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

CHAPTER 7. “Roars and Hisses”

As soon as Wallace got home, he pulled the tour schedule off his wall and threw it away. Being back was a relief. He felt again the “weird warm full excitement of coming home,” the pleasure, as he had written Alice Turner just before his book tour, of a world where his neighbors were “lumber salesm[e]n and Xerox copier repairmen,” and hoped he would never have to go anywhere again. “The Icky Brothers”—Jeeves and The Drone — were waiting. He wrote poetically to DeLillo about the “horses in the yard of the doctor’s manse next door,” of spring in Bloomington, and apologetically to Corey Washington. He left a two-word message with Costello’s secretary: “I’m sorry.”

He was glad again to attend his regular meeting and reinsert himself in the world of recovery, with its emphasis on community and cooperation. The lessons of recovery were never far from his thoughts. When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author’s getting an award he thought should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: “Mostly I try to remember how lucky I am to be able to write, and doubly, triply lucky I am that anyone else is willing to read it, to say nothing of publishing it. I’m no pollyanna — this keeping-the-spirits-up shit is hard work, and I don’t often do it well. But I try…. Life is good.”

Little, Brown wanted to publish a volume of Wallace’s magazine pieces right away. The idea was to get the book out before the red eye of Sauron moved on. Even before the last “spasms-trips” of Wallace’s tour, as Wallace called them, Pietsch was asking for the manuscript. Wallace, trying to show his gratitude, promised to work fast on “the lump.” For him it also represented an opportunity. He had never liked magazine editing, though he accepted it. Now he had, as he would later explain to DeLillo, a chance to undo the cuts editors had imposed on him to “make extra room for Volvo ads.” He added back in what had been taken out, sometimes doubling the published length of the pieces, reestablishing their verbal exuberance and their scope.¹ He tinkered until the last minute, offering again to pay for corrections and reminding Pietsch that he still owed him for the ones at the last minute for Infinite Jest, but Pietsch pointed out that Infinite Jest was certain to generate royalties beyond its advance and the cost of the changes could come from those funds. Wallace responded that there would be more corrections forthcoming for the paperback.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again came out in February 1997. Wallace told DeLillo he liked only the first and last essays in the book—“Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” to which he gave back his original title with its mathematical overtone, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” and the cruise ship piece. Yet the response to the publication of what were to Wallace a group of older, maybe not so interesting anymore essays, was surprising. Infinite Jest had left in equal amounts goodwill and frustration. How many readers had gotten to page 70 and given up? But they all the same wanted more of Wallace. If nothing else, the title he gave the collection — it was the original title of the cruise ship piece restored — captured well his generation’s ambivalence toward pleasure and marketing and the marketing of pleasure. There was something stunning about the experiential aspect of the essays in the book too, the ones whose technique Wallace described in an interview as “basically an enormous eyeball floating around something, reporting what it sees.” Their very length spoke of commitment, discomfort, the importance of caring in a world urging you constantly to lighten up. It was like listening to your best friend in grad school, tirelessly willing to absorb, reason, confront, embrace but never accept.

In general, critics felt less ambivalent toward Wallace’s nonfiction than they did toward his fiction. The San Francisco Chronicle saw “a passionate and deeply serious writer” amid the hijinks, and James Wood in Newsday noted a fruitful divide between Wallace the postmodern essayist and the journalist “eager to notate reality (though in funky ways),” concluding, “His contradictions are his strength, and if one wants to see the zeitgeist auto-grappling, in all its necessary confusions, one must read every essay in this book.” For Laura Miller of Salon.com, the articles were confirmation of the promise hinted at by Infinite Jest. Writing in the New York Times Book Review she noted that A Supposedly Fun Thing “reveals Mr. Wallace in ways that his fiction has of yet managed to dodge: as a writer struggling mightily to understand and capture his times, as a critic who cares deeply about ‘serious’ art, and as a mensch.”

Wallace did not want to go on tour for the paperback of Infinite Jest, but since it came out the same month as A Supposedly Fun Thing, he could do so without appearing to. He went to ten cities as the new book appeared on many bestseller lists and sold roughly fifteen thousand copies in hardcover. One night Wallace read at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then went to the Harvard Lampoon castle to receive an “Author of the Millennium” award, which he accepted only after making sure it was made up. There were long lines everywhere he went. At the end of the Infinite Jest book tour, despite misgivings, he had gone on Charlie Rose’s talk show. The spur was not his novel but a recent essay by Franzen on the state of fiction. The two had faced off with Mark Leyner and the experience had been relatively painless. So Wallace now said he’d appear on the show again for his essays. This time, without foils, the encounter was uncomfortable, as Wallace rocked back and forth in his white bandana, battling the urge to spew out the churning contents of his mind — to be on TV talking about the power of TV left him particularly confused: it was the kind of recursion he could not ignore. Friendly but insistent, Rose asked him about his pre-recovery days:

DFW:…Here’s why I’m embarrassed talking about it, not because—

ROSE: I want to know why.

DFW: Not because I’m personally ashamed of it, because everybody talks about it. I mean, it sounds like—

ROSE: In other words, everybody—

DFW: It sounds—

ROSE: Everybody talks about it for themselves or everybody talks about you?

DFW: No, everybody talks — it sounds like some kind of Hollywood thing to do. “Oh, he’s out of rehab and—”

ROSE: No, I—

DFW:“—back in action.”

ROSE: —didn’t say anything about rehab.

After a second successful book, Wallace again wanted to be sure that nothing fundamental had changed. Francis B. asked him to go with his wife’s preteen daughter to a movie and Wallace took her to Titanic and told her to cover her eyes during the nude scene. As ever, he admired those who lived as he could not: one member of his group worked twelve-hour shifts in a tire factory without air-conditioning, his only comfort the Serenity Prayer. “I mean,” he wrote a friend, “can you see why I LOVE some of these people?” At school he wore his bandana, devoted time in his classes to Grammar Rock, his mini-lessons on usage, and spat tobacco delicately into a red plastic cup. He edited students’ stories three different times, encouraging the timid and rebuffing the febrile. He made vocabulary word lists: “Birl, cause to spin rapidly with feet.” “Musth, period of heightened sexual drive in elephants (Vulcans) when they’re more aggressive.” He wanted to disappear again into the obscurity of being a difficult writer in a regional midwestern city.

Yet the world was different. What he liked about Bloomington was that he could live his life there “blissfully ignorant of most of the Red Hot Center’s various roars and hisses,” as he had written Alice Turner, adding, “My best kids are farm-kids who didn’t even know that they liked to read until I persuaded them they did.” But still they or their parents got Time and Newsweek. They had seen the pictures of Wallace and knew that the outside world regarded him as a personage. But students who wanted to talk about how it felt to be famous did not get far, and anyone who thought they would get points for reading Infinite Jest soon learned to do it out of their teacher’s sight.

His fame occasionally impinged on the campus. A man from Chicago called his department office, wanting to arrange a tennis game. Another came to the school and asked how he could meet the author of Infinite Jest and proceeded to wait the whole day, making the staff of the English department nervous. Some students from the University of Chicago arrived on a scavenger hunt, one requirement of which was to get their picture taken with Wallace (he was nowhere to be found).

Wallace began to change his phone number every few months. He would make restaurant reservations under fanciful names — one he particularly liked was Jim Deatherage, the name of a friend’s high school creative writing teacher. John O’Brien, the Dalkey Archive Press director, had thirteen dogs. They would come over and play with Jeeves and The Drone or Wallace would bring the Icky Brothers over to his house on the outskirts of the city. One day he complained to O’Brien that he no longer knew what to make of people: “People come up and say they love the book and I don’t know if they’ve read it. I don’t know who to trust anymore.”

Students had begun applying to the graduate program specifically to study with him. He was becoming a beacon for a kind of writing, not the postmodernism of the rest of the department and not the realism of Iowa and everywhere else, but a third approach, uncomfortable but sincere realism for a world that was no longer real. Making the head throb heartlike had the potential to become a literary movement. Different names were bruited for it, from the New Sincerity to Post-postmodernism. Occasionally one heard Grunge Fiction.

But Wallace did not seek acolytes. He was too competitive, too solitary, too recursive, felt his journey too painful to wish on others. For him teaching was just instilling basic skills; the student had to do the rest. He was starting to wonder how happy he really was in Bloomington anyway. “I find myself saying this year the same thing I said last year and — and it’s a little bit horrifying,” he had told Rose on his show, pointing out that most teachers stopped learning from their teaching after “about two to three years.” He became interested in yoga and meditation and practiced them regularly. With some of his recovery friends he went to a Jesuit retreat near St. Louis for a few days. The monastery observed silence to encourage reflection, and Wallace took advantage of this by bringing a bag full of work. He’d always wanted to see the Mississippi River up close, though, so he convinced Francis B. to descend with him to the riverbank below the cliffs on which the monastery stood. Disappointingly, when they got there, the flats held nothing but a dead gar. “This isn’t what I expected,” Wallace complained. At that moment, a cabin cruiser went by and a group of women lifted up their shirts. “Now that was spiritual,” Wallace said.

