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

CHAPTER 8. The Pale King

In midsummer 2002, Wallace left Bloomington in the Volvo he’d bought with some of his MacArthur money, Werner and Jeeves in the back. It had been nine years since he’d last changed jobs. Francis B. and his mother raced him to his first stop, a hotel in Columbia, Missouri, so that when Wallace looked up at the front desk, he found his friend signing the registry. The joke fell flat, though: it turned out the forty-year-old author was traveling, not with professional dog movers hired by Pomona, as he had told them, but with Sarah Caudle, a young mother who had been a longtime friend and was now his girlfriend. It took the couple six days to drive west. During the trip they ate in their motel room so that the dogs were never alone. In St. George, Utah, Wallace wanted to go to a recovery meeting. He found a listing in the phone book, but by the time the sponsor called back it was too late.

When they got to Claremont, bleary-eyed and anxious, they drove up and down the streets. The Mission-style strip malls astonished Wallace — he wondered, as he always did when faced with something new, if he had made a mistake. Wallace told Caudle he was afraid that the bland weather would sap his “will to live.” “What kind of zip code starts with ‘9,’” he had written DeLillo plaintively just before leaving the Midwest. And, in the winter, he would write Morrow to claim he missed “yellow snow and flowing mucus.” But there was posturing in this homesickness: in reality Wallace’s sense of being uprooted passed quickly this time. The house the college had arranged for him was pretty, on the main street, Indian Hill Boulevard, and near the campus. It was fenced all in, with lemon trees in the back and a giant palm tree Wallace happily measured to be eleven and a half feet around.

The first few days brought two visitors. Fraden came with one of her daughters, and fruit and baba ghanoush. And Karen Green also dropped by. When Wallace was still in Bloomington, Green, a visual artist, had asked him for permission to turn “The Depressed Person” into a grid of illustrated panels. Now she brought the finished artwork, along with a housewarming gift of Ikea ice trays. The story, Wallace’s act of anger against Elizabeth Wurtzel, ends without hope: the depressed person cannot break out of the cage of solipsism that her “terrible and unceasing emotional pain” has placed her in. Green had reimagined the story, so that in the last panel of her painting she is cured. When Wallace saw what Green had done, he was pleased. He told her that she had turned it into a story that people would want to read. That day in Claremont he offered to make lunch for her. There were lamps scattered everywhere — she counted fourteen — and towels stretched out to dry on the furniture: the place looked to Green “like an office with a laundry.” His fridge turned out to contain only hot dogs and goldfish crackers. When Green asked if Wallace had mustard, he told her, “I’m not that into condiments.” They went to a park and Werner jumped on her and tore out her belly-button ring. She came back a few weeks later, the day before her birthday, with a mutual friend, and Wallace prepared her hot dogs and put them in the frilly paper cuffs that usually attire lamb chops.

On the car ride west Wallace had invited Caudle and her daughter to move in with him. But soon he called her in Illinois and said he wanted to end their contact. And when Karen Green’s own marriage ended in November, Wallace offered to help. “I’ll be your hideous man expert,” he said. Expecting that they were going to begin a relationship and determined to start on an honest footing this time, he wrote her a series of letters — Grim Letter I, Grim Letter II, he called them — where he laid out his psychiatric history and his history with women.¹ “I don’t want to be Satan,” he explained. She drew a picture of Satan on him with a Sharpie and at his insistence added the words, “But I mean well.”

Soon Green invited him to spend Christmas with her in Hawaii. He was sad — Jeeves had just died (“the closest thing to a child that I had,” he wrote Morrow). To make sure they could get along when they got there, he had first visited her for a day in Marin County, where she lived. They had fun, and he amazed her afterward by writing a letter describing every detail of her house, down to the paint-splattered shoes in the hallway. He told her the depressed person was really him. Wallace wanted to go slow, so to encourage him in Hawaii, Green sent him a sheet with a hole already cut out. In December they left, surprising Wallace’s friends, who knew how little he liked to travel. In Hawaii, they watched movies and walked on the beach and talked constantly. Green swam, while Wallace avoided the water. He found the islands, he wrote Morrow afterward, “much less touristy or vulgar than I’d thought, and haunted and sad in a good way.” He also liked that there were no bugs. Before they returned home, he asked Green if she would marry him. But Green had a teenage son, Stirling, who danced, and she wanted to be near a good ballet program. On his return Wallace told Morrow that he was “pretty much hopelessly in love with a female in Marin County who’s a showing painter.”

Wallace settled in to Claremont. He found a recovery group he liked and, touched by California culture, drank his “breakfast vomit,” lifted weights, ran with Werner, and even bought a new tennis racket. He festooned his walls with shark attack clippings and pages of the Long Thing. When school began, he found he liked teaching at Pomona more than he had expected. For one thing, there were no graduate students (and thus no budding literary theorists), and the undergraduates were more capable than at Illinois State — he was in the “land of 1600 SAT scores, apparently” as he described Pomona to Morrow. He found Fraden, the department head, exactly how he hoped she’d be. They soon had a standing date to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer every Tuesday night at her house. As ever, Wallace tried to tamp down any sense that he was special; when the students in his fiction class had a “Dress Like DFW Day,” he let it be known that it was only sort of funny.

Best of all, he only had to teach one course each semester and never had to sit on a committee. “We’re hiring you to write — you have to keep writing,” Fraden had told him. “I have a lottery-prize-type gig at Pomona,” Wallace bragged to the Believer in 2003. “I get to do more or less what I want.” Any grumblings among the faculty, for whom undergraduate education was a calling, were soon laid to rest as word of Wallace’s unmistakable dedication to teaching emerged — for example, the eleven impromptu mini-papers he required from students in “Literary Interpretation,” or the comments in different-colored inks for each reading that he scrawled in the margins of students’ stories. He took teaching seriously and made sure his students did so too. Once, when the school registrar wanted to audit Wallace’s course, on the literary essay, Wallace turned her down because she would have had to miss too many classes for faculty meetings.

His grammar obsession quickly became well known. “On a scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11,” he would tell students, seeing a particular blunder. Or, “This actually hurts my brain.” He would consult his mother’s book, Practically Painless English, to answer any challenges and would sometimes trot out her old feint of fake-coughing when a student fell into a grammatical solecism. He used the modifier “only” in class to show the power careful usage wielded:

You have been entrusted to feed your neighbor’s dog for a week while he (the neighbor) is out of town. The neighbor returns home; something has gone awry; you are questioned.

