallace had met once since the former had given Girl with Curious Hair its first serious consideration, during Wallace’s short stint as a student at Harvard. At the time, Birkerts had been stunned by Wallace’s rapid-fire thought, enthusiasm for postmodernism, and need for cigarettes. Birkerts had also invited Franzen. To the audience, Wallace seemed the most cheerful of the three participants, the one with the most sense that successful fiction was still possible. Stranded overnight on the way home at O’Hare Airport, he wrote a long note (“HOPE THIS IS READABLE; I USED BLOCK CAPS, IN HOPES”) to Birkerts, trying to explain just how much he had changed. He told Birkerts that the critic cared more for “Little Expressionless Animals” than the author did now. The note also contained an early suggestion that capturing human verities when you had Wallace’s racing, recursive mind might at times be hard:
This long thing I’m 90 % done with — I wanted to make a kind of contemporary Jamesian melodrama, real edge-of-sentimentality stuff, and instead I find it buried — like parts of “L.E.A.”—in Po-Mo formalities, the sort of manic patina over emotional catatonia that seems to inflict the very culture the novel’s supposed to be about.6
He added, “I have never felt so much a failure, or so mute when it comes to articulating what I see as the way out of the ironic loop.”
That fall Wallace asked Moore to look over the manuscript and see whether the cuts Pietsch had wanted in June made sense to him. He was pleased when a month later Moore responded with suggestions for more modest condensing. Even better, his ideas were, by Wallace’s estimate, “80 % different from Little Brown’s, meaning I get to go with my gut more.” Wallace’s gut was that when Pietsch read all the pages he’d see better how they all fit together. He had also realized by now that he was not going to be able to get the book in by the end of the year and had apologetically asked Pietsch for an extension; there were only so many hours in the day. As a professor, he penalized students for late papers, but to his surprise, Pietsch was happy to give him more time. “The trick in a case like this,” Pietsch wrote back, “is to make sure we have to ask for only one extension.” They agreed in the end to a new due date of April 15, five months away. Still, feeling guilty after the fact, in January, Wallace sent the excuses he ought to have put in the first note: the surprising Illinois cold, a lithium battery in his 1980s-era computer so old it was “no longer manufactured outside like Eastern Europe,” and most of all Jeeves:
I thought getting a puppy would make it easier to spend 3 or 4 months in high-stress isolation, but it turns out the puppy does not go into suspended animation or reversible coma when I need to work, and shits about 17 times a day, and barks.
He was back at work by now, among other things expanding the “interAmerican huggermugger” that Pietsch had found too complicated, believing that the book needed it. Infinite Jest might be a “Jamesian melodrama,” but it was also the big shit he’d been working on for almost ten years, his bid for a seat at the table with Pynchon, and for that he had to preserve his unfamiliar political setting. He also around this time wrote what would become the beginning of the novel, the memorable scene, set a year after the end of the rest of the book, in which Hal Incandenza has a nervous breakdown during an admission interview at the University of Arizona. What transpires is an exaggerated version of Wallace’s own experience on his college tour fifteen years before, when he threw up at his Oberlin interview. At his own interview, Hal is seized by terror and literally can no longer speak. He is rushed to an emergency room in the midst of a psychotic episode, the end of which trip he imagines in detail:
It will start in the E.R., at the intake desk…or in the green-tiled room after the room with the invasive-digital machines; or, given this special M.D.-supplied ambulance, maybe on the ride itself: some blue-jawed M.D. scrubbed to an antiseptic glow with his name sewn in cursive on his white coat’s breast pocket and a quality desk-set pen, wanting gurneyside Q&A, etiology and diagnosis by Socratic method, ordered and point-by-point. There are, by the O.E.D. VI’s count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic…. It will be someone blue-collar and unlicensed, though, inevitably — a nurse’s aide with quick-bit nails, a hospital security guy, a tired Cuban orderly who addresses me as jou—who will, looking down in the middle of some kind of bustled task, catch what he sees as my eye and ask So yo then man what’s your story?
Wallace saw that the scene was a better lead-in for the novel than the discussion between Hal and his father posing as a professional conversationalist that had stood at the book’s beginning for so long. It captured the sense of terrified isolation that is key to the story, the worry that what we feel we can never express. And it held out a hope rarely signaled in Wallace’s earlier work but dear to his recovery experiences: the possibility that telling a story can heal.
But beginning the chronology of the book a year after the earlier draft had ended also presented a problem, one that offered an opportunity that excited Wallace. Telling Pietsch about it was likely the real purpose of his letter complaining about Jeeves. Wallace acknowledged as much in his note: “A lot of this is stalling before a query.” If Hal was a crack-up in the first scene of the novel, the reader might reasonably wonder how he had gotten that way. There were several possibilities. Hal may have seen the devastatingly absorbing video his father made or be detoxing from marijuana or have taken a potent kind of hallucinogenic fungus known as DMZ (nicknamed “Madame Psychosis”). Hints for all three of these plot twists are in the text. But Wallace wanted to tell Pietsch that he was never going to let the reader settle on one. Infinite Jest was meant to be a failed entertainment, not a potted amusement. He now warned his editor that he wasn’t going to tie up his story in a nice little bow: “Any sort of conventional linear ending for this stuff is in my opinion going to seem either linearily thrillerish in a way that doesn’t go with the rest of the book; or else incredibly prolix and complicated.” Reminding Pietsch that the plot of the book he’d bought “has always been more of an arc than a terminating line,” he proposed
an almost Artaud-ish blackout-type ending…. One that might look truncated or even violently ablated…. That is to say (I am not at my clearest on this, I know), a conceived ending that’s not so much anticlimactic as aclimactic? I can (but hopefully will not) give you about 4300 thematic/theoretical reasons why an aclimactic close here will be best — e.g. resonating echoes w/themes of stasis, annulation, paralysis, undecidability, clarification of questions > solutions to questions etc.
Wallace had dealt with enough New York editors by now to worry how such high-concept talk would strike even the supportive Pietsch. He asked for help, reminding his editor that “your loyalties to readability and readerly pleasure are one of the reasons why your editorial input here and elsewhere is of value.” There was an element of flattery here — Wallace played tennis in his letters too — but also truth. He so much wanted to help the reader to a more engaged life that he feared losing him or her on the way. He went back to writing and rewriting, cutting and then adding back in more than he had cut, taking breaks only to teach his classes. He could not have worked harder, as he let Pietsch know, but even so, he saw he would not finish the manuscript by April 15 and asked for more time at the beginning of that month. His letter requesting an extension was penitent, whether from exhaustion, memories of his tangle with Viking Penguin, or the usefulness of imagining Pietsch as an unforgiving authority figure so he would get the book written:
I’m mortified to have essentially lied to you about 4/15; the date seemed an almost GOP-ishly staid and conservative projection back in January. I now want to say late April or May. I’m not saying this: I’m saying I want to say it. I canceled class for these two weeks, but now I know I won’t be done by 4/18, and then I have to make up all the classes I’d canceled.
He imagined apocalyptic consequences to being late connected to the meaning of April 15:
If I don’t file my taxes I might go to jail — though this is also a sort of late-night terror I have, about Little Brown’s parent company’s lawyers sending me to jail because of some Kafkaesque boilerplate clause I neglected to see at the bottom of the legal document I know I signed, and was given $ by you guys. I know this is just a dark fantasy.
But ever recursive in his thinking, he added:
I also know there[’s] something doubly annoying about a letter like this: it’s so anxious and cringing that it kind of forestalls a stern response on your part, since the letter might now make a stern response seem like kicking somebody who’s already kicking furiously at himself and telling you to go ahead and kick because he’s such a dork he deserves it.