Sex, and the intense, complicated interchanges it brought with it, filled a place in Wallace that nothing else could. Promiscuity had been part of his life for a long time now. But being famous increased the number of women who would sleep with him or perhaps his sense that he needed to sleep with them. At his readings there were long lines everywhere he went, abundant “audience pussy”—a phrase Mary Karr used. He came back from one reading in New Orleans to tell Francis B. he had slept with a girl who was underaged. Corey Washington went to a reading in Washington, D.C., and saw two hundred people there, Wallace sedulously signing copies of A Supposedly Fun Thing. A young woman came up to them afterward. “I told you not to come here,” Wallace snapped. He was, he wrote a friend, “literally crazy” on the subject of sex. Once talking to Franzen he wondered aloud whether his only purpose on earth was “to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible.”

When Kymberly had left, she had speedily been replaced by another woman in recovery, who was also taking one of his classes in the English department. But one day when he wasn’t in the house, she read through his journal and he broke up with her. She was in turn replaced by her best friend, who was also a friend of Kymberly’s. She had two children, a favored arrangement for Wallace, part of the “fetish for conquering young mothers,” as he phrased it, that he had given to Orin Incandenza in Infinite Jest.² The young woman chewed tobacco and they dated for more than a year. But Wallace was badly suited to relationships by now. He had been alone too long and become, to quote his description of the tennis academy in Infinite Jest, “abundantly, embranchingly tunneled.” Over time he had added idiosyncratic touches to his house. He painted one room black, where he expected to work, and put his silver velour chair in it. “I’ve wanted a black room since I was a kid,” he explained to Brad Morrow in a letter. He filled it with lamps, many removed from his parents’ house. He put his computer in the living room for rewriting and revising and covered it with the wedding veil of a friend, as if it were the site of a sacral mystery. Wallace knew himself well enough to know he did not want a TV — until he did. Then he would buy one and insist it stay unplugged. Or he would put it out at the curb for collection or give it to some of his friends from recovery. His behavior was so noticeable that the local paper, the Pantagraph, mentioned it in an item.

All this might have suggested a man not well suited to relationships, but his dedication — sexily flawed — to what might be called single-entendre connections was extremely intoxicating to some women. For them, as several remember, he was “like a drug.”³ He played Trivial Pursuit with one undergraduate and her friends in their dorm. To another he read The Velveteen Rabbit. “Real isn’t how you are made,” the Skin Horse tells the Velveteen Rabbit, “it’s a thing that happens to you.” With a third it was charades. The women would wind up sharing his bed with him, Jeeves, and The Drone for a time, cajoling him about what one called “the food with no color” in his fridge — crackers, cream cheese, cereal — and then, sooner or later, they were sent on their way. “That’s a three-day weekend I’m still paying the credit card bill on,” he said of one young woman, unchivalrously. Wallace affected not to care that some of the women were his students. He told his friend Corey Washington he was trying to get himself fired.

Wallace continued seeing therapists in Bloomington, partly to try to resolve issues with his mother, partly for his own relationship problems. Worried that he was becoming a stock Romeo, he insisted he was ready for commitment, and for an end to what he called in a later letter “serial high-romance and low-intimacy” relationships that never got truly intimate. Other than the classroom, his favored venue for meeting women was St. Matt’s, the church in whose rectory his recovery group met. His listening skills and his own practiced efforts at self-disclosure often led to breaking the rules against “thirteenth stepping.” Other recovery members warned him to stop, citing the emotional dangers of dating the newly sober, which, from his crazed relationship with Mary Karr, Wallace was no stranger to. “The odds are good but the goods are odd,” went an old recovery saw. But Wallace could not stop himself. He wrote a friend that there were times he’d walked into the twelve o’clock recovery meeting and found that he had slept with three of the ten women there, “and come close” with one or two others. His behavior seemed, even to him, at times hard to justify; he was leaving a lot of hurt in his wake. But his bigger worry was that all this seducing was most damaging to himself. He saw that the need to make every woman fall madly in love with him had made him highly manipulative, a man who went around trying to make women feel the same, as he put it in a letter to a friend, “tuggy stuff” he always felt in that moment. To him this was the most wretched of transactions — tricking someone into needing you by pretending to care. It was the thing he had written Infinite Jest in part to expose. It made you, he realized, not so different from “the people selling Tide.”

By the time Wallace returned to Illinois State from his Supposedly Fun Thing book tour in the spring of 1997, he was already worried about his fiction writing. Predictably the effort to produce Infinite Jest had left him feeling wrung out. This sense of depletion had not surprised him at first. He had crafted the beginning of the novel in Boston in the early 1990s, expanded and improved it in Syracuse, and by the time he got to Bloomington in July 1993 he was mostly rewriting and responding to Pietsch’s edits. That had taken up the next year or so. But by 1995 he had been hoping — expecting — to start something else. It was his assumption that the new thing would be a novel too. The novel was the big form, the one that mattered, that reviewers and other authors cared about and by which he could fulfill his compact with readers. DeLillo’s published writing consisted almost entirely of novels; so did Cormac McCarthy’s.

The freedom success now brought left Wallace uneasy; in his life, he had worked to narrow his choices, to give himself a simple set of instructions — don’t drink or smoke pot; don’t try to impress others to make yourself feel better. But on the page things were more complex. He knew that he had to write for himself and not think about the reader, but that was easier to enunciate than to enact. He would have conversations during this period with Costello where he would complain about how hard it was now to get the words down in the right order. Since Amherst, he and Wallace had had as a touchstone of good writing John Keats’s poem “This Living Hand”:

This living hand, now warm and capable

Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold

And in the icy silence of the tomb,

So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights

That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood

So in my veins red life might stream again,

And thou be conscience-calm’d — see here it is—

I hold it towards you.

Wallace would talk about wanting in his writing to “make the hand come out,” and then, in disappointment afterward, “The hand, Mark — there’s no hand.” Costello worried that his friend was being too negative about his own work, that success had tipped his delicate internal balance.

When Infinite Jest was done, Wallace found himself more comfortable with shorter fiction. The value of this writing was unclear to him, though, and did not make him feel he was using his time well. “Writing is going shittily here,” he wrote to DeLillo in September 1996. “I’ve spent all summer doing dozens of obscure ministories that seem neither comprehensible nor interesting to anyone else.” He told Brad Morrow at Conjunctions that he spent his days in his black room, writing “weird little 1-pagers.” Some were about “the spiritual emptiness of heterosexual interaction in post-modern America,” as he would phrase it in a later interview, others almost metaphysical aperçus about the hazy intersection of cognition and the world, vignettes he grouped together under the heading “Another instance of the Porousness of Certain Borders.” What had made the scope of his imagination contract so radically? He blamed himself, rather than, say, fatigue or age. He thought perhaps other authors had less trouble. The year before he had turned back to the writer whom he most admired for help. He had a “jejune” question for DeLillo — like “some kind of tentative hand in the back row of a writer’s classroom visit or something.” He went on, “Do you have like a daily writing routine? Do you set off certain intervals as all and only time for fiction-writing? More important, do you then honor that daily obligation, day after day? Do you have difficulties with procrastination/avoidance/lack of discipline? If so, how do you overcome them?”

I ask because I’m frustrated not just with the slowness of my work but with the erratic pace I work at. And I ask you only because you seem at least on this end of the books, to be so steady — books every couple or so years for over two decades and you don’t seem to have an outside job or teaching gig or anything that might relieve (what I find to be) the strain of daily self-starting and self-discipline and daily temptations to dick around and abandon the discipline. Any words or tips would be appreciated and kept in confidence.

DeLillo wrote back to reassure the thirty-three-year-old Wallace that centering yourself to write got easier over time, though it never got easy. “The novel,” he wrote his younger friend, “is a fucking killer. I try to show it every respect.” This perhaps satisfied Wallace for a time, but his hand was up again a month later. Why, he asked his adopted role model, did the route to maturity have to be such a struggle?

Maybe what I want to hear is that this prenominate war is natural and necessary and a sign of Towering Intellect: maybe I want a pep-talk, because I have to tell you I don’t enjoy this war one bit. I think my fiction is better than it was, but writing is also less Fun than it was.

“All right,” DeLillo replied, a bit more sharply this time, “your first book was more fun but that doesn’t mean you’ve left pleasure behind forever.” For him, at least, it was the act of writing that carried him forward: “I have fun when I find myself gliding on language and when the story seems to drive itself forward and when I’m able to give a character his or her most unexpected expression,” he wrote. Still, novel writing, with its isolation and the uncertainty about what one had achieved, was never going to be a picnic. Wallace had to understand that. He offered a kind of buck-up, disputing Wallace’s distinction between his “bad” early work and his “good” later work:

And I don’t see that the occasional acrobatics in Girl with Curious Hair are a form of exhibitionism. And I don’t see anything in the early pages of [Infinite Jest] that would lead me to believe that you are dying of funlessness. But of course reader and writer are dealing from different perspectives. Where you see fun in my work, I remember doubt, confusion and indecision, and now experience considerable regret, particularly over the earlier books.