“I fed the dog.”

“Did you feed the parakeet?”

“I fed only the dog.”

“Did anyone else feed the dog?”

“Only I fed the dog.”

“Did you fondle/molest the dog?”

“I only fed the dog!”

His voice cracked with pleasure as he spoke the last line.

Wallace stood out in Claremont. His earnestness, part midwestern childhood, part defense mechanism, was unusual on a campus where the tone was muted cool, sun-drenched Ivy. Wallace once tried to get approved a course called “Extremely Advanced Essay Writing,” but the registrar objected that no “Advanced Essay Writing” class had been offered before. Still, Wallace’s arrival was a triumph for both the department and the university, this middle-aged monstre sacré in his iconoclastic outfits — bandana, beaten-up hiking shorts, and double athletic socks inside unlaced hiking boots. The Los Angeles Times, in covering his arrival, noted with approval his Pomona College sweatshirt with the arms cut off.

Wallace very much wanted Green to be in the same city with him. He did not want to wait until Stirling graduated high school in 2005. In the summer of 2003, Green bought a house in Cave Creek, Arizona. Wallace made the six-hour drive once a week. He worked in an upstairs room and read Tom Clancy novels by the pool, “burning his shoulders to a crisp,” as Green remembers. There was a local recovery group he liked too.

In August 2003 Wallace went to Maine with Green on an assignment for Gourmet. She had never met his parents before but his relationship with his mother had gotten easier with time and they bonded as a group. His editors were hoping he would reprise his role as the elite’s correspondent in the heartland, but, having promised to do his “own eccentric researching,” he came back with something decidedly more delicate than the state fair or the cruise piece. He had always been interested in what animals feel — their inability to protect themselves touched him as human pain didn’t — and over the years he had begun to wonder what right we had to be cruel to them. In Maine he found a scene worthy of Hogarth: thousands of lobsters being boiled alive at the “enormous, pungent and extremely well-marketed Maine Lobster Festival,” where “friend and stranger alike sit cheek by jowl, cracking and chewing and dribbling. It’s hot, and the sagged roof traps the steam and the smells.” Who, he wanted to know, gave us such dominion? But Wallace was and had always been averse to hectoring — it seemed rude to him — and in the piece he took pains to distance himself, physically and rhetorically, from the PETA representative, “Mr. William R. Rivas-Rivas,” who, he writes, papered the festival at the harbor with his leaflet “Being Boiled Hurts.” Instead, Wallace posed the problem with lobster eating as a series of ethical questions, writing in the faux-naïve voice of the curious midwestern boy he still in some ways was: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” He went on slyly:

For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and — presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands?…If, on the other hand, you’ll have no truck with [such] confusions and convictions…what makes it feel truly okay, inside, to just dimiss the whole thing out of hand? That is, is your refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think about it? I am not trying to bait anyone here — I’m genuinely curious. After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet?

Wallace was not under the illusion that his investigation would change anyone’s behavior (it did not change his own — at the festival one evening, Green remembers, he enjoyed two lobsters for dinner), but there was pleasure in and of itself in expanding the fight against American complacency.

In general, Pomona had a mellowing effect on Wallace. In September 2002, for instance, he had gone east for the New Yorker festival. He was to read alongside Franzen, and the two, who had never shared a stage before, jockeyed for the order, with Wallace feigning not to know that the second reader had the more prestigious slot. For Franzen, it was a microcosm of something that always bothered him in their friendship: Wallace didn’t like acknowledging how competitive they were. In the end, Wallace went first in the heat and read two sections of his long, unfinished novel. One was about Leonard Stecyk, the smarmy young man whose desire to behave perfectly with everyone leads to a wedgie in school (he grows up to be an IRS agent),² and the other was a Kafkaesque story about an implacable infant who turns up in an agency office and drives the examiners crazy. “My audit group’s Group Manager and his wife have an infant,” the narrator, an unnamed auditor, recounts, “I can describe only as— fierce. Its expression is fierce; its demeanor is fierce; its gaze over bottle or pacifier or finger — fierce, intimidating, aggressive.”³ The crowd was highly appreciative; Wallace had brought a towel for his own perspiration and was happy to see his friend also sweating. “I…did not think he could,” he wrote DeLillo afterward. But, graciously, Franzen had spared him the news that the author they both most admired was himself in the audience. “He’s kind in his way,” Wallace acknowledged afterward of his friend.⁴

Wallace had had three significant projects to work on as he settled in at Pomona: the ever-present Long Thing, a new story collection he had proposed to Pietsch, and a round of editorial queries on his book on Cantor and set theory. On the math book, he had pushed himself hard in the spring of 2002, his last semester in Bloomington, devoting almost all his time to it and getting a draft in just before leaving. Characteristically, the project had gone from a dare (“I’m doing a book about math!” he’d written Moore. “You?”) to a task (to DeLillo, just before moving to Pomona, he called it his “wretched math book”). But all the same, after a lot of effort he felt he had done good work and struck a balance between the biographical and the mathematical. He had hired a University of Illinois graduate student to go over the equations and technical details to make sure they were accurate too. But in September 2002, he wrote DeLillo in frustration that what had seemed done was not. “Both the math-editor and the general editor want repairs,” he complained. A book he had thought would take him four months of part-time work had now taken eleven of nearly full-time work. “I never want to see another Fourier series as long as I live,” he added, pride peeking out from beneath the irritation. And the copyedit was living up to his nightmares. Nine months later he was back to DeLillo with this new complaint: “The galleys for this blasted math book were such a mess that they’re having to typeset the whole thing over.” When the publisher asked for a small essay for its catalog on how he had come to write the book, Wallace responded with a meta-refusal:

The obvious objection to such promotional ¶s is that if the booklets are any good at all…blurblets are unnecessary; whereas, if the booklets aren’t any good, it’s hard to see how my telling somebody that as a child I used to cook up what amounted to simplistic versions of Zeno’s Dichotomy⁵ and ruminate on them until I literally made myself sick, or that I once almost flunked a basic calc course and have seethed with dislike for conventional higher-math education ever since, or that the ontology and grammar of abstractions have always struck me as one of the most breathtaking problems in human consciousness — how any such stuff will help.

Wallace’s publisher printed the disclaimer. It also asked another mathematician to review the manuscript. He expressed serious reservations and pointed to errors, some small, some larger, in it. Much as during his time at Harvard, Wallace was beginning to wonder if he had gotten into deeper water than he had realized.