Wallace’s apology-cum-meta-apology prompted words of comfort from Pietsch, who reassured his author that everyone at Little, Brown was happy to wait for the novel and eager to read it. Wallace, relieved, wrote back with thanks for Pietsch’s “extremely analgesic letter,” while quietly claiming a little more time to work on his book:
I am writing this thing; or rather except for the last ten pages have written the whole thing, and am w/ all due haste putting it together in a seamlessly tight bag….[P]lan your own schedule for this thing hitting your mahogany by late june at the very latest. I will finish the final draft by then or be dead.
As ever, his letter contained news. (The negotiations on due dates were just to soften Pietsch up.) He had a new scheme (“I’m telling you this in advance to like prepare you emotionally”), a way to shorten the book without having to cut it beyond where it could be cut: endnotes. At the back of the book in smaller type they could stick “harder stuff — data, medical lore, 19th-century asides, ESCHATON math calculations (which I’m attached to because darn if I did find a neater and more elegant way to prove the Mean Value Theorem for integrals than anything that’s in the texts) and certain scenes.”
He went on:
I’ve become intensely attached to this strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it. it allows me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence, 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically “back and forth” in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns…5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.
Aware that he was wandering back into the experimental terrain he had worked so hard to exit, he added, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.”
Finally, in late-June 1994, Wallace had the full manuscript, some roughly 750,000 words, complete with Artaud-ish ending and hundreds of endnotes. He promised to bring the bundle to New York on June 30 “handcuffed to a wrist.” He was exhausted:
If further stuff needs to be cut I’m apt not to fight but to ask for an enormous amount of help, because everything in it’s connected to everything else, at least in my head. The whole thing may be incoherent for all I know. At this point I have no idea. It’s like not knowing what your family looks like: you live right up close to something so long and it blinds you. I just want it done.
In New York, he met up with Costello and they went to see Gus, a polar bear at the Central Park Zoo whose constant neurotic circumambulations of his holding cage were attracting attention from the press, including a mention on Letterman. Wallace felt saddened to see the tourists gawking. He flew to Arizona on a visit, where he saw Ashby, who was surprised at how much bigger and shaggier Wallace had gotten with the years. For Wallace it felt strange to be away from a story that had kept him busy nearly night and day for three years. “I am sad and empty, as I always am when I finish something long,” he wrote Franzen, whom he saw in Chicago on the way back. He went on:
I don’t think it’s very good — some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way to describing the whole experience of writing the thing. I pray Pietsch doesn’t want major changes, mostly because I don’t want to have to be engaged with the thing again, not at all.
That summer Amy Wallace was going to be married in upstate New York. She was thirty now and had found someone to settle down with, which made Wallace feel left behind, the unmarried older brother. Amy’s upcoming wedding brought forward another fear, one he had been evading during his feverish work on the book. He wrote Franzen that he was scared that “stuff in the mss” would hurt his mother. The portrait of Avril Incandenza had considerable ferocity. She was now an arch grammarian “engaging in sexual enmeshments with just about everything with a Y-chromosome.” Wallace had placed her at the center of a comic but painful scene in which, dressed in a cheerleader’s uniform, she pretends to be blowing a whistle while one of the Enfield Academy tennis players assumes a three-point stance in nothing but football helmet and jockstrap. Wallace had even put in a suggestion that Avril had committed incest with Orin, Hal’s brother, thus triggering Orin’s own satyriasis.
Wallace calmed himself with the thought that Infinite Jest was after all fiction and that all the “rococo lit-flourish” surrounding her portrait would make the parallels hard to see. One flourish that packed particular power for him was the dedication, which would ultimately read: “For F. P. Foster: R.I.P.,” a coded condemnation of his mother’s father. (In an earlier draft, Wallace had made the attack more emphatic: “For Fenton Foster RIP, (P) [Rest in Peace (Please!)].”)
At Amy’s wedding, in July, David was a “bridesman,” his hair gathered in a ponytail. Everyone found him in good spirits. His “dread [of] the various eddies of such a confluence” (his phrase to Franzen) did not show, and if anyone noticed that things were cool between him and his mother, no one said anything.
Wallace was looking forward to the start of the fall 1994 semester. The department was allowing him to teach an undergraduate introductory course in literature. This had been his quiet wish since coming to ISU. Now after a year of hard labor, he was to be let out of the ghetto of creative writing classes. The equation that the more he taught the less he wrote had never entirely disappeared from his mind, and it was also true that the simpler what he taught was, the lower the impact on his own creativity; the course would grow to be a favorite of his over the years. After the formal description of the course in the syllabus, he told his students what he was really hoping to have happen:
In less narcotizing words, English 102 aims to show you some ways to read fiction more deeply, to come up with more interesting insights on how pieces of fiction work, to have informed intelligent reasons for liking or disliking a piece of fiction, and to write — clearly, persuasively, and above all interestingly — about stuff you’ve read.
This was a return to teaching’s first purpose. Wallace liked to sit in his classes, flannel shirt tied around his waist, straddling a backward-facing chair, rocking, as he discoursed on character and pacing. He reminded one student of “an engineer of literature,” pulling out the building blocks of stories — voice, narrative structure, point of view. He often used writers of popular fiction — Jackie Collins, Thomas Harris, and Tom Clancy among others — for this purpose, because the components of their fiction were easy to identify and it also made the point that a story did not have to be hard to be worth reading.
Meanwhile, Pietsch was reading Wallace, while Wallace brooded and waited for a response through the months. He wrote Franzen that Pietsch kept cracking “ominous hernia-jokes.” Pietsch had in fact had the manuscript tentatively set in type and confirmed that the novel, if printed as Wallace had written it, would be almost twelve hundred pages long. To make money on it, the publisher would have to charge more for each copy than anyone was likely to want to pay. He finally wrote a note to his anxious author in October 1994 warning him that though he loved “having this monster in my head,” there was going to have to be more cutting. Also, he pointed out that there were areas that had confused him in April that having a complete draft had not clarified: the book took too long to get going, and the characters at the Enfield Tennis Academy blurred in his mind. He still didn’t buy the back-and-forth among the merged United States, Mexico, and Canada and the angry Quebecois separatists. “There is no part of the novel I’m looking forward to rereading less than the sequence of colloquys between Marathe and Steeply on the mountain,” he wrote of the two secret agents. Then he responded to the two innovations Wallace had proposed in earlier letters: he was not excited by the idea of endnotes — footnotes would be easier on the reader, he felt — nor by the “Artaud-ish” ending. “Hundreds of pages of killer cartridges and stalking Canadians,” he objected, “and moving furniture and Avril’s affairs and James’s suicide — all those dingleberries in the air — and we don’t get to find out who or how or why?” But by the time he finished reading the manuscript a second time in December, he was cheerier. He acknowledged that he was beginning to see how tightly everything fit together. What looked arbitrary now worked. He even found the ending satisfying:
Hal’s breakdown, the one at the start of the novel, is approaching clearly enough that I finished the book guessing how he got from here to there…. The revelation that Hal’s known all along of his mom’s many affairs seems like a key to it all…I’m assuming now that this part of the story isn’t resolved more clearly…because Hal’s still avoiding it.
He added that “Gately’s hitting bottom…is gorgeous and very very powerfully sad,” and saw that endnotes might be better than footnotes — less “academic and daunting.” Maybe, he thought, Little, Brown could package the book with a bookmark so readers could keep their places.
Happier though Pietsch was, he still felt the book was too long. He wanted the same effect achieved with less. So just before Christmas he added hundreds of specific suggestions for cuts. And in February 1995, Wallace responded with a sixteen-page letter of his own, acceding, rejecting, and counterproposing, wheedling, in a bath of faux mea culpa language for having birthed such a complicated and long book. “I guess,” he wrote, “maybe I have an arrogance problem — I think I’d presumed in some of this stuff that it was OK to make a reader read the book twice.” But he dug in on the ending, where Pietsch still wanted more clarification: “We know exactly what’s happening to Gately by end, about 50 % of what’s happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin. I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural argument for this, but let’s spare one another, shall we?”