And he ended with a compliment, meant to give Wallace a sense of belonging to an elite for whom this sort of suffering was the price of membership:

When I say the novel is a killer, I am reserving this designation for writers who are smart enough, sensitive enough and good enough to realize the dangers and consequently to respect the form. You have to be good before you even sense the danger, or before you can understand what it takes to succeed. Let the others complain about book tours.

It’s unlikely this comforted Wallace. For him there had to be a huge difference between the tone of his early work and Infinite Jest—not just his literary development but his actual physical survival was embodied in the difference. Now Wallace cast about for different ways to motivate himself. He invited Charis Conn from Harper’s to stay with him for a semester to work on her novel, putting at once a competitor and a watchdog in his spare bedroom. (He dubbed his house “Yaddo West.”) He quit smoking, took it up, quit it again. He tried teaching new classes to spur his interest in his day job. In the spring of 1997 he taught a course with Doug Hesse, a colleague in the English department, on creative nonfiction, which they defined in a handout they gave the class as “a somewhat problematic term for a broad category of prose works such as personal essays and memoirs, profiles, nature and travel writings of a certain quality, essays of ideas, new journalism, and so on.”⁴ The same semester he designed and taught a class on great novels of the twentieth century, “basically,” as he wrote in the course syllabus, “a contrived, excuse/incentive to read several interesting, difficult U.S. novels…. The class is to function as a large, sophisticated, energetic reading group.” “I’m gearing up to do 2 DeLillo, 2 Gaddis, 2 McCarthy…and 1 Gass. Death by fiction,” he wrote Steven Moore with pride.

When extra teaching didn’t stimulate his creativity, Wallace thought about not teaching. He had not forgotten that he had done his best work away from the classroom. Other times he blamed his lack of discipline. He imagined a more perfect version of himself and scribbled it on a sheet of paper one day:

What Balance Would Look Like:

2–3 hours a day in writing

Up at 8–9

Only a couple late nights a week

Daily exercise

Minimum time spent teaching

2 nights/week spent with other friends

5 [recovery meetings a] week

Church

“I’m back to thinking IJ was a fluke,” he wrote on another sheet:

I feel nothing lapidary inside. “Until there is commitment, there is only ineffectiveness, delay.” Goethe. How to make a commitment — to writing, to a somewhat healthy relationship, to myself. How to schedule things so that a certain portion of each day is devoted to writing. How to save money so that I can take Fall ’97 off.

This last he acted on. He asked DeLillo to recommend him for a Guggenheim Fellowship, then four days later canceled the request. “A weird lightning-bolt fellowship” had come his way, he reported. The Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe had awarded him $50,000, “which means,” he wrote Steven Moore, who had helped arrange the grant, “I can take an unpaid year off next year and face writing fears head on.” But the prospect of a whole year without classes, Wallace wrote DeLillo, caused him “basically to have projected my own superego out onto the world and thus imagine that THEY expect-nay-demand an exhilarant piece of novel-length prose at the end of my grant time, which I know is horseshit but still makes it hard to breathe.” He asked again why he could not find DeLillo’s discipline—“you quiet, deeply serious guys who take time and publish only finished, considered stuff.” He was becoming as afraid of having too much time as not enough.

God, as Wallace liked to point out, being “nothing if not an ironist,” the year after he won the Lannan, the MacArthur Foundation gave him an award of $230,000, which, together with the Lannan money and the income from his books, effectively freed him from the need to teach. The receipt of a so-called genius award was acutely uncomfortable for Wallace. It sat just the wrong side of his worry that he was a high-level entertainer who could be bought by what he called, in a letter to Markson, “the blow-jobs the culture gives out.” He did not like the idea of being celebrated for who he was, as opposed to what he had written or was currently trying to write. Accepting the award was as risky as taking an advance on a book — worse psychologically, really, because you got to keep the funds either way. The only one who could punish you for not living up to expectations would be yourself. He did not really need the money either. His only big cost was health insurance, which ISU provided. He went nowhere and bought little — he drove an old car, and malls, he told friends, made him sad. To expiate the burden, no sooner did he have the funds than he tried to get rid of them. He lent money to ex-girlfriends and gave it away to friends in his recovery group to pay for their children’s college tuition. He offered to fund other friends’ worthy projects — one wanted money to help her write a study of childhood sexual abuse. He bought a pickup truck. One day in class he mentioned he couldn’t figure out where it had gone. He was embarrassed when a student brought forward the keys and told him he had lent it to her several weeks before.

Anxiously, he went into his year off. “I am getting some writing done,” he wrote Moore in September 1997, after a summer on his own, “though not of course as much or as well as I like.” He wrote in the margins of a notebook around the same time, “I am a McArthur [sic] Fellow. Boy am I scared. I feel like throwing up. Why? String-free award — nothing but an avowal of their belief that I am a ‘Genius.’ I don’t feel like a Genius.” He spent a lot of time writing letters in procrastination, many of them about procrastination, as he cast around for what was keeping him from feeling he could write anything bigger or braver than his “microstories.” He came to blame the fame that adhered to him since Infinite Jest. He came back to an image of celebrity that had absorbed him since he’d worked on that book. In those pages, an assistant coach lectures a reporter about why he feels the need to protect his players from the media:

For you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade.

Now Wallace was wondering whether he hadn’t become a literary statue, “the version of myself” as he wrote a friend at the time, “that I want others to mistake for the real me.” The statue was “a Mask, a Public Self, False Self or Object-Cathect.” What made the statue especially deadly to Wallace was that it depended for its subsistence on the complicated interplay between writer and public. Not just: You are loved. But also: You love being loved. You are addicted to being loved.

Wallace had known for some time what he wanted to write, he continued in the letter, but he was “paralyzed” by fear of failure. He worried that whatever “magic” or “genius” people said they’d seen in his last two books would not be in evidence. He would, he worried, be “obliterated or something (I say ‘obliterated’ because the fear most closely resembles some kind of fear of death or annihilation, the kind of fear that strikes one on the High Dive or if one has to walk a high tightrope or something).” He was now frozen by his own need to be the person others saw him as. They could let go of it more easily than he could. And since the success of Infinite Jest the problem had gotten worse, so that he feared the “slightest mistake or miscue” would knock the statue down. The prospect terrified him. He concluded that since the publication of Broom—“the date of the erection/unveiling of the statue of DFW as Author”—he had only been able to do “truly good work” on “rare” occasions.

He was being too hard on himself. For Wallace, self-examination and self-flagellation often overlapped — and were also often a spur to possible literary inquiry. What turned an author into a statue? And wasn’t even inquiring in this way an attempt to polish it up, clever custodial work? As he’d written to Wurtzel, “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.”

Comparable examples of recursion beset him all the time; they were his default mental setting. He was working on another of his “Porousness of Certain Borders” pieces, which began:

As in those other dreams, I’m with somebody I know but don’t know how I know them, and this person suddenly points out to me that I’m blind. Or else it’s in the presence of this person that I suddenly realize I’m blind. What happens when I realize this is I get sad. It makes me incredibly sad that I’m blind. The person somehow knows how sad I am and warns me that crying will hurt my eyes somehow and make them even worse, but I can’t help it—

He was appalled at how much time it took to yield such vignettes. The exception were two stories that came out of his own experience more directly. The first was “The Depressed Person.” The story, published by Harper’s in 1998, was a genre Wallace hadn’t tried since “Westward,” revenge fiction. It was his way of getting even with Wurtzel for treating him as a statue (or, she would say, refusing to have sex with him). Freed from desire, he now saw that her love of the spotlight was just ordinary self-absorption. “The Depressed Person” of the title is a spoiled young woman, who repulses the reader with her obsessive neediness, much as she repulses her friends in the story. “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain,” the story begins, “and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” Through the course of story, the unlovable protagonist shuttles fruitlessly between friends and therapists, looking for a sympathetic ear — the same ear the narrator denies her — as her clinical symptoms are revealed to be nothing more than narcissism.⁵

The second story, “Self-Harm as a Sort of Offering” (collected later as “Suicide as a Sort of Present”), was a meditation on his difficult relationship with his mother. Wallace was always looking for some sort of catharsis in their connection. In the story — as, he believed, in his own life — a mother’s intense love for and disappointment in her son is the root of his neurosis. The need she holds for him to excel is itself the result of the belief her own parents inculcated in her that she needs to be perfect. The destructive cycle then gets passed to the next generation:

The child appeared in a sense to be the mother’s own reflection in a diminishing and deeply flawed mirror. Thus every time the child was rude, greedy, foul, dense, selfish, cruel, disobedient, lazy, foolish, willful, or childish, the mother’s deepest and most natural inclination was to loathe it. But she could not loathe it. No good mother can loathe her child or judge it or abuse it or wish it harm in any way. The mother knew this. And her standards for herself as a mother were, as one would expect, extremely high…. Hence the mother was at war. Her expectations were in fundamental conflict. It was a conflict in which she felt her very life was at stake: to fail to overcome her instinctive dissatisfaction with her child would result in a terrible, shattering punishment which she knew she herself would administer, inside. She was determined — desperate — to succeed, to satisfy her expectations of herself as a mother, no matter what it cost.