Everything and More was finally published in October 2003. In the book Wallace covered the history of infinity as a philosophical and mathematical concept, beginning with Zeno’s dichotomy and moving through calculus and axiomatic set theory, the idea that all of mathematics is derivable from a handful of simple axioms, and on to Cantor. Cantor had suffered from severe mental illness; Wallace took pains to point out that the mathematician’s willingness to delve deep into questions of recursion and paradox was not the cause. “The real irony is that the view of ∞ as some forbidden zone or road to insanity — which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years — is precisely what Cantor’s own work overturned,” he wrote. He noted:

In modern medical terms, it’s fairly clear that G.F.L.P. Cantor suffered from manic-depressive illness at a time when nobody knew what this was, and that his polar cycles were aggravated by professional stresses and disappointments, of which Cantor had more than his share. Of course, this makes for less interesting flap copy than Genius Driven Mad By Attempts To Grapple With ∞. The truth, though, is that Cantor’s work and its context are so totally interesting and beautiful that there’s no need for breathless Prometheusizing of the poor guy’s life…. Saying that ∞ drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George’s loss to the dragon: it’s not only wrong but insulting.

Wallace had written Everything and More in a slightly different voice than usual, that of an amateur delighting in his subject and eager to communicate his enthusiasm, Cavell on holiday. He adduced a made-up high school math teacher, Dr. Goris, as his guide and threw in his customary mixture of high and low vocabulary, as well as a lot of math notations. He hoped that the playful tone of the book would help critics and professionals identify Everything and More as the college bull session it was meant to be. A few were charmed. The distinguished math writer John Allen Paulos in the American Scholar praised Wallace’s “refreshingly conversational style as well as a surprisingly authoritative command of mathematics,” but many felt otherwise. One, a philosopher of mathematics, writing in the New York Times Book Review, thought the book suffered from some of the same flaws as Infinite Jest: “One wonders exactly whom Wallace thinks he is writing for,” noted David Papineau of King’s College, London. “If he had cut out some of the details, and told us rather less than he knows, he could have reached a lot more readers.” Papineau was kinder than some of the other experts. Science wrote of the book that “mathematicians will view it with at best sardonic amusement. Crippling errors abound.” The magazine’s reviewer, Rudy Rucker, who had given Broom a glowing notice in the Washington Post in 1987, went on to enumerate a host of technical errors: providing the wrong definition of uniform convergence, botching the crucial Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms that form the basis of much of set theory, and conflating Cantor’s continuum problem with his continuum hypothesis. Wallace-l, an electronic mailing list devoted to Wallace’s work, became a repository for suggested corrections by various professional mathematicians. Wallace’s publisher now asked one of the list’s contributors, Prabhakar Ragde of the University of Waterloo, Ontario, to re-review the book before paperback publication. He sent back a three-page memo. Some of his suggestions Wallace took, but he also finally cried enough: there was a distinction between trying to write for general readers and specialists. “Dr. Ragde, who is clearly one sharp hombre,” he wrote the editors, “has nailed many of the book’s crudities — it’s just there are lots of crudities that I decided were more perspicuous for lay-reader purposes.” The book became one of the publisher’s bestselling titles all the same, on the strength of Wallace’s name and its engaging style, though he always had the disquieting feeling that he had been mugged for trespassing.

Oblivion was a far smoother process. The collection consisted of eight stories, some of which came from the notebooks Wallace was using to write portions of The Pale King and probably began as sections of it. Wallace had downplayed the stories when he had first tentatively suggested a new collection to Pietsch in October 2001, calling them “the best of the stuff I’ve been doing while playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing.” But Pietsch, as ever his ideal reader, responded immediately to the portraits of “unhappy, complicated, intellectualizing men.” In the following two years, while Wallace worked on Everything and More, he also wrote the last story in the collection, “The Suffering Channel,” the story of a man for whom great art comes so easily that he can defecate it, and Pietsch began organizing the pieces for publication. “I don’t feel like much of an editor here,” Pietsch admitted to Wallace in October 2003, “but these stories didn’t strike me as needing many red-penciled queries…. Overwhelmingly, these stories do what they do with irresistible force.” Privately, he marveled at the creative pain and stress evident in his author’s newest effort.

The stories were mostly successors to those of Brief Interviews. They too concerned themselves mostly with middle-aged, middle-class white men in middle America.⁶ Though the subjects share their antecedents’ condition of total self-absorption, their pride in themselves — whether in their sexual politics or just in their sexuality — has by now been replaced by a sullen silence. These men are aware of themselves as over-the-hill, culturally disempowered, on their way to nowhere, especially vis-à-vis women. It is no accident the first story is called “Mr. Squishy.” Even irony has lost its power to protect them. They seem able to see everything but what’s in front of their eyes and to talk about everything but what actually matters to them.

The stories in Brief Interviews are afraid of expansion, so unattractive or unstable are the interiors of their subjects; the stories in Oblivion seem afraid of compression, as if the title were a threat that could only be defended against by the relentlessly engaged consciousness. Words cover the stories, coating them in thick layers of verbiage, perspectives shift, and there are disorienting chronological jumps. “It’s interesting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing,” the narrator of “Good Old Neon” writes. There is only one way to halt the onrush of data, to slow it down so you can find its meaning: “Think for a second what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died…?”

“Good Old Neon” is the most uncomfortable of the stories in an uncomfortable volume, a narrative about an advertising executive who deliberately kills himself by crashing his car into a concrete bridge abutment. Neal is a familiar type in the Wallace world, a young man whose personality is built on the need to impress others. And the more he succeeds in impressing them, the more of a fraud he feels. Like Wallace, he feels frozen by the need to control how others see him, “condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue.” Suicide appears to him the only escape from this recursive nightmare. “Self-loathing isn’t the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death. If I was going to do it, I wanted it instant,” he assures us. Strangely, his is a death testified to by David Wallace, a year behind him at the same Aurora, Illinois, high school, leafing through their yearbook. It is a story where a ghost tells his remembered self about David Wallace’s imagining why the ghost’s remembered self killed himself. ⁷

“Good Old Neon” is the only story in Oblivion explicitly about a suicide, but many in the collection have a tamped-down sense of doom, of thoughts distorted by words and words constrained by personality and personality deformed by culture.