Some of the new round of cuts Wallace took eagerly, other times with an undertone of reluctance. “Mugging of Joe D. in Cambridge. Cut, although it introduces three different characters and starts four different plotlines,” he groused at one point, agreeing to cut back one of the characters who dated all the way back to the Hammerhill boxes that had held some of his early attempts at the novel. Sometimes he wanted to keep a scene simply because it had been in the book for so long. Other times he threatened that if material were removed, longer, duller rewriting would rise up to plug the gap. Another of his favored tactics was to respond to a request for a cut with a condensation, turning ten pages into five or five into two, or taking the unwanted material and putting it in the endnotes, where some of his favorite passages went to make their last stand. Pietsch also hesitated to put the words “A Failed Entertainment” on a book people were supposed to buy. Wallace suggested it might go on the “frontispiece” instead. Pietsch objected that the problem with calling Infinite Jest “A Failed Entertainment” anywhere was “it’s not,” and it quietly disappeared from the manuscript.
The winter of 1994–95 Wallace took a major step. After almost a decade of an itinerant life, he bought a house. It was the largest asset he had ever owned and he thought of it as much as anything as a down payment on his maturity. The house had three bedrooms and a little patio in front and a yard in the back that he had fenced off for Jeeves. It was made of brick, allaying a fear of tornadoes that dated back to his childhood. The house stood at the edge of town, near trailer parks and a slaughterhouse and also open land; down the street were cornfields, much as with his childhood home in Urbana. He was particularly pleased that his mail address was “Rural Route 2,” rather than a street address. Wallace moved in with his books and manuscripts and soon letters from Franzen and DeLillo and then a copy of the Saint Francis prayer appeared on the walls.
Wallace had never owned anything bigger than a car before and he approached his new possession as if everything to do with it were a cause of wonder, a stance that also served to reassure him that though he was now a homeowner he had not totally sold out. “I bought a house,” he wrote to Don DeLillo in May,
it’s small and brick and next to a horse pasture. It has what seems like a 6-acre lawn, and I bought the house in the winter and it didn’t occur to me that the grass in this lawn grows and will have somehow to be dealt with. I haven’t mowed a lawn since I folded my childhood lawn-mowing business at 13, and I see all my neighbors mowing their own 6-acre lawns like every fourth day, and Weed-Whacking, and dispersing seed and nitrates through devices that look like enormous flour-sifters on wheels, and I am not keen on becoming a lawn-obsessed homeowner. But it’s nice to own a house and not pay off a landlord’s mortgage.
Wallace’s recovery friends were much in evidence in his new home. Many of them were handy, and they were vigilant that the impractical Wallace not get ripped off by their own. His best friend from recovery, Francis B., built his bookshelves. Another put in a cutoff switch for his main electrical cable; Francis B.’s mother volunteered to clean Wallace’s house; soon she was doing his wash, with Wallace hiding his underwear from her before she got there. She would cook for him or pick up a roast chicken at his favorite restaurant and stick it in his empty fridge while he was teaching or at a meeting. One time when the handle on his screen door came off, Wallace called Francis B.: “How much is a new screen door going to cost me?” His friend came by with a screwdriver. Wallace exaggerated his helplessness. It was at once a gesture of generosity and of selfishness. The others took pleasure in helping, and Wallace got things done that he didn’t have time or aptitude for.
In March 1995 Colin Harrison asked Wallace to go on a Caribbean cruise and write about it for Harper’s. He and Kymberly were split up, at least for the moment. Spring break was coming and, offered the chance to get away from the cold and the never-ending revisions to Infinite Jest, he accepted. Once again he would join the American hordes dosing themselves on fabricated amusements. He would sample shuffleboard, endless buffets, onboard talent shows, and whatever else came his way. But, as ever, he was unsure how to proceed. The hopes of editors always made him nervous. He asked Costello and Franzen if they would join him, but neither was available, so alone he flew to Fort Lauderdale, from which the ocean liner MV Zenith—dubbed by him the Nadir—was slated for a weeklong circuit around the Gulf of Mexico. From the ship, Wallace called Harrison and asked what the magazine was looking for. Harrison told him to just “Be yourself. Enjoy. You’ll find the story.”
There was an immediate problem. Shipboard life was full of alcohol and Wallace didn’t drink. There would also be no recovery meetings on board. In compensation he smoked plenty of cigarettes. “Prospects for an acute and fecund belle-lettristic essay on cruising in ’95 are looking bleak,” Wallace wrote Franzen from Playa del Carmen. “Everything but the shuffleboard court is restricted. The atmosphere summons images of a floating range of Poconos.” Wallace felt lonely, awkward, and on a false footing and spent most of his time in his cabin or in the ship’s library. He was relieved when the trip was over and he was back on shore. On his way home in late March he stopped in New York, visiting Pietsch to talk about his manuscript, and stayed with Franzen for a few days in Jackson Heights in Queens, where his friend was now living. Franzen tried to get Wallace to cut back on the blondies, while Wallace made fun of the tidiness of his friend’s household. They bickered but more affectionately — work was on the whole going well for both of them now. Wallace was still wary of anything to do with cities and sophisticated city people but one night Franzen took him to a gathering hosted by Open City, a literary journal, at a Manhattan nightclub. It was not a scene Wallace felt very comfortable in, a party full of alcohol and drugs. During the evening he met Elizabeth Wurtzel, a writer whose memoir of depression, Prozac Nation, was a current hit. Wurtzel had struck a provocative pose on the cover of her book in a flesh-colored T-shirt, mid-riff exposed, and when Wallace questioned why, she told him it was what you had to do to sell a book. He demurred, citing his duty to art and other DeLilloesque objections. But Wallace was smitten by her silver lamé leotard and walked her home. In the lobby of Wurtzel’s building, as she remembers, he spent more than an hour trying to persuade her to let him come upstairs. He told her it would be a therapeutic favor. She told him if he stopped chewing tobacco he’d have a better chance.
Trivial as the encounter was, it stayed on Wallace’s mind. Wurtzel was a breathing symbol of temptation to him, Salome to Leyner’s antichrist. He had never met anyone as self-involved as he was, someone, moreover, with a history of depression, yet whom fame and drugs had not pushed into collapse. It was another glimpse of the alternative universe he had last seen at Yaddo with McInerney in 1987, the lure that the decisions he’d made about celebrity were not the only ones possible. He quickly inscribed a copy of Broom to her. “Not my best thing, by a long shot, believe me,” he noted on the title page. Wallace was in a happy time in his life, but all the same Wurtzel prompted a long letter full of recursive agonizing that he wrote soon after he got back to Bloomington:
I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am — for just an example — self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel like I’m not one of the good ones; but then I countenance the fact that here at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any integrity at all don’t notice or worry about it; so then I feel better about myself (I mean, at least this stuff is on my mind, at least I’m dissatisfied with my level of integrity and commitment); but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to (imagined) Others…. It has to do with God and gods and a basic sense of trust in the universe v. fear that the universe must be held at bay and micromanaged into giving me some smidgeon of some gratification I feel I simply can’t live without. It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am — so where does that put me.
He told her how hard it was for him when he wrote to discern the difference between caring about the reader and caring that the reader cared about him:
The crux, for me, is how to love the reader without believing that my art or worth depends on his(her) loving me. It’s just about that simple in the abstract. In practice it’s a daily fucking war.