The story ends ambiguously — it is not clear who gives the present of suicide to whom — but in its intense distancing sentences one feels Wallace examining the shards of his childhood again and again, trying to construct a whole without bringing it so close it will hurt him again.

Wallace always wrote in the midst of busyness. There were classes, and even without classes there were recovery meetings, errands for friends and friends of friends, and demands from his dogs. He himself now sponsored many participants in recovery and made it a point to always be available. Charis Conn was amazed to see that whenever Wallace had a few free minutes, he would sit down, cross his legs, and work on a story (one explanation for the shortness of so much of his work during this time). He sent a few of his “1-pagers” to the more innovative magazines with which he had connections, where, despite his reputation, the result was tepid. Most found his efforts obscure. How had a marquee maximalist become a jotter of haikus? Wallace wrote to Steven Moore in late 1996 that he had recently sent out four little stories and they’d all been rejected, a situation that felt familiar and that, combined with his failure to be nominated for the National Book Award for Infinite Jest, led him to believe that his “15 minutes are over and things are back to normal.”

When Wallace was not happy with his fiction, nonfiction grew in appeal. There were always offers. The New York Observer now asked him to review Updike’s Toward the End of Time, a story, like Wallace’s two novels, set in the near future, and he agreed. Wallace’s one-sided conversation with Updike was long-running. Admiration and dislike were always in competition, usually mixed together. Updike was an extraordinary writer, Wallace acknowledged, but there was something too insistent about the way he always declared his genius. The self-conscious beauty and elegance of his prose, Wallace wrote to DeLillo in January 1997, “paw…at the reader’s ear like a sophomore at some poor girl’s bra.” Now faced with the master’s new book, Wallace felt only disdain and a whiff of pity. How, he asked the Observer readers, could so gifted a writer write a book as bad as Toward the End of Time?

Toward the End of Time concerns an incredibly erudite, articulate, successful, narcissistic and sex-obsessed retired guy who’s keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

Wallace evinced a particular dislike for the protagonist’s “bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair,” a line of thought no doubt well known to Wallace.

He received much congratulations when the piece ran in October 1997, and the remark that he attributed to “a friend” in the article, that Updike was “just a thesaurus with a penis,” was widely circulated. Wallace did not like overly personal literary criticism, but he felt within his rights in this case because of his sense that Updike’s flaws had gone beyond the literary to the moral. His characters — well, the author himself — were forgetting that literature was not about showing off; it had to be a service to the inner life of the reader. How then to justify creating characters

who are also always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone. They never belong to any sort of larger unit or community or cause. Though usually family men, they never really love anybody — and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women. The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.

After the review ran, Wallace was sorry. He knew that Toward the End of Time was hardly representative of Updike’s best work, his attack seeming after the fact like another brain-fart. “It makes me look like a punk taking easy shots at a big target,” he wrote an admirer who praised the review. “Never again, ami, a book review of a titan.” (On the other hand, he included it in his next essay collection, Consider the Lobster, published in 2005.)

As he was finishing the Updike piece, Premiere asked Wallace to cover the awards ceremony the adult entertainment industry held every year in Las Vegas. Wallace loved the idea — pornography was a subject that never stopped interesting him. It was where the false pleasures and relentless marketing of America met, a metonym for what was toxic in the nation. “My opinions are only that the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love,” lectures Marathe in Infinite Jest. The piece was also a way to intellectualize an appetite a less guilt-ridden man might have just enjoyed. Rather than look for the movies locally, Wallace asked Premiere to rent them in New York and send them to his home. There he watched them in preparation and quickly shipped them back.

In January 1998 he went to the convention. He met the “gonzo porn” producer Max Hardcore and Jasmin St. Claire, known in the industry as “the gang-bang queen.” He was able to compare his penis size to those of male porn stars in the men’s room and take in a spectacle tackier than he had ever seen before. What always amazed Wallace about real life was the overload of information. He did not see how anyone could really capture what went on in a single moment. He wrote to a friend in frustration, “Writing about real-life stuff is next to impossible, simply because there’s so much!” He spent a great deal of time in the hallway of the convention, propped against a wall, scribbling in his notebook. (He was as interested in recording his reaction to what he was seeing as in what he was in fact seeing.) At night he would lie awake in his bed looking at himself in the ceiling mirror.⁶

Where Wallace didn’t find the remarkable, he invented or borrowed. He made use of interviews from his long-ago unpublished Playboy research. Premiere had asked a writer from Hustler, Evan Wright, to help out, and, with his permission, Wallace mined his research as avidly as his own. Wright told Wallace of a scene from two years before in which a porn star, angry at something he had written, put him in a headlock. For his article Wallace moved it to the present and improved the moment by giving Wright a pair of “special autotint trifocals” that the headlock sent “in an arc across the room and into the forbidding décolletage of Christy Canyon never to be recovered.” Wright had written in the LA Weekly about a woman at an industry charity bowling event who had valves under her arms through which she was slowly augmenting her bust size with silicone. Wallace turned them into air valves that would allow her to grow or shrink her breasts at whim, a character out of Philip K. Dick. In all, the convention left him with much the same feeling as the Caribbean cruise had: how sad the world was when you opened your eyes, how much pain it contained. “Some of the starlets are so heavily made up,” he wrote in the article, “they look embalmed. They have complexly coiffed hair that tends to look really good from twenty feet away but on closer inspection is totally dry and dead.” When he got back to Bloomington, he was relieved. He described his trip to DeLillo as “three days in Bosch’s hell-panel.” “I don’t think I’ll have an erection again for a year,” was his comment to Franzen.

Bit by bit Wallace scratched out enough short fiction so that by late 1997 he thought he had a new collection. He told Pietsch he was surprised how dark the stories were since he hadn’t been feeling “particularly dark” in the past few years. He knew that the mini-tales might not please all the readers of his last two books. They were funny but they were not playful or redemptive, qualities many readers had come to associate with his name. He immediately looked for reassurance that the publication of the collection would not become a replay of Infinite Jest, a chance for Little, Brown to cash in on what he called his “late 90s notoriety.” “I don’t think the book could stand up to that kind of hype,” he wrote Nadell. “It’d be slim, strange and a bit slight. A small book.” But the reflexive cast of his mind immediately set him to wondering whether his modesty meant he really didn’t think the book deserved readers at all. “Do I,” he asked Nadell, “secretly think it’s not strong enough to publish, meaning I should wait a few years or however long it takes to have some Bigger or more reader-friendly stories? Or am I a whore to think that way?”

With Wallace a desire to be published usually won out. Moreover, as he began organizing and revising the stories for a collection, he became more excited by how powerful they were as a group. They centered on fear, longing, anxiety, depression, and boundaries, the challenge of being human in an inhospitable time. Many of the stories examined courtship behavior — his, of course, which was particularly nauseating to him at times — but also the entire back-and-forth that he had witnessed between men and women, fortified by the many stories he’d heard in recovery and in relationships.

The set-up for the core of the collection is consistent: they are little plays, conversations, most between a woman and various men she is interviewing. The interrogator’s questions are never written, though; it is up to the reader to figure them out.⁷ The tales are designated only by place and date, as if they were jailhouse or psych ward interviews B.I. #59 04–98 HAROLD R. AND PHYLLIS N. ENGMAN INSTITUTE FOR CONTINUING CARE EASTCHESTER NY B.I. #15 MCI-BRIDGEWATER OBSERVATION & ASSESSMENT FACILITY BRIDGEWATER MA. The men are not named.

One man tells a story to a friend about seeing a woman get off an airplane and wait at the gate for someone who doesn’t show; he picks her up, exploiting her disappointment. A second invites women to let him tie them up; he claims an almost perfect ability to sense which women secretly want to be dominated in this way, comparing it to “chicken-sexing.”⁸ In a third, a man uses his withered arm — his “Asset,” he calls it — to get women to sleep with him out of pity: “I see how you’re trying to be polite and not look at it,” he challenges the interrogator. “Go ahead and look though. It don’t bother me…. You want to hear me describe it? It looks like a arm that changed its mind early on in the game when it was in Mama’s stomach with the rest of me. It’s more like a itty tiny little flipper.” In a fourth, a man tells the interviewer that men who spend a lot of time focusing on the sexual needs of women—“going down on a lady’s yingyang over and over and making her come seventeen straight times and such”—are actually as narcissistic as men who only want to orgasm. “The catch is they’re selfish about being generous,” he lectures. “They’re no better than the pig is, they’re just sneakier about it.”