“The Suffering Channel” is about that culture and the cluster of editors and writers in New York who help create it. Much of the story takes place at Style, a lightweight celebrity magazine whose cheery denizens plan the next issue’s pabulum in offices on the sixteenth floor of 1 World Trade Center. “The Suffering Channel” can be read as a prequel to “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”; it re-creates the heyday of irony less than three months before the fatal attacks. But it is also a story about personal shame and the confused sources of an artist’s art. In the tale, the celebrated defecator, whom we first think so gifted he can just shit a classic, turns out to be beset by self-hatred. To go to the bathroom is to remember the childhood abuse and humiliation that led to his creativity. He is asked to give a performance on the Suffering Channel, a new station devoted entirely to “real life still and moving images of most intense available moments of human anguish.” Yet at story’s end it turns out to be impossible to broadcast his agony; his shame and his art both are to remain private:

There’s also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare — the artist in this case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.

Oblivion, published in June 2004, met with what was by now a familiar duality. Wallace had a public that awaited his books — he filled bookstores, and an event at the Public Theatre in Manhattan where he was interviewed by George Saunders sold out. The book sold well — in all eighteen thousand hardcover copies in its first year — and was on several bestseller lists. Wallace found the author tour painless, he preferred having company onstage. The collection got the customary respectful reviews accorded an important writer in the daily press, but there was also an undercurrent of irritation, even anger, on the part of critics — Wallace was denying them the full enjoyment of his great talents. Why, for instance, did all the protagonists sound the same? Where had the Dickensian scope of Infinite Jest gone? What had happened to its comic genius? Reviewers remembered that Wallace had promised readers something different: a single-entendre writing that felt redemptive. That hardly seemed the achievement, let alone the aim, of Oblivion. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times again brought up this gap, criticizing the collection for offering “only the tiniest tasting of [Wallace’s] smorgasbord of talents. Instead, he all too often settles for…[the] cheap brand of irony and ridicule that he once denounced.”

More sympathetic critics acknowledged that there was something interesting about using deadened language to convey deadened states, that the ironization of irony had merits, but they too wondered whether what Wallace was writing was of more than academic interest. “Another Pioneer,” contained the words “evection,” “canescent,” “protasis,” “epitatic,” “hemean,” “nigrescently,” “ptotic,” “intaglial,” “catastasis,” and “extrorse,” not to mention “thanatophilic” and “omphalic.” It had a single paragraph twenty-three pages long. The same thing might be said about the stories as is said in Infinite Jest about Jim Incandenza’s disdained experimental cartridges, that there was “no sort of engaging plot, no movement that sucked you in and drew you along.” Or maybe that they were less stories than forms for stories, much as one character in “The Suffering Channel” is described as “not a body that occupied space but rather just a bodyshaped area of space itself.”

The eagerly awaited next novel was on reviewers’ minds as well. Where was it? The Houston Chronicle hypothesized, generously, that it was already written, imagining a “forest-killing manuscript à la the thousand-page Infinite Jest” that was at that very moment “devouring the time and energy and quite possibly the soul of a senior New York editor.” Wyatt Mason in the London Review of Books, after a skillful elucidation of the title story, wrote:

Wallace has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him. I flatter myself to think that I am one of them, but I haven’t any idea how to convince you that you should be, too; nor, clearly, does Wallace. And it might not be the worst thing in the world, next time out, when big novel number three thumps into the world, were he to dig deeper, search longer, and find a more generous way to make his feelings known.

Chiding notices were harder for Wallace than the pans, which he expected by now — he could ignore critics calling for more salt in the soup — because for him, too, all roads led back to his “more generous” Long Thing, The Pale King. He had hoped at times while he was writing them that the stories in Oblivion would show a way out of the dead end Infinite Jest seemed to have left him in. He boasted to Costello that in writing it he had “looked straight into the camera.” He meant that he had finally surmounted the need to have readers love him. The mania was gone; only a studied and mature sadness remained. But to his disappointment he didn’t find that the story work suggested how to write a novel of similar honesty. The problem may have been that Wallace’s approach to Oblivion—the trick-free prose, the Pynchon-free plots, the insistence that the reader work for his or her satisfaction — was simply too pitiless to carry a reader through a novel. And while Oblivion was descriptive, The Pale King was supposed to be prescriptive. It had to convince the reader that there was a way out of the bind. It had to have a commitment to a solution that Oblivion lacked.⁸ Wallace had settled on his thesis long before. As he wrote in a notebook:

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.

The problem came up when he tried to dramatize this idea. How do you write about dullness without being dull? The obvious solution, if you had Wallace’s predilections, was to overwhelm this seemingly inert subject with the full movement of your thought. Your characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the rippling tactility of your writing would keep them from appearing static. But this strategy presented its own problem: Wallace could make the characters vibrant, but only at the risk of sacrificing what made their situation worth narrating — the stillness at the center of their lives. How could you preach mindful calmness if you couldn’t replicate it in prose? A failed entertainment that succeeded was just an entertainment. Yet Wallace had never really found a verbal strategy to replace his inborn one. In more ways than he cared to acknowledge he remained the author of The Broom of the System. He wrote to Franzen around this time:

Karen is killing herself rehabbing the house. I sit in the garage with the AC blasting and work very poorly and haltingly and with (some days) great reluctance and ambivalence and pain. I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic.

Usually when Wallace found work frustrating, his relationships suffered. But this time his love for Green flourished. He had found something as important to him as his fiction. “It’s a dark time workwise,” he wrote Franzen, “and yet a very light and lovely time in all other respects. So overall I feel I’m ahead and am pretty happy.” His fit with Green worked in ways no other ever had. She was herself creative but not a writer. She didn’t have his intense competitiveness; she created to create, unshadowed by any statue. When she teased him it was with love. “We used to have this joke about how much can you irritate the reader,” Green recalls.

Time was on the relationship’s side too. Wallace no longer thought of himself as young. “No more nymphs for me,” he had written Steven Moore as he was about to turn forty in early 2002. Wallace had a strikeout drawn through the fading word “Mary” on his tattoo and placed an asterisk under the heart symbol; farther down he added another asterisk and “Karen,” turning his arm into a living footnote. He knew he could not sustain the emotional availability of a parent and he was worried about passing on his mental instability, so he did not want to have children anymore, but he enjoyed being with Stirling. They would often play chess, which Green’s son usually won. Wallace’s whirring mind made him an inconsistent competitor.

As Stirling began his final year of high school, Green and Wallace made plans for her to move to Claremont. They began house hunting. Wallace first asked the university if he could buy his house on Indian Hill Boulevard and was surprised to be told it wasn’t for sale. So he and Green looked elsewhere. When he tired of the search, she went alone, eventually choosing a ranch home in a newly developed area at the very northern limit of the town. Like the house in Bloomington, it was far enough from the university to allow for privacy, and from their street they could see the mountains.