By now, the cruise ship experience had begun to cohere for him. He was merging the miserable time he had had on board into his larger themes. He produced an overstuffed meditation, twenty-four pages in the magazine, on the mistaken American belief that pleasure can do anything other than stoke the need for more pleasure. Early in the article he declares:
I now know the difference between straight bingo and Prize-O. I have seen fluorescent luggage and fluorescent sunglasses and fluorescent pince-nez and over twenty different makes of rubber thong. I have heard steel drums and eaten conch fritters and watched a woman in silver lamé projectile-vomit inside a glass elevator.7
Wallace explored the various types of cruise self-indulgence, from shuffleboard (“thanatopic,” he called it) to the daily “eleven gourmet eating ops” to skeet shooting. He told the story of having missed a clay pigeon by a wide margin and watching it sink into the ocean: “Know that an unshot discus’s movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean’s sky is sun-like — i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left — and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.”
“Sad” became the tocsin ringing through the piece, sadness as the consequence of too much plenty: sad waiters, sad cruise ship — goers taking pointless videos of other sad people pointing video cameras at them from their own cruise ships, and sad, senseless attempts by Americans to amuse themselves in the absence of any larger spiritual idea. “Choose with care,” Marathe warns in Infinite Jest. “You are what you love. No?” Wallace’s cruise ship piece was about the price of failing to choose well.
To underpin this note, Wallace quoted the saddest story of all, one that had been in the news just before departure:
Some weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a half gainer off the upper deck of a Megaship. The news version of the suicide was that it had been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a ship-board romance gone bad. But I think part of it was something no news story could cover. There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to what people call dread or angst, but it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.8
In April 1995 Infinite Jest was back on Wallace’s desk — Pietsch had had the novel set in sample type again and realized the book was still too many pages. He sent a list of possible new cuts. To DeLillo, whom he increasingly turned to as his authority on literary matters, Wallace voiced a growing worry:
I am uncomfortable about making cuts for commercial reasons — it seems slutty — but on the other hand LB is taking a big gamble publishing something this long and this hard and I feel some obligation not to be a p.-donna and fuck them over. Maybe I’m writing because I want your general aestheto-ethical imput on this. I don’t know.
He added that he would probably wind up “cutting 40 % of what they ask and making the font slightly smaller and hoping to fool them.” DeLillo wrote back that he had to follow his instincts; as Wallace summarized his advice back to Pietsch, when “you feel incipient bladder tumors at the thought of cutting something don’t cut it.”
The edits Wallace agreed to left Pietsch in, as he wrote Wallace in mid-May, “a state of editorial ecstasy…the veil lifted.” But ten days later he was back with more unwelcome news. “Here’s what happened,” he wrote Wallace, “I got to the end of Infinite Jest Friday a week ago and mailed that letter to you. Then over the weekend I was struck by the realization that I hadn’t actually edited the manuscript yet. Only now do I feel that I know the novel well enough to make more detailed suggestions.” Anticipating his author’s response, he added, “I know this is harrowing for you, but I believe that this is the work you want me to do. This is my best editing, David.”
A new round of editing followed, focusing on the first five hundred pages. “I’m prepared to thumbwrestle you over every one of these cuts,” Pietsch challenged Wallace, having absorbed the latter’s language of playful combat. He chopped at endnotes, and went after more of the “interAmerican huggermugger” in the back, where Wallace had stashed it. Wallace quickly responded to the edits, as he did when agitated, with a circle signifying “total acquiescence to demand” and a dash meaning “bared teeth,” “dickering,” or that a proposed cut had to be discussed on the phone.
Pietsch was also still worried about how the parts fit together. This was a novel in which, with the possible exception of Gately’s story, the plot reaches no conclusion. You don’t know for sure if the terrorists find the lethal cartridge. The reader never learns what drove Hal mad. Is Avril Incandenza an agent for the Quebecois terrorists? There were hints that she and John “No Relation” Wayne,9 the top player in the school, both were. Wallace insisted that the answers all existed, but just past the last page. The novel continued in time in the reader’s mind — that is, it meant for it to have the trajectory of a “broad arc” rather than a Freytagian triangle. Pietsch asked for one clarification now. He wanted some indication of the fate of Orin Incandenza, who may be responsible for sending out the lethal cartridge to get back at his mother.
Wallace, amid all the cutting and rewriting, gave it a try. “Potential insertion into page 1229 about which I’m not exactly qualmless,” he faxed Pietsch on June 11 and sent a scene, with overtones of 1984, in which Quebecois terrorists trap Orin under a surreally massive inverted “tumbler” and unloose roaches on him — his “special conscious horror.” The goal is to suffocate him — a fate similar to that which he inflicted on the roaches infesting his bathroom several hundred pages earlier.
Another set of alterations was forced by a phone call. In May, Mary Karr, who had read some of the portions of the novel serialized in magazines, called Pietsch to point out that many of the Ennet House scenes were taken either from what Wallace heard or saw at Granada House and in recovery meetings, where conversations were supposed to be private. For Wallace, an accusation of this sort could elicit maximum anxiety, the threat of new exposure and problems. He might find himself once again in Girl with Curious Hair territory. But this time things went far more smoothly. He changed some names in the manuscript, altered other details, and added a strongly worded but evasive denial to the copyright page that the events in the novel were disclosed at confidential recovery meetings.10
Wallace flew to New York once more at the end of June with the manuscript in a box on his lap. Kymberly Harris came with him this time. Their relationship had revived in the spring. Wallace had even requested a sit-down with her parents and, arriving highly nervous, asked if it would be okay for Kymberly to live with him. “David is asking for my thumb,” she joked. The Harrises gave their consent, amused by Wallace’s formality, but he had been serious, in a way; a midwestern rigor in certain matters was still within him and this was a major step in his mind. Kymberly had moved in with her clothes and furniture in April, but, now just a couple of months later, she planned to audition for the Actors Studio in New York. Wallace dropped in on Pietsch and handed off his bundle and was back in Bloomington a week later. Soon after, the Actors Studio wrote Kymberly to say she had been accepted. Wallace pronounced himself thrilled, delighted that she had gotten into the “Yale Medical School of Acting,” then, quickly less thrilled, asked her to wait a year before she went east. At first she agreed, but by August she realized that the more deeply she got involved with Wallace the less likely she would be ever to leave Bloomington. She told him she was going to New York, with him or not, and four friends came and moved her and her things out, leaving him the silver velour recliner, Jeeves, his old bed, and little else.
Soon Wallace found other companionship. One day he was out jogging and a dog appeared by his side. Wallace realized it was a stray and decided to take it home. “The Drone,” as he named him after the mythic club in P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, was a black Lab mix, as Jeeves was.11 He was more rebellious than Jeeves, less of a house pet.12 Together the two ruled the house, their chew toys and fur everywhere. Their water came from the cooler. If Wallace was away for more than a few hours, he brought in a sitter.
To Wallace’s surprise, Little, Brown had already produced a brochure with a short piece by Wallace on writing and a brief excerpt from the novel and distributed it at the annual booksellers’ convention in late spring. And just a few weeks after he brought his final manuscript to New York with Harris, Pietsch sent him bound copies for subsidiary rights sales and prepublication quotes. After discussion, the cover was a picture of blue sky with puffs of clouds. It was inspired by the “wallpaper scheme” of the administrative offices’ waiting room at the tennis academy that incites Hal’s agoraphobia, with its “fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky.”13 Wallace wrote to DeLillo that the book had “a cover that’s (troublingly, to me) identical to the passenger safety card on American Airlines flights.”
The work of Infinite Jest almost done, Wallace was casting around for new projects. The state fair piece and the sections of Infinite Jest that had run in journals had made him in demand. He said no to a week at a nudist colony and a chance to attend the launch of a scent endorsed by Elizabeth Taylor at an air force base, the similarity of these offers sparking the suspicion, as he later told an interviewer, that all the magazine editors in New York read each other’s mail.14 Wallace was vulnerable to being wanted and he had liked all the new readers his magazine work got him. So he agreed to write a piece for Details about the tennis star Michael Joyce (it was ultimately published in Esquire), and another on the U.S. Open for Tennis, a magazine that he’d devoured as a teenage player. Both magazines were looking for a piece of the Wallace voice, that tone of a sensitive, sincere genius operating in second gear. His nonfiction persona was, as Wallace told an interviewer, “a little stupider and shmuckier than I am.” He became adept at the back-and-forth of magazine work, limiting the psychic cost of the editing by calling and leaving long messages at night on his editors’ voice mails.