The men in the stories not only seem to feel nothing; they seem to feel nothing about feeling nothing. They have creepy amounts of self-awareness but no ambition for catharsis. Their hideousness is beyond question. But Wallace was also making a point about women and their endlessly disappointed hopes for sane connections in the era of relative equality (if indeed it was sane connections they wanted and didn’t just say they wanted). It was as if he were challenging women, saying, You think men are disgusting? I’ll show you disgusting men. “How exactly the cycle’s short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe,” the narrator of one story, “Octet,” avers, addressing himself. “Maybe say they’re supposed to compose a certain sort of ‘interrogation’ of the person reading them somehow — i.e. palpations, feelers into the interstices of her sense of something, etc…. Though what that ‘something’ is remains maddeningly hard to pin down, even just for yourself as you’re working on the pieces.” Wallace would call the stories in a letter to his old Amherst teacher Andrew Parker “a parody (a feminist parody) of feminism,” though they were also a postmodernist parody of postmodernism, as one nameless male chauvinist makes clear:

Today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what’s really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we’re all us individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and informed.

“I see that Hal is not the last sad character you’ll be inventing,” Pietsch had responded to the first batch of stories he read, which Wallace sent in February 1997. Wallace added the remainder in mid-August 1998, just before he had to go back to teaching after his anxious sabbatical. He wrote his editor with uncharacteristic enthusiasm:

I feel pretty good about the mss.’s constituents and their order as they stand. I like the way they play off one another and the way certain leitmotifs weave through them (see for example the child-perspective-self-pity of “The Depressed Person” vs. the parent-perspective-self-pity of “On his Deathbed…Begs a Boon” vs. the more quote-unquote objective intrafamily pain of “Signifying Nothing” and “Suicide…Present,” or the way p. 149’s “Yet Another Example…(Vi)…. arcs back to “The Depressed Person,” etc.)

Publication was set for May 1999, at the end of the school term, so Wallace could tour.

The week that Wallace mailed off the full Brief Interviews with Hideous Men manuscript to Pietsch, the Poags invited him to dinner to meet a woman. Nearing thirty-seven, Wallace felt ready for a change. The birth of his sister’s first child in February had reminded him he was no closer to the alluring stability of family life. Writing Brief Interviews had also shaken him up. The book, he told friends, had made him look at aspects of himself he didn’t find very appealing. He had recently broken up with yet another girlfriend and wrote a friend that he felt like he had been through the experience so many times by now that it left him dispirited—“not about the thing not working out but low vis a vis DFW and his existential state.”

Wallace had told the Poags he wanted to be with either a nurse or a social worker, and the woman they invited, Juliana Harms, worked for the Department of Children and Foster Services. For Wallace the meeting was a date, but the Poags told Harms Wallace was interested in interviewing her for some work he was doing, which, given Wallace’s hunger for material, was also true. Wallace was an inveterate interviewer. He went to a tire factory, trailed an exterminator, and even had watched Francis B. propose to his girlfriend. Now the foursome had Chinese food for dinner and sat on the Poags’ front porch afterward. From across the street they heard a baby’s cry: Harms tensed up. “That’s not normal,” she said. When the baby calmed down, so did she. Wallace was impressed.

Soon they met again, and before long the pretense of an interview was gone and they were seeing each other. Harms was more like Susie Perkins than like the women Wallace had dated over the past decade; she was not depressed, nor did she have a history of drug or alcohol problems. She had liked Girl with Curious Hair but most of all remembered looking at the picture on the back, taken when Wallace lived in Somerville, and thinking, “User”—a drug abuser. Wallace was fascinated by her job, which included entering houses under police protection to remove endangered children, and pressed her for every detail about how she did it.

Immediately, Wallace had wanted to go to bed with her. This was how he usually dated. Harms resisted, though; so instead they would go for long walks; she lived in an apartment on the other side of town from him. They spent hours talking into the night. She loved Kokopelli, a Hopi trickster and fertility god. He had a large one on his wall. The Oxford English Dictionary held pride of place on the shelves in his living room. On the first birthday of hers that they celebrated together, a month after they met, Wallace gave Harms the two-volume version, with, as she remembers, “salivating excitement.” They became involved. Wallace’s “Mary” tattoo had faded over the years. “Who’s Marv?” they would joke.

Wallace was in a “post-partum funk,” as he called it, after finishing Brief Interviews. The Drone was sick with lymphoma and despite a course of chemotherapy was not getting better. “I’ve been going around crying like a toddler at the prospect of him suffering or dying,” he wrote Brad Morrow. Harms helped him through these difficult moments. In November Wallace took her to Jamaica. The gesture was a counterphobic one — he hated travel, and tourism even more. But Wallace saw a chance to start afresh, a way to slough off his own hideousness. The couple arrived at the Beachcomber Resort in Negril. They swam together, Wallace lulled by the promise that there could be no sharks so close to shore in the Caribbean, and ate spicy food and walked on the beach, where, attracted by his long hair, marijuana sellers swarmed him. “They always come to the addict,” he said. But as often as he could, Wallace barricaded himself in the coral pink bathroom to write. Never liking to be without a project, he had started on a long essay on language which was giving him the usual trouble. “We snorkeled,” he wrote Franzen in quiet panic on his fifth day at the resort, “Juliana got menaced by a sting ray. She is easy to be with, and that’s good, because except for the 2 hours a day I flail away (futilely) on the usage article, we’re together all the time.” Harms was surprised to find that her new friend locked the door to work even when he was alone.

Back in Bloomington, Wallace settled down to his article. The piece was tied to the publication of a new dictionary of American usage, but he wanted to write about the function of language more broadly, what it really meant to speak of “a common language.” Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus. “Issues of usage, looked at closely even for a moment,” he wrote DeLillo, “become issues of Everything — from neurology to politics to Aristotelian pisteis to Jaussian Kritik to stuff like etiquette and clothing fashions.” Not surprisingly, as soon as he opened himself up to such vast considerations, Wallace found himself overwhelmed: “Every argument seems to me to sprout several potential objections, each of which feels like it has to be handled or the whole argument falls like a pine.” He invoked an image from Faulkner that writing a novel was like building a hen coop in a hurricane and asked DeLillo to remind him never to do nonfiction again. “The whole thing needs to end,” he added.

The relationship with Harms continued to go well. She got him to cut his hair for the first time in a year and they went to the office Christmas party for the Department of Children and Foster Services, Wallace wearing one of her plastic tortoiseshell headbands. Drone died in mid-December. Wallace held his dog in his arms and cried as the veterinarian gave a lethal injection. The body could not be cremated for three weeks and so he would go by the veterinary office and sit outside the freezer where his dog lay. He sent DeLillo a holiday card with the emendation, “It is a sad Christmas.”

Again Harms was there to comfort him. Wallace asked Harms not to fly in winter; he was afraid of losing her in a crash. Soon Harms moved into his house at the edge of town, bringing her cat. They bought a king-sized bed, because the old one was too small. The two shared corny pop songs they loved, like Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be Your Crying Shoulder.” (Wallace boasted he had the musical taste of a high school girl.) He bought her expensive gifts, happy that the books and the fellowships had made him well-to-do. The couple got engaged and picked out a setting for their rings. They talked about having a child and agreed that if Harms got pregnant they would be pleased.

But there were issues. Harms wouldn’t let him use a pen on the couch. He was allergic to her cat. She would come home from work and zone out. He worked all day on his fiction.⁹ At Harms’s urging, Wallace checked himself into an addiction center in Pennsylvania to try to get off nicotine entirely. He had been at various times a smoker, a tobacco chewer, and a patch user — sometimes all three in quick succession — since graduate school.¹⁰ The stay lasted more than a week, and Wallace came home highly agitated. He wished he had a major project under way; he wished he were smoking. He wondered about the Nardil. He never felt quite himself on it. It left him somehow slightly detached from reality. He had in recent years, he believed, become hypoglycemic too, and so his historic diet of prepackaged blondies was replaced by sugarless jelly spreads.

Wallace had managed to keep television at bay for many years now, but in order to relax after her grueling days, Harms ordered satellite TV service with, as she remembers, 75 channels. Wallace would sit and click through the stations, landing on one, then moving on to the next, always afraid he was missing something better and so really watching nothing. By now, between the loss of The Drone, the availability of TV, the lack of nicotine, and the scarcity of privacy, he was stupefied. But he was engaged and committed to Juliana.

Juliana was an active Catholic. She and her fiancé discussed his converting. Wallace, who never lost his hope that he could find faith, signed up for an ecumenical Christian program called cursillo: the goal “to bring God from the head to the heart.” But his new attempt to join a formal religion did not get much further than the one with Karr. At the final ceremony, when the participants were meant to attest their belief in God, Wallace expressed his doubts instead. Faith was something he could admire in others but never quite countenance for himself. He liked to paraphrase Bertrand Russell that there were certain philosophical issues he could bear to think about only for a few minutes a year and once told his old Arizona sponsor Rich C. that he couldn’t go to church because “I always get the giggles.”¹¹

He was back at school now teaching and could be short-tempered, perhaps resenting the time it took up. In one creative writing class he shoved a student who had shown him attitude and then threatened to fail him: “I too have used outrage, abrasiveness, and irritation as a way to keep people at arm’s length,” he wrote Lee Freeman in a note. “So trust me: it is a bush-league defense, and painfully obvious in the terror it betrays.”