Wallace at this point considered Green his fiancée, but other women had had that title before. He emailed Franzen in February 2004, “I hear Kath[y] gaffed and landed you”—Franzen had moved in with Kathryn Chetkovich, a writer from Santa Cruz whom he had been dating. Ever competitive, Wallace saw his own girlfriend as a counterpart to Franzen’s, another K from California. A week later he emailed, “I am more and more sure KG and I will get married. Now it’s a matter of getting her to be more and more sure.”

At the end of 2004, Wallace and Green flew to Urbana for Christmas, staying at the Jumers Castle Lodge, “a sad place with trophies on the walls,” as Wallace’s sister, Amy, remembers. She and her two daughters had the job of luring his parents to the courthouse, where they discovered their son in a suit, with his companion in a dress. The forty-two-year-old Wallace and Green were married, his nieces as the witnesses. After lunch, the newlyweds walked down a path and Wallace gave a hop and clicked his heels together. Amy photographed the moment, and this became their wedding announcement. They spent the evening watching a Law & Order marathon in their “shitty motel,” as Wallace reported to DeLillo, assuring him that “my ass is not as big as it looks in the photo.”

Six months later, Green moved to Claremont. Wallace had already been living in the house for a while, and by the time his new wife got there, he had taken it over. A jockstrap hung from a lamp, and the town had earlier posted a notice on his door ordering him to remove the weeds on his lawn. Green painted the garage bright red and furnished it with his recliner, a comfortable desk, and Wallace’s lamps, his accounting books, the old Scottish battle scene, a poster of Klimt’s The Kiss, and other miscellanea he had brought from Bloomington. She tore out the wall-to-wall carpeting in the house. He had developed a personality for social interactions that he had never had before. Whenever anyone came over and complimented the décor, Wallace would quickly say it was Green’s doing. But Green would see another side at night, when he would beg her not to get sick or die.

Wallace was thrilled that his personal life was finally in order: he took it as evidence that he had matured, left behind his unfocused, hedonistic, self-indulgent past.⁹ The couple watched DVDs together—The Wire was a favorite; he thought of writing an essay on how the best writing in America was for television shows. Wallace felt strong in his sobriety as he never had before, the pair even keeping wine for guests. Wallace liked to remind Green what a good companion he was. “I took out the garbage. Did you see that?” he would say to her, or “I put tea on for you when you were driving home!” Some of his bachelor ways lingered, though. When he wrote he would go from the garage to the guest room, where there was an extra computer, and on to the family room, to write in longhand with his earplugs in—“scattering debris, intellectual and otherwise,” as Green remembers. She was appalled to find his towels and socks hanging from her paintings. Soon they were in couples therapy, working on these issues. He agreed to a clothesline outside.

Wallace often got mail from aspiring authors, many modeling their prose after his, and one day Weston Cutter, a young writer, wrote to ask Wallace, why bother writing? “It’s just this: how do you keep hope?” Cutter asked. “How do you not just get tired of all this shit, all the time from every vector, public and private and governmental? And more pressing, how do you not wear yourself out and feel as if you’re just another supplier of said stuff?” “This is like listening to a transcript of my own mind,” Wallace jotted at the bottom of his letter in response, adding, “Basically — I empathize. I have no answers. I do know I’m easiest when I accept how small I am and how paltry my contribution is as a % of total. But >60 % of the time I don’t/can’t accept it. Go figure.”

Shortly after his arrival in Claremont Wallace had told the Los Angeles Times reporter, “I’m poised, ready to write, 10 hours a day.” But of course being ready to write was not the same as writing. There was always the teaching and the counseling and the sponsoring. He wanted to help those most in need, offering informal advice and complete availability, paying it forward.¹⁰ He wrote in his introduction to English 67—Literary Interpretation:

Clinically shy students, or those whose best, most pressing questions and comments occur to them only in private, should do their discussing with me solo, outside class. If my scheduled office hours don’t work for you, please call me so that we can make an appointment for a different meeting time.

One student, Kelly Natoli, remembers Wallace introducing himself on the first day of a creative writing class: “He said, ‘It’s going to take me, like, two weeks to learn everyone’s name, but by the time I learn your name I’m going to remember your name for the rest of my life. You’re going to forget who I am before I forget who you are.’”

In 2005, Kenyon College invited Wallace to give an address at its graduation. The student invitation committee did not know much about Wallace, which may have been just as well, since the real Wallace differed at this point almost 180 degrees from the Wallace of popular imagination; a slacker exterior hid an intense moralist, someone whose long experience in recovery had made him into an apostle of careful living and hard work. Success had to be earned; do your homework; make your bed. How many times had he told his students that the worst thing to happen to them would be to be published before they were forty? At Kenyon, Wallace saw a chance to set out the things he cared about without the frustrating contrivance of the novel. He could just tell the audience to be mindful instead of trying to orchestrate it through his characters. He had a chance to remind that most self-centered of cohorts, college students, to get over themselves — or, better, outside themselves. His point of departure for his speech was similar to the one he’d set out in a letter to a friend in 1999: “You’re special — it’s O.K. — but so’s the guy across the table who’s raising two kids sober and rebuilding a ’73 Mustang. It’s a magical thing with 4,000,000,000 forms. It kind of takes your breath away.”

So for the Kenyon College address, he wrote a speech against egoism and egotism, about openness and humility, of apostles who behold but cannot see. He inserted a favorite joke from recovery. Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish goes by and calls out to them, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The younger fish continue side by side for a while and then one stops and says, “What the hell is water?” In other words, it was not hard to be successful in conventional terms; what was hard was to be aware of life as you lived it. “The trick,” he underscored, “is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.” He continued:

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being “an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

He explained to the students that they could stand in a supermarket line and experience nothing but the anxiety and irritation their college-augmented sense of superiority would entitle them to or they could, in the midst of that same experience, open themselves up to a moment of the most supernal beauty—“on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.” It was up to them, of course; they could do as they chose: “But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will have other options.”