Wallace also began a review of Joseph Frank’s four-volume biography of Dostoevsky for the Voice Literary Supplement, where Lee Smith, the editor of Signifying Rappers, was now working. Wallace had over the years become deeply attracted to the Russian’s writing and life. The parallels between Dostoevsky’s and his own certainly caught his eye, as they had at Granada House. Wasn’t his time there comparable to Dostoevsky’s exile in Siberia, where the Russian had first seen how much he had in common even with the most desperate souls? He left this implied in the lengthy article he produced:
What seems most important is that Dostoevsky’s near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer — a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory — into a person who believed deeply in moral/spiritual values.
Wallace spent most of July on the essay and became more and more impressed. Here was a writer impossible in modern America, one earnestly and unapologetically moral. He wrote in a notebook around this time.
Hyperc[onsciousness] makes life meaningless […]: but what of will to construct OWN meaning? Not the world that gives us meaning but vice versa? Dost embodies this — Ellis, Leyner, Leavitt, Franzen, Powers — they do not. Their fictions reduce to complaints and self-pity. Dostoevski has BALLS.
He wanted to extend the point he had made in “E Unibus Pluram” two years before. Then he had mostly diagnosed a disease; now he was giving a model for the cure. American writers were still content to describe an ironic culture when they should be showing the way out. They had still not discovered, as he wrote in Infinite Jest, that “what looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage.” “Who is to blame,” he concluded in his VLS piece, “for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction.”
In August the copyedited manuscript of Infinite Jest arrived. Wallace had been dreading this day. He had written Pietsch in the winter that if his editor would give him the name of “your/our copyeditor…I’ll start sending candy and sweet nothings now.” He had sent a prophylactic note along, almost a compendium of Wallace stylistic tics, in the hopes he could limit disagreement:
To Copyeditor:
Hi. F.Y.I., the following non-standard features of this mss. are intentional and will get stetted by the author if color-penciled by you:
— Single quotation marks around dialogue & titles, with double q.m.’s inside — reversal of normal order.
— Such capitalized common nouns and verb-phrases as
Substance, Disease, Come In, Inner Infant, etc.
— Neologisms, catachreses, solecisms, and non-standard syntax in sections concerning the characters Minty, Marathe, Antitoi, Krause, Pemulis, Steeply, Lenz, Orin Incandenza, Mario Incandenza, Fortier, Foltz, J.O. Incandenza Sr., Schtitt, Gompert.
— Multiple conjunctions at the start of independent clauses.
— Commas before prepositions at the end of sentences.
— Hyphens to form compound nouns.
— Sentence-fragments following exceptionally long sentences.
— Inconsistent paragraphing, with some extremely long paragraphs.15
Now he braced himself for several months of unraveling the mistakes and foolish consistencies of people who knew grammar less well than he, a fear that was shortly confirmed. He wrote his Boston friend Debra Spark in October that he was “in the 8th circle of page-proof-proofreading hell. Never again anything over 150 pages.” He wheedled and begged Pietsch for more time, presenting evidence that it was the publisher who had messed things up. “The more I proof these page proofs, the more convinced I get that it would be a mistake to disseminate bound galleys before typos and solecisms are corrected,” he wrote Pietsch. “I’m going over each word and line with a loupe, almost,” he assured him. To Alice Turner, to whom he sent the bound proofs, he claimed in December to have caught “about 47,000 typos in the bound galley.” (Later he would tell an interview from Time that he had corrected all but one of “about 712,000.”) One of his graduate students, Jason Hammel, remembers going over to Wallace’s house to find him with loose pages of Infinite Jest spread out in front of him, watching the movie Beethoven over and over on a TV/VCR combo from Rent-A-Center. He told Hammel it was the only way at this point he could bear to read the book. His eyes, by now, he complained to the chief copy editor, were “wobbling like a vestibulitiser’s.”
Wallace was not the only member of his family to play copyeditor. He had also tried to test-drive the family’s response to the book by hiring his sister for that task even before the manuscript had been finished. She immediately saw what was going on and asked him if he really felt this was the right way to deal with his anger at his mother; Wallace just shrugged. But he still felt he had to give his mother the manuscript to read. He sent it to Urbana and waited. In December, six weeks later, he wrote Alice Turner that he was worried still to have heard nothing, “wholly ominous given our family’s normal communication grid; I fear someone sees more autobiography in it than there is.”16
As the February publication of Infinite Jest neared, Wallace felt neither he nor his book was ready. Any hint of impending clamor made him glad he was in Illinois, safe from curious eyes and the intoxications of admiration and publicity. But Little, Brown had the job of making sure Wallace felt necessary or at least familiar to literary readers. He had not had a book of fiction come out since 1989. The massiveness of the novel was the central fact to be dealt with. It became a joke at the publisher’s marketing meetings to ask, as one participant remembers, “Has anyone here actually read this thing?” Soon Little, Brown realized that the obstacle could be made the point. To read Infinite Jest was to accept a dare. It began a campaign of postcards sent to four thousand reviewers, producers, and bookstore owners. With each round of postcards a bit more of the title was revealed against the toneless blue sky of the jacket. One postcard had glowing quotes from earlier Wallace books, another promised “the biggest literary event of next year” and a third promised, “Just imagine what they’ll say about his masterpiece.” This was too much for Wallace, and in a mid-September letter, in the midst of the “fucking, fucking nightmare” of the page proofs, as he would later call it, he begged Little, Brown to stop. “‘Masterpiece’? I’m 33 years old; I don’t have a ‘masterpiece,’” he wrote Pietsch. “‘The literary event of ’96?’ What if it isn’t? What if nobody buys it? I’m getting ready, inside, for that possibility; but are you guys?” At least, he begged, could they reduce the size of his name on the publicity material? A deeper worry, though, was that in the cascade of edits, the nebulous, fine-veined schema of the novel had been compromised. Wallace himself wasn’t sure anymore. When David Markson wrote him to say how much he enjoyed the advance copy of the book he got but there were parts he couldn’t figure out, it touched a chord in the author and he answered, a bit ungratefully:
About the holes and lacunae and etc., I bet you’re right: the fucker’s cut by 600 pages from the first version, and though many of the cuts (editor-inspired) made the thing better, it fucked up a certain watertightness that the mastodon-size first version had, I think.
Seven years after Girl with Curious Hair had come out Infinite Jest was to be published into a very different literary terrain. Minimalism had vanished. Postmodernism was a yet more distant memory: no recent graduate of a writing program would have bothered to make one of its authors the patriarch for his patricide. Importantly, the American political climate had changed, changing the literary climate. Both minimalism and postmodernism, as Wallace had noted in his “Fictional Futures” essay, were forms of social protest, and as the 1990s progressed, just what was to be protested grew harder to define. Ronald Reagan had left office at the beginning of 1989, the Berlin Wall had been pulled down the next year, and the Soviet Union had dissolved in 1991. Political worry was replaced by economic abundance. Americans had never felt more masterful than in the mid-1990s, living in the space between the Cold War and the time of ill-defined threats that was to come.
Wealthy eras usually repair to realism, at least for a while. This was true too of the 1990s. The well-wrought short story—“no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past,” as Wallace wrote in “Fictional Futures”—returned to the fore, if indeed it had ever been anywhere else. Lyrical realist novels like Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, and Richard Ford’s Independence Day dominated awards lists. Cormac McCarthy became the best-known literary author of the decade, but it wasn’t the intense McCarthy Wallace loved of Blood Meridian and Suttree but the more romantic one of All the Pretty Horses, the story of a young cowboy who crosses into Mexico to look for love and a friend’s stolen horse.