By now the new relationship energy with Harms had completely dissipated. Wallace bolted himself in his dark workroom, and when Juliana came home she watched TV alone. Costello was worried by how praising Wallace was when he talked of Harms. He knew, as he remembers, that “admiration was always the tomb” of his friend’s relationships. Wallace and Juliana went to St. Louis to visit Franzen, who felt like Wallace’s interest in her was largely theoretical.¹²

Harms, too, saw that Wallace was pulling away. The search for the ring had stopped. He got a rescued puppy to replace The Drone, but he found the presence in the house of the new dog, Werner, a pit bull mix, unbearable. “I can’t work,” he complained to Harms. “I have to take care of him all day.” The couple went to a MacArthur Fellowship reunion in Chicago, and Wallace stayed in the hotel room, trying to write. “I need to be ready to write,” he explained to her. But to Costello he acknowledged, “Clean pages are safe around me.” He told Juliana he felt like he was always disappointing her, then got mad when she said he had all the qualities she could hope for in a partner. She grew suspicious — she guessed he was hiding something larger. ¹³

Harms confronted Wallace, who denied being involved with another woman. She pulled out all his papers. A trained investigator, she knew where to look. She found several notes from a graduate student in Wallace’s department. “I haven’t had a physical affair with her but I’m contemplating it,” Wallace explained sullenly. Harms had had enough. A few weeks later, in early January 2000, Doug Poag helped her move out. Wallace contributed to the down payment for her new house out of his MacArthur money and then was peeved when a new boyfriend quickly moved in.

The graduate student became Wallace’s girlfriend. They exchanged books — he gave her The Screwtape Letters, she gave him the J. D. Salinger collection Nine Stories—“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing” was a line he loved. Things grew increasingly intense, but as ever the work came first for Wallace and the relationship faltered.

In April 1999, Salon.com asked Wallace for his list of underappreciated novels, and in his response he included longtime loves like Omensetter’s Luck, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Blood Meridian, but added Jerzy Kosinski’s little-known Steps, “a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close.”

Kafka’s fragments may have been the comparison he wanted reviewers to make when they read Brief Interviews. He had written a book that was, as he told an interviewer, “mean to just about everyone it’s possible to be mean to,” and had to hope for thoughtful readings. He was, though, resigned to what might come, perhaps even to being ignored. He wrote Brad Morrow that he was glad to be out of the spotlight: “The big Attention eyeball has mostly passed on to other poor schmo’s.” Still, Little, Brown asked him to go on a book tour and he obliged, as long as it was short. “I’m in the midst of the world’s smallest tour,” he boasted to Steven Moore in June. “Just four cities.” Even short book tours filled him with misgivings. “The Statue Talks!” he joked to a friend.

He avoided interviews as much as he could and tried to show as little of himself as possible when obligated to sit down for them. He met a writer from Book magazine at the Cracker Barrel by the I-55 interchange in Bloomington, where he grouchily averred that he “just want[ed] to be left alone to eat my meatloaf.” Publishers Weekly found him at a K-Mart. In Los Angeles, he went on Bookworm, a radio show hosted by Michael Silverblatt. Silverblatt was special — he had been so excited by Infinite Jest he had called Michael Pietsch to ask to read the outtakes. In their conversation now, Wallace suggested that the collection was meant as a corrective for those readers who had misunderstood his last novel:

I wanted to do a book that was sad…. It’s something I tried to do in Infinite Jest. Everybody thought that book was funny, which was of course nice, but it was also kind of frustrating. I designed this one so that nobody is going to escape the fact that this is sad.

Silverblatt gave a persuasive explanation of how Wallace was attempting to effect this:

Here, it felt as if, in reading these stories with eyes wide open, I was being asked to revolve so much that I would get dizzy. And that, in the fall, in the dizziness, a kind of compelling sadness — that the sadness is itself formed by the obligation to have no stable position. That everything has to spin on itself, until a kind of weariness, attrition, ecstasy, exhilaration, humor, terror, become compounded. And the emotion bomb, as the therapists say, is left in the reader.

To which Wallace answered, “Wow. You’re giving — I mean, this is why I look forward to coming to L.A. — is you tend to give interpretations of the stuff that’s real close to what I want.”

The country’s reviewers on the whole were more positive than Wallace expected. He was welcomed to the short story form (although in fact this was his second collection), and critics tended to play up his formal inventiveness and shy away from the knotty problem of what the reader was supposed to come away with. Benjamin Weissman in the LA Weekly praised this “full-scale harassment of the short story form,” while Andrei Codrescu in the Chicago Tribune admired Wallace’s “seemingly inexhaustible bag of literary tricks.” Adam Goodheart, writing in the New York Times Book Review, sounded a mixed note, comparing Wallace to Edgar Allan Poe, “another mad scientist of American literature.” But Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times chose to do unto Wallace as he had done unto Updike:

No doubt these portraits are meant as sardonic commentaries on our narcissistic, therapeutic age, but they are so long-winded, so solipsistic, so predictable in their use of irony and gratuitous narrative high jinks that they end up being as tiresome and irritating as their subjects.

She accused Wallace of writing an “airless, tedious” book that failed to live up to the promise in “E Unibus Pluram” to reanimate the “deep moral issues that distinguished the work of the great 19th-century writers.” “The NY Times just slaughtered the book,” Wallace wrote Moore afterward, “just panned it, in a review that caused my editor pain (he actually called me about it).” Wallace was in fact also devastated and could recite several sentences in it from memory.

The New York Review of Books soon afterward published the first major overview of Wallace’s mature work, taking a stance between impressed and skeptical and implicitly psychoanalyzing the author along the way. “The Panic of Influence,” by A. O. Scott, emphasized Wallace’s anxious relationship with post-modernism and also his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness. Scott also accused Wallace of fencing off all possible objections to his work by making sure every possible criticism was already embedded in the text. Brief Interviews, especially, the critic wrote, was not so much anti-ironic as “meta-ironic,” driven much like the characters in its stories by the fear of being known. This sort of writing, he continued, was clearly connected to the self-centered self-absorbed culture of late-twentieth-century America, but “does Wallace’s work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it’s both.” Wallace was not pleased but he was impressed. In the margins of a draft of the story “Good Old Neon,” which he began around this time, he noted (punningly), “AO Scott saw into my character.”

Brief Interviews, though, sold well, which made Little, Brown happy and, for better or worse, helped buff the statue. Though Wallace claimed he no longer read reviews, he printed out a post by a critic for Slate’s book club to tape inside his composition notebook: “The difference: BIWHM’s just too much telling, not enough showing. He needs to combine that urge to confront what matters with his ability to spin a wonderful tale. When that book comes out, I’ll be waiting in line.”

Wallace had been mulling the possibilities for a third novel since the mid-1990s, even as he began the stories that would form the heart of Brief Interviews. The setting had come early, possibly even before the publication of Infinite Jest: he knew he wanted to write about the IRS. The agency fit well with Wallace’s Pynchonian appetite for clandestine organizations and hidden conspiracies. And like the tennis academy and recovery house in Infinite Jest, it was a world unto itself, where characters would be in charged apposition to one another. Wallace himself had had numerous small brushes with the agency over the years, usually involving trivial errors on Form 1099s that he or his accountant had to get corrected. These encounters touched off the same anxiety within him as communications from lawyers and fact-checkers. He had an idea as well of the IRS as a secular church, a counterpart to Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest.¹⁴ But, finally, he probably settled on the IRS for the most obvious reason: it was the dullest possible venue he could think of and he had decided to write about boredom.

Wallace had no direct knowledge of life at the IRS or indeed in any office — he had never worked in one — and his grasp of accounting was shaky, but he was an avid study, so, soon after the publication of his novel, he began taking classes at the university. He went from beginning financial accounting in the fall of 1996 (“Examines the nature of accounting, basic accounting concepts, financial statements, accrual basis of accounting…”) to federal income taxation in summer 1997 and advanced tax that fall. He read countless agency publications and books on accounting and the IRS, from West Federal Taxation to D. Larry Crumbley’s The Ultimate Rip-Off. He interviewed real-life IRS employees and went to Peoria, where the agency had a large facility. He boasted to Costello that he was only a few credits short of passing the state accounting exam.