The truth behind banalities always excited and embarrassed Wallace, filling him with the wonder that, as he wrote in Infinite Jest, “clichéd directives are a lot more deep and hard to actually do.” Over the past twenty-five years his mental life had run a huge circuit through the most astonishing complexities to arrive at what many six-year-olds and nearly all churchgoers already understood. He wasn’t sure whether what he had written was deep or unimportant. As he worked on the speech, he and Green joked that she should do a little soft-shoe behind him while he read it from the podium. Wallace delivered his words in his academic robe, bent slightly forward, a lock of hair covering his face, sweat dripping down his neck, in his intense, slightly quavering voice, speaking modestly and hesitantly. It was as if there was nothing more uncomfortable for him than being there, at this podium, but what he had to say was too important to keep it to himself. There was a sense that day that the man speaking these ordinary phrases had earned that right. It was one thing if your aunt told you you weren’t the center of the universe just because you thought you were; it was another if the author of Infinite Jest did. Wallace was someone whom younger people felt a link to, someone who had defied the corruptions of the adult world.¹¹

All this time the reputation of Infinite Jest was growing. The novel was connecting with more and more readers, passed along and recommended by word of mouth and on the Internet. This was true even though the world had changed drastically in the decade since Wallace had written it. The current danger was not from total immersion but from relentless fragmentation, not from watching one video to death but from skipping among hundreds. Americans were now not passively but frenetically entertained, and the warning shot turned out to be not Wallace as a child, glued to the four stations of 1960s Urbana, but Wallace in Bloomington, clicking among seventy-five channels of satellite TV, unable to decide which show to watch lest he miss a better one. Instinctively, Wallace was wary of the emerging technology. “I allow myself to Webulize only once a week now,” he wrote a graduate student who was helping him with his math book in July 2001, and he didn’t become a consistent emailer for several years afterward. “Thank God,” Karen Green remembers him saying when they got a new piece of computer equipment, “I wasn’t raised in this era.”¹²

But changes in technology did not really affect whether one responded to Infinite Jest. Video cartridges were the vector of the plot, but they were not responsible for the sadness at its core. What the novel was about was how to feel connected in your own life, and that was still the great struggle. The Web might offer a different hope of escape from the self, but actually escaping was no less futile, as those who spent their time trying discovered. (It was named the “Web” for good reason.) Among the early champions of Infinite Jest, in fact, were the technologically elite, the rising generation of information and technology experts, programmers, and webmasters, real-life counterparts to the student engineer in Infinite Jest who takes his work break on the roof of the “great hollow brain-frame,” of the MIT Union. These readers immediately responded to a writer who saw the afternoon light through the lens of a new reality, as they did:

The P.M. was moving fast from a chilly noon cloud-cover into blue autumn glory, but in the first set it was still very cold, the sun still pale and seeming to flutter as if poorly wired.¹³

Reading Infinite Jest was an act of protest against the future they were creating, the one Wallace had imagined in “Here and There,” a world “of the cold, the new, the right, the truly and spotlessly here.” Yet paradoxically the Web made Infinite Jest an easier read. The cognitive jumps in its pages felt less extreme after a generation of Internet surfing and blogging than they had when the book was published. Wallace’s distinctive prose with its rapid ascents and descents in diction and its seemingly endless appetite for expansion, at once erudite and ungainly, yearning for home without ever finding it, turned out to be perfect for a new medium. The Web seemed made for multiple conjunctions at the opening of sentences.

In time these early Internet users took up Wallace for their fan communities too, a transition that particularly discomfited him (though to be fair anything that reinforced the masonry of the statue did). When in March 2003 a member of Wallace-l told Wallace about their email list at a taping of a reading for The Next American Essay, a compilation of creative nonfiction edited by John D’Agata that Wallace had contributed to, his response was, “You know, for emotional reasons and sanity I have to pretend this doesn’t exist.” Yet efforts like it did exist, and their influence looped back into the world of conventional magazines. Chad Harbach, an editor at N+1, a literary magazine founded in Brooklyn in 2004, declared in its first issue that “David Foster Wallace’s 1996 opus now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit.” It was their Catcher in the Rye, a Catcher in the Rye for people who had read The Catcher in the Rye in school. By 2006, 150,000 copies of Infinite Jest had been sold and the book continued to sell steadily.

Wallace was becoming a staple in the academy too. In 2003, Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace came out, the first book dedicated to Wallace’s oeuvre. The same year Stephen Burn’s book-length guide to Infinite Jest was published. Scholars began examining his works’ dense allusions. They focused on narcissism, irony, and recursion. The influence of Derrida, De Man, Heidegger, and, of course, Wittgenstein were looked at. Some of the early efforts had an improvisatory feel, as academics tried to find the appropriate approach to a writer who represented an era in literature when there was as yet no secondary source material. Another problem was that Wallace himself had laid out such a clear explanation of his theoretical aims. That Wallace had abandoned literary theory a decade before opened the question of the theory by which he rejected theory, if he had in fact rejected theory and not just subsumed it. Infinite Jest’s debt to other literature was perhaps an easier way to start, from Gödel, Escher, Bach to Tristram Shandy and, of course, Hamlet. In 2007, Timothy Jacobs, a Canadian scholar, wrote a thoughtful paper marking out the links between The Brothers Karamazov and Infinite Jest. The parallels are multiple, both being novels about a father and his three sons. Orin Incandenza corresponds to Dmitry Karamazov, the nihilistic oldest brother; Hal is Ivan; and Mario is the stand-in for Alyosha Karamazov, the simple, almost holy youngest son, with his “foolish grin” and refusal to lie. Like “the good old Brothers K,” as Wallace called Dostoevsky’s novel, Infinite Jest counterposes sincerity and faith against moral lassitude. Both eschew stylish irony to make a single point: faith matters.

Attention to his past work, though, was not going to help Wallace out of his current hole; in fact it would dig him into it more deeply. Stuck on The Pale King, he eyed the output of his contemporaries with envy: Franzen, Eggers, and especially Vollmann, who won the National Book Award for his novel Europe Central in 2005. “I’m in awe of his productivity,” Wallace emailed Franzen in November of that year. “How many hours a day does this guy work?” He felt the field he had once dominated getting more and more crowded. Single-entendre principles, hijinks sentences, prose at once formal and street-smart were no longer his alone. He read Rick Moody’s The Diviners, a maximalist novel set in Hollywood, thought it good in part but tired in style, and swore to Franzen he would never write like that again. But how, then, should he write? When Franzen told him he was having trouble with his own work, Wallace wrote to commiserate (or perhaps outdo):

I too have lots of stuff that’s been jostling in line inside for years for a book. And many, many pages written, then either tossed or put in a sealed box. What’s missing is some…thing. It may be a connection between the problem of writing it and of being alive. That doesn’t feel quite true for me, though. Mine is more like the whole thing is a tornado that won’t hold still long enough for me to see what’s useful and what isn’t, which tends to lead to the idea that I’ll have to write a 5,000 page manuscript and then winnow it by 90 %, the very idea of which makes something in me wither and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light outside. I’ve brooded and brooded about all this till my brooder is sore. Maybe the answer is simply that to do what I want to do would take more effort than I am willing to put in. Which would be a bleak reality indeed, if that’s all it is?