No time of calm is without its undertone of introspection and angst; affluence has its victims too. Wallace was by no means the only one nor the only one trying to give them voice. Certainly anyone as attuned to television as Wallace was could witness the damaged and the distressed telling their stories all day long.17 And something similar was going on in writing by non-Anglo American writers, many of whom were presenting a vivid world of stories drawn from their own histories. But these were not authors to whom Wallace has a strong response; his remained the world of the 1970s novel, predominantly male, Caucasian, and highly erudite.18 There a sense of anxiety was more muted, though not absent. Rick Moody was writing Purple America, a novel that deploys shifting consciousnesses to define a damaged and polluted America, and William Vollmann was pursuing the reportorial inquiry into the darker side of American life he had begun with The Rainbow Stories, an investigation similar to one that Denis Johnson was conducting in books like Jesus’ Son. These were a few of the authors who shared or even anticipated Infinite Jest’s sense that the focus on consumption and pleasure in modern American life would end badly. None of them, though, combined such a stance — the anti-hedonistic strain in American fiction — with the promise of redemption that lies at the center of Infinite Jest.
Indeed, earnest storytelling seemed to nearly everyone but Wallace antithetical to proving oneself worthy of taking on questions of societal unease; Don Gately is a character one can’t imagine any of the others creating. Literature — especially from the sorts of writers Wallace felt in conversation with — was about delving, extracting, and then layering a complicating layer of language on observed life; there was nothing evangelical about it. The literary gesture existed almost as an inverse to the narrative of recovery meetings, where as Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest, “an ironist…is a witch in church.…Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity.” In Infinite Jest, Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire. “Look man,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in the Review of Contemporary Fiction interview,
we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.
Infinite Jest then didn’t just diagnose a malaise. It proposed a treatment, answering a need that Wallace saw perhaps better than any other writer of his time. The book is at once a meditation on the pain of adolescence, the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity. (Wallace never forgot David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and the skein that separates unremarkable from abnormal in America.) It spoke of the imminence of collapse and the possibility that one can emerge stronger from that collapse. It offered faith apart from religion. Its multiple voices jibed with an America that no longer spoke as one, an America in which, as in James Incandenza’s films, “you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the…narrative periphery they were.” It captured a new generation of young people — especially young ones, especially male — who in the midst of plenty felt misunderstood or ignored, who with each decade had less and less idea how to make their rich inner selves visible, who understood what Hal meant when he objected:
I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything.
But the book also had the range to get beyond the much-trafficked literary realm of the misunderstood young. It captured another America, the millions felled by the “input too intense to bear” that Wallace had signaled in “Westward,” the Don Gatelys of the world, charismatic and full of fallow potential, people “damaged or askew,” calling out to the reader from inside their broken lives, as they call out to Hal’s sensitive brother Mario as he visits Ennet House:
Mario likes the place: it’s crowded and noisy and none of the furniture has protective plastic wrap…. The inside of it smells like an ashtray, but Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.
There was no need to decide which Infinite Jest you were reading, since, after all, these two main strands both emanated so clearly from the same concern: how to live meaningfully in the present. There is a generosity to the world created by this 1,079-page novel. A great intelligence hangs above it and seems not entirely uninterested in our survival. It watches from the walkway about the courts at the Enfield Academy and lurks in the communal rooms at Ennet House, explains the rise of O.N.A.N. and the fall of network advertising, the composition of tennis rackets, the Boston street names of controlled substances, and the history of videophony. Infinite Jest, for all its putative difficulty, cares about the reader, and if it denies him or her a conventional ending, it doesn’t do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic storytelling can, because, just as in Ennet House, you have to work to get better. The book is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are (there is a reason Wallace had to reach back to Dostoevsky for a model). Gately abides, taking on, almost in a Christlike way, the sins of his flock, and Christ implies a God. Wallace never forgets his pledge, as he told McCaffery, that “all the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.”
All this makes it seem as if the critical success of Infinite Jest were predetermined. True, the book appeared at a moment in which critics were looking for big novels, for some way of summing up the world at the turn of the millennium, but Infinite Jest did not seem immediately what they wanted. It was too difficult, felt too headlong, its calculated casualness confused. The prepublication notices straddled the fence between admiring and wondering whether the reviewer wasn’t being had. Publishers Weekly called the work a “brilliant but somewhat bloated dirigible of a second novel,” while Kirkus was slightly warmer, admiring what was “almost certainly the biggest and boldest novel we’ll see this year and, flaws and all, probably one of the best.” Predictably, most reviews emphasized the dimensions of the book, both literal and metaphorical. Sven Birkerts captured this amazement in the Atlantic, where he noted that Infinite Jest had “mov[ed] toward us like an ocean disturbance, pushing increasingly hyperbolic rumors before it: that the author could not stop writing; that the publisher was begging for cuts of hundreds of pages; that it was, qua novel, a very strange piece of business altogether.” Library Journal warned its readership that Infinite Jest was “not for the faint-hearted or the weak-wristed.”
Most reviewers who wrote about the book liked it, but there was an undertone of obedience to their writing, of being relieved they could answer in the affirmative the dare Little, Brown had laid down. “Challenging and provocative,” wrote the Orlando Sentinel. The Chicago Tribune called the novel “brashly funny and genuinely moving…worth the long haul.” The novelist Jonathan Dee in the Voice Literary Supplement praised Wallace as “the funniest writer of his generation.” All agreed Infinite Jest was significant — or, at least, a novel others would think was significant, so their readers should know about it. Walter Kirn, a mischievous novelist who reviewed it for New York, sped the plow: “Next year’s book awards have been decided. The plaques and citations can now be put in escrow. The competition,” he wrote, “has been obliterated. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on ‘Jeopardy!’ The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good.” Esquire praised the book but criticized the publicity campaign. (Wallace, who happened to be in New York when the piece came out, in a note to Markson called it “that sneery thing in Esquire about the so-called ‘Hype of the Huge.’”) All these developments were positive from the publisher’s point of view. “I’m very happy with the launch so far,” Michael Pietsch wrote to Bonnie Nadell, “all our drum beating seems to have been heard.”
The book began selling well, especially given its size, and the publisher quickly went back for several small reprints. Yet the novel was certainly not sweeping everything away in its path. Jay McInerney reviewed the book for the New York Times Book Review with little enthusiasm. He missed the inventiveness of Girl with Curious Hair and found Wallace’s sentences more interesting than his plot. In the end he was not convinced that Wallace had successfully yoked two different kinds of books: “The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola,” he objected.
The most significant negative note came from Michiko Kakutani of the daily Times, who had expressed qualified affection for Broom. Faced with a behemoth in which narrative strands consume hundreds of pages and then fade away for several hundred more, in which the two principal plots of the story don’t clearly intertwine until more than six hundred pages into the book, in which the reader is consistently distracted by the need to thumb the back for endnotes that often offer information no reader seems to really need, in which digressions, playlets, urban legends, quasi-science, and pseudo-history break up the narrative, she found herself skeptical that she had read a masterpiece: “The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited),” she wrote, “on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.” The end or non-end of the book particularly bothered her:
At the end, that word machine is simply turned off, leaving the reader — at least the old-fashioned reader who harbors the vaguest expectations of narrative connections and beginnings, middles and ends — suspended in midair and reeling from the random muchness of detail and incident that is Infinite Jest.19
But such reviews did not dampen the impression, especially among the sort of critic interested in the dialogue among modernism, postmodernism, and whatever was coming after, that something new was being communicated. Birkerts in the Atlantic, who had welcomed Girl with Curious Hair as the first book truly to absorb the schizogenic vision of the writer writing in the media-saturated age, saw Infinite Jest as a brilliant extension of that preoccupation into the era of the Internet, with its manifold, overwhelming sources of image and information. So what others considered incoherence or sloppiness was to him a sign of a talent struggling to absorb the news:
To say that the novel does not obey traditional norms is to miss the point. Wallace’s narrative structure should be seen instead as a response to an altered cultural sensibility. The book mimes, in its movements as well as in its dense loads of referential data, the distributed systems that are the new paradigm in communications. The book is not about electronic culture, but it has internalized some of the decentering energies that computer technologies have released into our midst.