As Wallace moved forward, he acquired vocabulary and context for his novel, much as he would for one of his nonfiction pieces. He used to tell his classes that a novelist had to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him or her on an airplane; Wallace easily surpassed that benchmark. He learned that what outsiders called an IRS agent might actually be an examiner, an auditor, or an investigator. He read that the IRS had changed its focus in the Reagan era from an agency primarily involved with compliance to one engaged in revenue maximization; a fiscal mission had replaced a civic one. He thought there might be something in that conflict to dramatize. When something wasn’t true that would be good, he made it up. He decided junior employees were called “wigglers” or, dismissively, “turdnagels.” (This became his email address for a time, after he started using email in the early 2000s.) “‘Snout’=IRS Investigator / ‘Immersive’=Talented IRS examiner,” he wrote in a notebook. He imagined that all IRS agents got a new social security number when they entered the agency. Wallace found a prose poem by Frank Bidart that suggested a clever epigraph for this rebirth: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”

His research in pornography over the years was still on his mind. Wallace’s original conceit for the novel may have involved not just tedium but pleasure. He made notes for a plot in which a group of rich businessmen run a video porn operation. They go into business with Drinion, an IRS immersive so talented that he sometimes floats above his seat while he works. Drinion had helped seize the business on behalf of the service for unpaid taxes. He comes now to double as their male lead in the movies. His great virtue is that he is so pale that he can be digitally erased and the porn viewer can have his own image replace it.¹⁵ It was the “Infinite Jest” videocartridge one iteration further along: what could be more addictive than watching yourself act out an addiction?¹⁶

The Bidart poem neatly connected to Wallace’s core interest in the IRS: how does it change a person’s internal life to work at something as dull as monitoring tax returns? The agents’ jobs were tedious, but dullness, in Wallace’s conceit, was what ultimately set them free. The lack of stimulation gave them a chance to open themselves up to experience in the largest sense of the word. The idea connected to Buddhism — Eastern religious practices had been a growing interest of Wallace’s for many years. (He liked to practice sitting meditation, he wrote Rich C., with “weird cultish Sikh and Buddhist groups, most of whom are very crazy in a very attractive way.”) The goal of the discipline was crucial to him — the inability to slow down his whirring mind was part of what he felt made his life so hard. As a character notes in the story “Good Old Neon,” which Wallace wrote around 2000, “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.” In the process of writing the novel he came to call The Pale King,¹⁷ he laid out its central tenet in one of his notebooks:

Bliss — a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.

Wallace had explored this state briefly in Infinite Jest, partly through Lyle, the levitating guru in the weight room, and partly through John “No Relation” Wayne, the top player at the tennis academy, whose skill comes not from Wallace- or Hal-like cunning but from “frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.”¹⁸ With the help of researchers, Wallace assembled hundreds of pages of research on boredom, trying to understand it at an almost neurological level. He pulled down his Oxford English Dictionary and was intrigued to find that “bore” appeared in English in 1766, two years before “interesting” came to mean “absorbing.”

Wallace had four offices to write his novel in: his black room at home, a university office (rarely visited), a room put aside for him in Francis B.’s mother’s house, and a rented space in town.¹⁹ He was usually flummoxed by his lack of progress. DeLillo, to whom he wrote in worry, reassured him that a novel was “a long march to the mountains.” He took a second yearlong leave in 2000 and spent the first half of it trying to work and seeing a lot of movies. (Movies, he liked to say, were an addict’s recreation of choice.) Then he wrote letters about the movies. DeLillo was his chosen correspondent and his opinions were anti-elitist and mildly contrarian. For instance, he saw and loved the cyberthriller The Matrix—“visually raw and kinetic and riveting in a way that only something like Bochco’s Hill Street Blues was in ’81,” he wrote his friend — and hated the acclaimed Magnolia, which he found pretentious and hollow, “100 % gradschoolish in a bad way.” That summer he went to a retreat run by the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas. There Wallace spent a pleasant month. He borrowed a nearby rancher’s two golden retriever puppies to walk and turned the books by the retreat’s alumni to the wall. This was his moment to approach the novel head-on, but the writing didn’t go particularly well, at least in retrospect. To Franzen, on his return, he wrote, “Almost everything I did there will have to be thrown away, but that, too, is good, in a way.” To Rich C., he was more downbeat: “I’m scared I can’t do good work anymore.”

Wallace was ever more in demand for his nonfiction. In the fall of 1999, Rolling Stone asked him if he wanted to write about a candidate in the upcoming presidential elections and he chose John McCain, the independent-minded Republican who was opposing George W. Bush for the presidential nomination. Wallace was politically fairly conservative; he’d voted for Ronald Reagan and supported Ross Perot in 1992, telling his friend Corey Washington, “You need someone really insane to fix the economy.” He came to combine midwestern conventionality with girlfriend-pleasing campus liberalism. In 2000 he voted for Bill Bradley in the Illinois primary. In truth politics did not generally matter much to him. He did not think who won an election could change what was broken. But in McCain Wallace saw another chance to explore the hollowing out of the American character. McCain’s campaign, which prided itself on openness and truthfulness, raised two intriguingly recursive questions in his mind. Was McCain genuinely honest or just portraying himself as genuine? If the former, were Americans so steeped in the complex double-talk of advertising they could not see genuineness when it appeared? And if the latter, were they so used to being tricked that it was now its own source of pleasure?

Wallace spent a week on the campaign trail in early February 2000 and, as was his style, ignored the top-level operatives to focus on the techies and hacks in the bus that followed McCain’s bus, the Straight Talk Express, dubbed (probably by Wallace) the Bullshit 1. He exaggerated on the way to make his point. He painted the major newspaper reporters — he called them “the twelve monkeys”—as haughtier and more alike one another than they even were and pretended the McCain campaign strategist was so afraid of him he would duck around the corner to avoid encounters (in fact they got along well; the gesture was playful, as the campaign strategist told a reporter for Salon in 2010.) And did two separate reporters really mistake Wallace for a bellboy and tell him to carry their suitcases? It seemed unlikely, but all this falsity contributed to creating a portrait of Wallace as an outsider, someone who could convey a truth readers weren’t getting elsewhere, real straight talk. In the end, what Wallace wanted to capture was what

the brief weird excitement [that the campaign] generated might reveal about how millennial politics and all its packaging and marketing and strategy and media and spin and general sepsis actually makes us US voters feel, inside.

McCain’s campaign was fast folding. After he lost the primary elections of early March to Bush, Rolling Stone needed the article in a hurry. Wallace took only three weeks to write twenty-seven thousand words. The piece — cut by more than half in three days of frantic editing by phone — was in print by mid-April, a speed that Wallace found both liberating and upsetting. In the end Wallace used his unaccustomed ringside seat at American history to further preoccupations that dated back to his “E Unibus Pluram” essay. His conclusion was that McCain was America looking in the mirror. “Whether he’s truly For Real,” he ended, “depends now less on what’s in his heart than on what might be in yours.”

The article would win a National Magazine Award, but Wallace always felt his take on the “three months that tickled the prostate of the American Century,” as he called the campaign in a letter to DeLillo, was just a vacation from the novel he was supposed to be working on. “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do,” he added as “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub” was about to appear, “but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket, and taking half-hours off to write letters like this and still calling it Writing Time.”

In June 2000, an editor from Atlas Books approached Wallace with the idea of writing a volume on mathematics for its Great Discoveries series, which it was copublishing with Norton. Jesse Cohen suggested as subjects either Georg Cantor, a pioneer in set theory, or Kurt Gödel, who authored the incompleteness theorems, which state that no matter how much one knows about a system there is yet more to know. That knowledge has limits that are themselves the product of our knowledge was the sort of thing that Wallace never stopped thinking about. “Obvious fact,” he would later write in the book, “never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is.” Cantor, though, held the prospect of something even more appealing: an inquiry into a man who took on a puzzle of the sort that had always fascinated and worried Wallace — in this case, the nature of infinity. Most investigations into thinking of this sort, Wallace knew, led to paralysis, the a.p.-s’s (adolescent pot smoker’s) solipsism he always feared. Cantor though had broken through to the other side by showing that there are different sized infinities and that they can be thought about almost like ordinary numbers. He had turned a fearsome unknown into a quantity that mathematicians could manipulate. Cantor also presented the more achievable challenge. “I know [enough] about Gödel’s proof to know that the math and notations alone would take me years to get proficient at,” Wallace wrote Cohen. He added in a stern fax he sent shortly after from Marfa that if he did undertake the book it would be “on the side as a diversion from other contracted stuff.” All the same, he couldn’t resist thinking how rewarding such an effort would be:

Did you know that the implifications/ramifications of Cantor’s diagonal proof are huge, especially for contemporary computer science (e.g. “trans-computational problems,” etc.)? Did you know that it would take 500 pages even to outline these consequences and ramifications? Would the book just be a bio of Cantor and contemporaries and discuss the Proof and its context, or would you also expect a Consequences discussion?

When Cohen wrote back that the book was meant to be a book of ideas, the thrust being on “Cantor and the sheer mindbending quality of his theories,” Wallace was hooked. This was the part of him he had left by the side of the road when he became a fiction writer, the part he had tried to breathe life back into when he went to Harvard, the part that made him the smartest guy in the room. He had slid into lightweight magazine work, offering insights on porn and tennis. The information that the advance might be as high as $100,000 did not hurt either. That was a bigger advance than he had gotten for Infinite Jest. He said yes.

It was now the fall and Wallace was more than halfway through the second leave that was supposed to be devoted to his fiction. He started research on the infinity book. His efforts on what he had taken to calling “the Long Thing” did not go well. “Most of my own stuff I’ve been delivering to the wastebasket,” he wrote Markson in November. “It looks good in there.” All the same he was so glad not to be teaching that when he found out that the university was accidentally still paying him, he wrote his department head to say he wouldn’t cash the checks in case they tried to make him pay them back with classes later. But in the spring of 2001, he was back in the classroom, trying to balance his nonfiction, his fiction, and his fears. The article on American usage he had begun when he was with Juliana finally appeared in Harper’s. The magazine ran less than half of what he had originally written but he acknowledged in a note to DeLillo that Colin Harrison, his longtime nonfiction editor there, “did a pretty good cut.”