“DeLillo’s thing,” he added to Franzen, “about the unwritten book following Gray around like a malformed fetus dribbling cerebrospinal fluid from its mouth gets apter all the time. I am dead becalmed — stuff literally goes right into the wastebasket after being torn from the top of the legal pad.” More than a year later he was no farther along, writing to Franzen: “I go back and forth between (a) working to assembl[e] a big enough sample to take an advance, and (b) recoiling in despair, thinking that if I had your integrity I’d pitch everything and start over.”

Complicating things was that he and Green were having so much fun. They listened to U2 and old Simon and Garfunkel CDs and loved IZ’s rendition of “Over the Rainbow.” For his forty-fourth birthday, in February 2006, Green got her husband a bootleg of the new season of The Wire. That Christmas they had spent with his family on Stinson Beach, Wallace with a pair of binoculars watching out for sharks as Karen swam far from shore. Franzen persuaded Green and Wallace to go to Capri in the summer for a writer’s festival, where Wallace discovered octopus and went to parties at sponsors’ houses. He seemed, to Franzen’s eyes, as “available” as he had ever been. Afterward, Wallace took a detour to Wimbledon to start a piece on Roger Federer for the New York Times Magazine. He loved sitting courtside and watching Federer play. When Wallace insisted on using the serial comma, which was against the rules of the Times’s style handbook, the issue was settled in his favor by the executive editor Bill Keller.

Wallace was used to contradictions, both in his life and in his work, by now. But he could not pretend after all these years that his real work was going well. He told Michael Pietsch that he had completed “two hundred pages, of which maybe forty are usable.” He wrote Franzen at the beginning of 2006 that he had to get serious again in late January, and then again, when he didn’t, in the fall.

In September 2006, Green and Wallace adopted a two-year-old dog, whom they named Bella. “It’s…part-Rottweiler, part Lab (?) or Boxer (?)…. Very good-hearted, patient, and smart in dealing with Werner,” Wallace wrote Franzen. Though Wallace saw Werner as the boss, their friends laughed to see his first female dog subtly take over the pack. Bella made Wallace feel his family was complete again. Yet the specter of his unfinished work was never far from his thoughts. The Pale King was wildly overdue now, though the only deadline was in his own mind, since there was no contract. When Little, Brown had invited him to a celebration for the tenth anniversary of Infinite Jest in 2006—the book was to be reissued with an introduction by Dave Eggers — he had declined, telling Michael Pietsch he was “deep into something long, and it’s hard for me get back in it when I’m pulled away.” The next year the New School invited him for a commemoration. “The idea of coming to NYC is appealing,” he wrote to Franzen. “The idea of doing any more public events around a book I don’t remember is not.”

Stymied in the composition of the novel, Wallace threw his energy into research, though he knew the danger that posed.¹⁴ But he still wanted to be first in his class. The value of meditation and emptying the mind continued to play a key role in The Pale King; Wallace still wasn’t sure he understood Buddhism and its practices. He began a correspondence with Christopher Hamacher, a young man who had read his Kenyon address and traced some of its roots to Buddhist thinking. Wallace peppered his correspondent, a practicing Zen Buddhist, with questions. He asked about authors he should seek out, mentioning books by Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, and Jiddu Krishnamurti. His friend told him don’t read, just do: “It’s absolutely wonderful that you don’t ‘know’ anything about zen.” Wallace wondered was he letting himself off easy when he meditated: “Is it OK to sit in a chair? Or is severe pain part of the (non-) point?” he asked. “What about a ‘meditation bench’ that lets you kneel with a straight back? Is it half-lotus or nothing? If so, why?” His new friend told him that the lotus position was preferable and the pain would pass, but to use his common sense. Wallace then confessed that there were many times when he didn’t much want to sit or sat only briefly. “You’re not going to hell if you only sit 15 minutes, sometimes,” his friend advised him. “A good rule is to sit exactly as long as you planned, no more, no less.” It was still hard for Wallace to understand that Buddhism wasn’t a course you tried to ace.

Wallace audited more accounting courses, now at the Claremont Graduate University. “You should have seen him with our accountant,” Karen Green remembers. “It was like, ‘What about the ruling of 920S?’ He had a correspondence with an Illinois accountant, Stephen Lacy, also a former philosophy student, who sent him a famously impenetrable passage, Section 509(A) of the IRS tax code, with a note that seemed to echo Wallace’s own premise for the novel:

I find that although I can never quite understand what it says, after I read it several times and concentrate, I can actually get into a kind of weird Zen-type meditation high! (Then again sometimes it provokes a profound anxiety attack.)

Lacy argued that the tax code was postmodern, meaning relativistic and constructed of words, but Wallace did not want to write a postmodern novel about the tax code: in fact the opposite, he wanted to write a premodern novel about the tax code, one that took the code as holy writ, a text out of which mystical clarity might emerge. “Tax law is like the world’s biggest game of chess,” he emailed Franzen in April 2007, “with all sorts of weird conundrums about ethics and civics and consent of the governed built in. For me, it’s a bit like math: I have no talent for it but find it still erotically interesting.” He added, “I wrote a page today! (Well, more like rewrote/typed, but STILL!)”

In his heart Wallace knew he was temporizing. The Pale King had so many ambitions. It had to show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life. It had to be emotionally engaged and morally sound, and to dramatize boredom without being too entertaining. And it had to sidestep the point that the kind of personality that conferred grace was the opposite of Wallace’s own. In 2005, Wallace wrote in one of his notebooks, “They’re rare, but they’re among us. People able to achieve and sustain a certain steady state of concentration, attention, despite what they’re doing.” By now, his failing to write the book had itself risen to a meta-level — he saw that he could not write it because he could not himself tune out the noise of modern life. He wasn’t an adept, an immersive, even after more than a dozen years of sobriety and recovery and sitting. He was not as far as he wished to be from the “obscurely defective” young man from Urbana who had arrived at Amherst in 1980. “Work,” he wrote Franzen in December 2006, “is like shitting sharp stones, still.”