These comments came at just the moment when the importance of computer-based communication was exploding. Indeed, in the eight or nine years from the inception of Infinite Jest to its publication, the Internet had gone from a tool primarily for academics and the technologically adept to something approaching the limitless repository of information it is today. Few novelists or cultural critics had had time yet to think about what this transformation meant, least of all Wallace, and he was surprised to learn he had written a cybernovel. Asked by the Chicago Tribune whether his book was meant to reflect life as it was experienced in the computer age, he demurred. “This is sort of what it’s like to be alive…. You don’t have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way,” adding that he had never been. (He was wise enough to see a snare in it for an addict like himself. He felt, he told a friend, that he had already been exposed to enough ads for one lifetime and saw it as another insistent bleat creating the modern atmosphere of information overload, the state of affairs he would later call “Total Noise.”) Of course, “what it’s like to be alive” felt different for Wallace than it did for most people. Beset by anxiety and whipped by consciousness, his was a mind more drawn to the flat bright outlines of personhood than the nebulous contours of personality; it would be too simple to say that life for Wallace looked even more like the Internet than it did like television, but there is truth to it. In any event, the Internet Age was a gift that the post-millennial world gave to Wallace as a writer in search of readers. Collage and pastiche were gaining currency, and caricature and portrait were drawing closer together in people’s minds. Wallace’s characters — modern in their very sketchiness — felt realer to many readers than what realists were writing. As the culture collapsed into the anecdote and sound bite, Infinite Jest was one of the few books that seemed to anticipate the change and even prepare the reader for it. It suggested that literary sense might emerge from the coming cultural shifts, possibly even meanings too diffused to see before.
Wallace knew that he could not hide out in Bloomington forever. On publication day he would have to pack up and head east to face what he liked to call, referencing his old Tolkien reading, “Sauron’s great red eye.” But in fact Sauron was coming his way.
His first interview was with Details magazine. Wallace had never been interviewed by the mainstream media in depth before — the only feature magazine piece written on him had been by a friend of his agent for Arrival in 1987. So he left up the letters from Franzen, DeLillo, and others—“a whole wall of letters that help me or are important,” as he later wrote to DeLillo. The reporter, David Streitfeld, who was on staff with the Washington Post, told him he should take them down, because a journalist could see them and quote from them. He also told Wallace that rambling self-analysis might not be the ideal approach to conversations for publication; an interview was not the place for confidences. “I was wildly indiscreet about stuff like drug histories and M. Karr,” Wallace wrote DeLillo after, “and he stopped me in the middle and patiently explained certain rules about what to tell reporters.” About his time in substance abuse programs, he needed no coaching, since Karr had already warned him about it via her phone call to Pietsch. When Newsweek soon after asked him how he knew so much about recovery, he trickily replied:
I went with friends to an open AA meeting, and got addicted to them. It was completely riveting. I was never a member — I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.
By the time the New York Times Magazine came to see Wallace in Bloomington on the eve of his book tour, he was cannier. All the same, some of his personality came through. The reporter, Frank Bruni, got to watch Jeeves eat a bologna sandwich from Wallace’s mouth. “They pretend they’re kissing you,” Wallace said, “but they’re really mining your mouth for food.” And he went along to a dinner at the home of a couple named Erin and Doug Poag. They ate Kentucky Fried Chicken and heroes on trays and watched The X-Files, a taste of Wallace unbuttoned. Wallace did not mention that his connection to the Poags was from his recovery circle — he claimed to have met them at a “Mennonite church.” And, understandably, without that information, Bruni was left with the impression that Wallace’s fondness for ordinary midwestern people might be a put-on. In all, Bruni’s article grappled with — and never quite decided — whether the author of Infinite Jest was more “shtick” or “soul” or a combination of both that was generationally unique.20
Next came the book tour, which began in Manhattan in mid-February. Erin Poag went with him to steady her friend while he was away from both his home and his recovery group. One reporter mistook her for either his mother “or the Illinois version of a publicist.” Walking up the rickety stairs to his first New York reading, Wallace tried to turn around and go back down. “I don’t think I can do this,” he told Poag. She answered, “If you get up and don’t like it, we don’t have to stay,” and, a solidly built woman in her fifties, she put her hand on his back and pushed him along. Wallace had the strange feeling as he walked into the room of the crowd parting. The Times Magazine noted the turnout:
The critics aren’t the only ones angling to prove that they get it. Wallace’s contemporaries have shown up at his public appearances in force. When he read at K.G.B., Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of “Prozac Nation,” claimed a spot near the front of the room.21 The following night, at another jam-packed reading, this time at Tower Books in the Village, Ethan Hawke lurked in the back.
Soon afterward, Gerry Howard recalls bumping into a long line of fans waiting to see Wallace read at a Rizzoli’s bookstore on West Broadway. He was amazed that this writer, whom he had always thought destined for a small, essentially intellectual, literary public, had become a phenomenon. “There was this adoration,” Howard remembered. “He had reached people in this highly personal way.” The Times Magazine, trying to pin down this connection, dubbed Infinite Jest “The Grunge American Novel,” signaling the link between a fragmented novel of fragmented souls and a cultural movement led by singers like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana characterized by a similar affect. There was considerable truth to it; both proffered an awkward sincerity. They shared an allergy to façades, to disco-type slickness. Infinite Jest’s jagged multiple-conjunction-opening sentences held the same promise of authenticity as the primitive musical arrangement and bad amping of Seattle garage bands. Both music and novel implied that communication had gotten harder and harder, hitting walls of isolation too high to scale, reducing us to diminished gestures, preferences, grunts. As Wallace would tell an interviewer around this time, “there’s a way that it seems to me that reality’s fractured right now; at least the reality that I live in.” The chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” paralleled Wallace’s portrait of a generation addicted to media with its assertion that everyone was “stupid and contagious…. Here we are now, entertain us.”22
There was a shared look between writer and singers too. The unwashed hair with bandana, unlaced work boots, and old plaid shirts that Wallace had been wearing since Arizona were also now practically a uniform for anyone who felt disenchanted with the post-Reagan American culture of buying and owning. Wallace’s “impulse to second-guess every thought and proposition” had become, as Howard notes, “something like a generational style.” “When I was younger,” Wallace told an interviewer for the Boston Phoenix, “I saw my relationship with the reader as sort of a sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.”23
The possibility that Wallace himself was going to become famous filled him with confusion, though of course he saw the irony of what was happening. He wanted his work to be fully experienced, not lightly absorbed with all the other noise of the culture. When a fellow English professor at ISU congratulated him on the cruise ship piece in Harper’s, Wallace pointed to his mouth with one hand and made a butt-wiping gesture with the other. To anyone who praised his achievement, he would only repeat that he had “worked really really hard on” Infinite Jest, as if he were a child talking about his artwork. He posted a sign on his office door at ISU during his book tour: “D.F. Wallace is out of town on weird personal authorized emergencyish leave from 2/17/96 to 3/3/96 and from 3/5/96 to 3/10/96.”