That summer he went with friends to a two-week meditation retreat at Plum Village near Bordeaux, France, under the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. The retreat required abstention from both coffee and smoking. Wallace wanted to understand more deeply what it was he was proposing in The Pale King. What did the bliss that followed great boredom actually feel like? He found that writing about mindlessness and achieving it for oneself were two different things; he left early, blaming the food, and was home as soon as he could be. He wrote to DeLillo on his return, “Highlights: 1) Went AWOL from Viet-Buddhist monast[e]ry’s retreat….2) watched 2 of 4 drunk Peruvians drown in Dordogne off St. Foy La Grande. 3) Ate a snail on purpose.” He mentioned that Franzen, whose third novel, The Corrections, was coming out in mid-September, was “gearing up for his turn at having Sauron’s great red eye upon him.”

The morning of September 11 found Wallace at his usual activities, going to his meeting, running errands, planning to write. At the actual moment of the attacks, he was showering, “trying to listen to a Bears post-mortem on WSCR Sports Radio in Chicago,” as he remembered. He did not know whether he had feelings about the attacks beyond the ordinary, but when Rolling Stone approached him for a piece on his response, he felt drawn to try. In three days, he wrote a short, delicate essay—“Caveat. Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock,” he appended to the draft. “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” is a piece of oblique social analysis, a tribute both to the heartland and recovery. (It was first punningly called “A View from the Interior.”) He once more disguised his recovery group circle as friends from church. Thus Mrs. Thompson, his pseudonym for the mother of Francis B., became “a long-time church member and leader in our congregation.” He captured the essence of her and her friends’ diffuse, gentle articulations as they viewed the awful events, their worries about family in or near Manhattan, and their tears as they watched the towers collapse on television. “What the Bloomington ladies are,” Wallace wrote,

or start to seem, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a bizarre lack of cynicism in the room. It doesn’t once occur to anyone here to remark on how it’s maybe a little odd that…the relentless rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn’t seen it yet.

He contrasted the sincerity of the women with the attitude of a young man named Duane, also present, whose “main contribution was to keep iterating how much like a movie it is.” Wallace ended, “I’m trying to explain the way part of the horror of the Horror was knowing that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my own — mine…and poor old loathsome Duane’s — than these ladies’.” Did a certain part of America then deserve what it got? This was a point Wallace of course had to sidestep, but for anyone who had absorbed the lessons of Infinite Jest it was present all the same.

“It’s been a couple of very humbling years,” Wallace wrote Michael Pietsch soon after, admitting the novel was not going forward but insisting he had the maturity now to withstand fallow times: “When there’s sufficient humility and non-seriousness-about-self, it’s not all that bad, more like when the two guys are laughing existentially…at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” It did hurt, though, that the turn of the millennium had brought with it an abundance of large literary efforts that threatened to push Infinite Jest to the edge of the stage. Dave Eggers’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, had appeared in 2000, with a quote from Wallace on the jacket praising this “merciless book.” The work sought that characteristic honesty beyond honesty of Wallace’s essays.²⁰ Eggers was also the editor of a new magazine, McSweeney’s. With its self-conscious sense of pleasure and wariness of hype, McSweeney’s shared Wallace’s goal of recording real life in a media-saturated age. (He in fact contributed three stories.) The admiration was mutual: Wallace proposed Eggers to Little, Brown to design Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

And in September 2001, The Corrections was finally published, a novel Franzen had worked on — as Wallace noted with admiration to Pietsch a month later — for ten years, including “two periods when he threw [away] nearly-completed books he just knew in his gut weren’t right.” Wallace watched with amazement as the book became a bestseller. “I apologize in advance for the fact that I will never make you, me, or our joint employers,” Wallace wrote Pietsch, looking for reassurance, “anything even close to the amount of money he’s making FSG [Farrar, Straus & Giroux], by the way.” In truth he was happy for his friends — sort of — but knew (and cared and didn’t care) that his role as one of the founders of a new kind of writing was threatening to slip into the historical.²¹ At the same time as he was being pushed aside as its leader, he was being held responsible for its flaws. For many years, critics had asked Wallace if he saw himself as part of a movement, and for as many years he had said no. Back in the early 1990s, he had written Morrow, half-jokingly, to suggest an issue of Conjunctions designed to show how he, Vollmann, and Franzen had nothing in common. When Salon.com inquired at the time of Infinite Jest what he and Franzen, as well as Donald Antrim, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, and Richard Powers shared, Wallace responded, “There’s the whole ‘great white male’ deal. I think there are about five of us under 40 who are white and over 6 feet and wear glasses.” Then, in August 2001, James Wood warned in a review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in the New Republic that there was a disturbing new trend in fiction: “A genre is hardening…. Familial resemblances are asserting themselves and a parent can be named.” Wood dubbed the new style “Hysterical Realism,” its principal characteristic being a desire

to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence…. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs. Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned.

Wood believed this freneticism came at the price of intimacy and psychological acuity, the true gifts of the novel. Wallace wasn’t the father of this undesirable new movement in fiction — that was Dickens, in Wood’s conceit — but he was named as one of the louche uncles, corrupting literary youth. And the next year would bring two more additions to the family: Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, both debut novels that seemed to owe their exuberance — their commitment to “vitality at all costs”—to Infinite Jest. The irony was that Wallace had now spent half a decade trying to slow down not just literature’s pulse but his own.

Wallace was beginning to feel like time was passing him by. He read in the New York Review of Books about electronic publishing and wondered what it meant that he didn’t like the idea, was wed to the artifact—“the traditional galleys-and-proofs-and-pub-dates-and-real-books-with-covers-you-hate” approach, as he wrote to DeLillo. He used to welcome change, he remembered: “The whole thing makes me feel old, sort of like the way Heavy Metal music or cum-shots in mainstream movies make me feel.” When his high school class in Urbana had celebrated their twentieth reunion the year before, Wallace hadn’t been able to attend — he was at Marfa — but sent a check for a floral arrangement for classmates who had died and asked for someone to videotape the event. Shortly afterward, he came through Urbana and was absorbed by the images of his classmates celebrating, which he watched in the home of the class reunion chair. He apologized to her for not having been more sensitive to her depression when they were students, and when he found out she worked with the man whom as a boy he had tormented with snowballs, he wrote a letter apologizing to him too. He made amends wherever he could, sometimes to excess.²² He wrote to his Arizona sponsor that “I struggle a great deal, and am 99.8 % real,” then crossed that out and wrote in “98.8 %,” noting in a parenthesis in the margin, “Got a bit carried away here.”

Wallace knew it was time to leave Illinois State. His writing was stuck and his relationships with women were falling into a pattern so predictable that even he saw the humor in them.²³ The university had also begun to back away from “the Unit,” the oasis for experimental literature in the prairie. Wallace cared little by now for this kind of writing, but the people who had worked so hard to create it mattered to him.

Ever since Infinite Jest, various high-level writing departments had put out feelers to him in the hopes that this well-known author, so obviously wasted on a second-tier midwestern university, would be willing to move. In the fall of 2000 he received a letter from Pomona College, in Claremont, California, which had just created a chair in creative writing. Wallace responded to the English department chair with caution. The department head, Rena Fraden, reassured him that the post was designed for a full-time fiction writer. On a later call he joked that all his friends had gotten a letter too, including Franzen (who said he was not interested and recommended Wallace). He and Fraden agreed that he would visit the school in December and give a reading and teach a class to see what he thought of the school. When he came, the students at the class, as one remembered, sat “in a narcotic state of awe.” Wallace taught a workshop and said if he could leave them with one thing it was the difference between “nauseous” and “nauseated.” He gave a reading to a small group in Crookshank Hall and met the faculty and liked them. He went to a dinner at Fraden’s house, where the participants each talked about a book that had affected him or her deeply. One mentioned Clarissa; another Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Wallace surprised all by naming a popular page-turner (no one can remember quite which).

Wallace quickly bonded with Fraden. She was the sort of sympathetic, uncompetitive academic whom he could count on to provide the special conditions that helped him to work, a successor to Dale Peterson, Mary Carter, and Charlie Harris. Pomona began to look like a place where he could make a new start. He and Fraden discussed that evening what it would take to get him to leave Bloomington. He asked for as little teaching as possible; Fraden agreed. The department voted to end the interview process and offer him the job. A month later, Wallace accepted. “The students actually appear to like to read and write, which will be a welcome change,” he wrote to Peterson. “I have gotten very tired (and sometimes impatient) with having to be a disciplinarian in order to get ISU students (the bulk of them, anyway) simply to do their homework.” He had promised ISU that he would teach a full year after his second leave, and he meant to keep that promise, but he was already looking forward to a new start. He pointed out to Morrow that he had been “home” for almost a decade and explained to Curtis White, his colleague in the department, that it was time for him to grow up.