The low point of Wallace’s rise was his publication party. Little, Brown wanted to mark the arrival of the book with a media gathering at the Limbo Lounge, a trendy East Village club. Nadell had not loved the idea. Infinite Jest was “not a hip downtown kind of book,” she wrote the publisher. “It is a major literary novel.” But Little, Brown believed that to ignite enthusiasm for the novel it had to establish the book’s of-the-moment credentials. The party wound up being held at the Tenth Street Lounge, if anything a more glamorous destination. A large crowd of editors and writers gathered there on February 21. The New York Times Magazine filed this report:
And at the official book party two nights later at an East Village club, M. G. Lord, the author of “Forever Barbie,” can be seen chatting up another novelist of the moment, A. M. Homes. Between puffs of their cigarettes, many people whisper what Wallace says he does not want to hear: he is the current “it” boy of contemporary fiction.
Wallace spent much of the time upstairs in a private room, watching the proceedings from a window that looked down on the main floor, with Charis Conn, his fiction editor from Harper’s, and Costello. His frequent trips to the bathroom led the uninformed to suspect cocaine use, though in fact he was pulling out chaws of tobacco. “I think I made it a project not to look in the mirror during that party,” he later told an interviewer, “because I knew that a whole lot of other people were looking at me, and if I thought about what I looked like, I was going to go crazy.” Wallace and Costello were sneaking out of the club together when a young blonde woman followed them from the party and presented herself to the author. “Do you want to meet my puppy?” she asked. Wallace went off, leaving his friend behind.
Afterward, Wallace wrote to DeLillo of how little he had enjoyed the gathering. The party, he told his miglior fabbro, had been “packed and scary…. It’s the only Pub Party I’ve ever been to, and if God’s in his heaven it will be my last.” The ensuing publicity tour had been the subject of careful negotiation with Little, Brown. Wallace had agreed to visit, as he wrote DeLillo, “some dozen cities” for readings and interviews. He had turned down the Today show, agreeing as compensation to a Rolling Stone interview, because, as he wrote DeLillo, “I argued (compellingly, I think) that Rolling Stone was essentially TV anyway.” The Rolling Stone reporter was the journalist David Lipsky. The two got along well, and Lipsky, also a novelist, took in what was left of the private Wallace in his home: chew toys on the floor, a copy of Cosmopolitan, which Wallace swore he subscribed to, claiming that “reading ‘I’ve Cheated — Should I Tell?’ a bunch of times a year is fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.” There was a Barney towel doubling as a window curtain, a postcard of Updike, and a Scottish battle scene painting. A large poster of Alanis Morissette, the intense, confessional female soloist, was on one wall. To someone who did not know Wallace, the décor might have looked like conventional professorial po-mo mockery of the middlebrow. But Wallace was serious — at least sort of — when he told Lipsky he liked to listen to Enya, the sugary Irish singer. He referred to Kymberly in the present tense as his girlfriend and said she had taught him to appreciate Ani DiFranco and P. J. Harvey, “and what’s her name? Tori Amos,” though he preferred Morissette. He was effectively underscoring to hipsters that he wasn’t one of them. Infinite Jest wasn’t just an assertion of anomie, the way grunge was. It was also supposed to be an answer to despair, a corrective to the misery of youth, a recipe for personal growth. Wallace could observe grunge and note its impact, but its undemanding hopelessness flew in the face of his recovery theology; it was too self-pitying. If you were as stupid as “Teen Spirit” asserted, there was only one person who could make you smarter.
Rolling Stone did not in the end save Wallace from TV. The public-TV talk show host Charlie Rose also wanted him on. Wallace asked the people he trusted whether he should do it. Franzen told him he had to, because, as Wallace wrote in summary to DeLillo, to whom he next appealed, “you guys made your bones in a different time, when the author’s own personal person wasn’t as necessary a part of a PR machine that itself wasn’t necessary to sell books.” He told DeLillo his inclination to avoid TV was “not out of integrity so much as an awareness that I do a fair amount of writing about TV and spectation and that I wanted to stay on my side of the screen and that I’d fuck up future work if I didn’t.”
Wallace wrote the letter in March, during a break between the two parts of his publicity tour. He had been to eleven cities by then, to Seattle, to read at Elliott Bay, an important independent bookstore, then to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, where he couldn’t sleep, and Iowa City, where he ran out of petty cash and a member of the audience stood up and accused him of being insensitive to those with disabilities, because in the mini-essay that Little, Brown had asked him for he had quoted an observation by Bill Gray, the blocked novelist in DeLillo’s Mao II, that writing a book was like having a “hideously deformed infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer.”
Wallace was accumulating regrets as he went. In Los Angeles, he and Nadell got into an argument with a dealer when he refused to sign hundreds of books, magazines, and memorabilia. And at the Tower Books reading in New York, the one Ethan Hawke had attended, Wallace, flying high on what must have felt like a toxic gust of celebrity, had added the name of the director Richard Linklater to the list of directors of the sorts of projects second-tier actors who were hired to be stand-ins for video phone conversations might be involved in. The ad lib got a knowing laugh from the crowd, but later Wallace heard that his “brain fart,” as he described it later, had offended Hawke, who had just starred in a Linklater film. Wallace’s sense of having been “a serious asshole” had a self-referential cast: “This poor guy can’t even go in the back. He didn’t want to be acknowledged. He just wanted to listen to a reading.”
Wallace was learning that all sorts of relationships that had been simpler — if never quite simple — when he was more or less unknown were tricky now. In Seattle, he had told Corey Washington he could not hang out because he was too exhausted to see even an old friend. Costello was furious at having been abandoned at the Tenth Street Lounge party. Elizabeth Wurtzel had continued during the past year to entrance Wallace. One time he had called Franzen from a payphone at 3 a.m. when they were out together to say, “I’m with a girl who has heroin in her possession. This is not good.” Then after the KGB reading, she brought him back to her apartment and took him up to her loft bed, but at the last minute changed her mind about sex. Wallace, suspicious that she had only brought him home in the first place because of his rising fame, grew furious. “You’re going to make me drink again!” he shouted at her. He threw on his clothes and stomped out, ending the friendship.
Even before Wallace’s tour was over, Little, Brown had reprinted the book six times for a total of forty-five thousand copies. Pietsch wrote Wallace that readers were calling him at the office to try out theories about the ending. “It reminds me of the exhilaration I felt finishing Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time and finding someone else who’d read it to knock brains with,” he wrote his author. There was even movie interest in the book. The director Gus Van Sant wanted to option Infinite Jest. Wallace worried it seemed whorish — he knew that serious writers did not sell their work to the movies — but a friend in the business told him he had nothing to worry about; no one could ever make a movie from that novel.24
By April, Wallace was at last all but done. He had had a fantastical success, and he was far from sure the experience had been a pleasant one. He was too self-aware not to see the paradox that his attempt to condemn seduction had proven so seductive. He had tried to write a splintered entertainment, to remind people of the dangers of spectation, and instead he had wound up prying open their wallets with Leyner-like adroitness. He had hoped readers would read his book twice, but whether they had read it at all was the question. Had Infinite Jest become another entertainment cruise ship, bright lights on an empty sea? Wallace turned to DeLillo to try to make sense of the experience, alluding to a media stampede satirized in his novel White Noise:
I…tried my best to tell the truth and to be kind to reporters who hadn’t read the book and wanted only to discuss the “hype” around the book and seemed willfully to ignore the fact that articles about the hype were themselves the hype (for about a week there it seemed to me that the book became the Most Photographed Barn, everyone tremendously excited over the tremendous excitement surrounding a book that takes over a month of hard labor to read).
When JT, his buddy from Tucson, wrote to congratulate him, he wrote back, “WAY MORE FUSS ABOUT THIS BOOK THAN I’D ANTICIPATED. ABOUT 26 % OF FUSS IS WELCOME. AS YOU SAID YEARS AGO, ‘YUPPIES READ.’”
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