There were many parts of the book all the same that came to some fruition, ones where he polished the sentences over and over. A few sections achieved what he was aiming for, or came close enough for him to allow for their publication. In 2007, the New Yorker ran a small part of the novel, entitled “Good People,” which dealt with the decision by a future IRS agent named Lane Dean Jr. to commit to his girlfriend, whom he had accidentally gotten pregnant.¹⁵ Another section, a favorite at readings, was the one in which an agent’s calm is disturbed by a colleague’s surreally menacing baby. It found its way into Harper’s as “The Compliance Branch” in 2008. The Lane Dean section was poised and uninflected, written with a quiet style reminiscent of Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”; “The Compliance Branch,” by contrast, was hectic and exaggerated, not unlike the Incandenza sections of Infinite Jest. The disjunct between the two suggested the challenge Wallace was facing in deciding how to tell his story. “My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some,” he wrote his New Yorker editor, Deborah Treisman, about “Good People.” “But the terror is still there.”

He made starts at many other passages and characters. Despite his promise to the reader in an “Author’s Foreword” not to write “some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher,” he introduced a character named “David Wallace,” who works at the agency as a summer intern.¹⁶ Other agents contained identifiable parts of the real Wallace. There is Stecyk, the unctuous young man who winds up getting a wedgie.¹⁷ And David Cusk, who suffers from anxiety attacks, racing to the bathroom where “the toilet paper disintegrate[s] into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead.” In the quiet study of tax forms, they both seek peace.

Wallace came closest to creating the sort of character who fully inhabits the page in Chris Fogle, whose apathy when stoned echoes that of Wallace in his senior year of high school. Fogle, though, has a conversion far neater than Wallace ever experienced, one of the sort he had urged on the students that day at Kenyon College:

I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger, and watching the CBS soap opera As the World Turns on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith…. There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid…. Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera…and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching As the World Turns,” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching As the World Turns,” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching As the World Turns”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement…. It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching As the World Turns.”…I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter — even just to myself — I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

Fogle decides to join the IRS, and soon heads off for training in Peoria, after which he is recruited to be part of a team of tax savants — Fogle’s ability, never fleshed out in the text but present in Wallace’s notes, is to recite a string of numbers that grants him total concentration. Wallace liked the many pages he wrote on Fogle well enough to consider publishing them as a short stand-alone novel. Perhaps someone else reading other sections of the book — Wallace would show them to no one — might have been satisfied with those too, but he could not get out from under the shadow of the statue. To the inside cover of a notebook, he taped an anecdote about T. S. Eliot, who had also suffered from crushingly high standards: “One of [Conrad] Aiken’s friends was a patient of the famous analyst Homer Lane, and Aiken told this friend about Eliot’s problem. Lane said to his patient, ‘Tell your friend Aiken to tell his friend Eliot that all that’s stopping him is his fear of putting anything down that is short of perfection. He thinks he’s God.’” (The underlining was Wallace’s).

Wallace had said again and again how much he loved the reader. But how much did he really care whether people found what they were looking for in his books? And how much did he write for himself? One test was his willingness to create a satisfactory plot. He had never liked plot, that tidying up of life in which, as he had written Howard in 1986, “revelations revelationize [and] things are cleared up.” To rely too much on plot risked seducing the reader; it was like selling Tide. Moreover, plots typically involved the gradual maturation of the characters, and that was not how Wallace saw things. His default view of life was more mechanistic than organic. Change in a character — Hal, Gately, Wallace himself at Granada House — was usually a binary flip. Yet he knew an unplotted book violated the physics of reading. So over the years, he slowly cast about for a structure for The Pale King. In one of his notebooks, there is a sentence suggesting that he had hit on a framework of interest: an evil group within the IRS is trying to steal the secrets of an agent who is particularly gifted at maintaining a heightened state of concentration. It was a nice Pynchonian notion, with an echo of the scramble for the “Infinite Jest” video cartridge, but Wallace didn’t follow up on it. Probably it struck him as too clever, a short cut. Instead he divided the agents into two groups: those who wanted to automate the agency versus those who still wished to process returns by hand. His own heart was with the old-fashioned processors. Over the past decade he had been watching the digitalization of media with ever greater discomfort. “Digital=abstract=sterile, somehow,” he had written to DeLillo in 2000. Electronic media facilitated consumerism; it removed obstacles to spectation. It was also that if the IRS was going to be a secular religion, it needed its priests. To Wallace, so troubled by freedom, there was nothing more erotic than people who willingly gave up theirs. But anti-automation was more of an attitude than a plot anyway, as perhaps Wallace knew. There was also the consideration that if you really wanted to capture the mindfulness that comes through boredom, the less plot you had the better. Wallace wrote in a note: “Something big threatens to happen but doesn’t actually happen,” and elsewhere, characterized the novel as “a series of setups for things to happen but nothing ever happens.” Maybe different scenes in suggestive apposition may have been all he wanted for his plot, but if so, he remained worried that the thousands of pages he had written left the reader still too much on his or her own. “The individual parts of this book would not be all that hard to read,” he wrote Nadell in 2007. “It’s more the juxtaposition of them, the number of separate characters, etc.”

And life kept breaking back in. Wallace had become increasingly political over the years, thanks in large part to Green. He was a vocal critic of George W. Bush’s administration. “I am, at present, partisan,” he had told The Believer in 2003. “Worse than that: I feel such deep, visceral antipathy that I can’t seem to think or speak or write in any kind of fair or nuanced way about the current administration…. My own plan for the coming fourteen months is to knock on doors and stuff envelopes. Maybe even to wear a button. To try to accrete with others into a demographically significant mass. To try extra hard to exercise patience, politeness, and imagination on those with whom I disagree. Also to floss more.” When Bush won reelection in 2004, Wallace and Green seriously considered leaving the country, but Wallace felt that would be an overreaction. In the end, he was a writer, not a political operative. He cared about the moral state of the country, more than which side won.

The thought kept recurring to him that he was no longer the kind of person who could write the novel he wanted to write. Infinite Jest had been driven by his dysfunctional yearning for Mary Karr; nothing similar goaded him now. Green had opened up a showroom for her work. She called it Beautiful Crap, a name that happily coincided with the plot of “The Suffering Channel.” She loved her gallery, and they discussed jobs he might enjoy. “He talked about opening up a dog shelter,” she remembers. It would be what the tennis coach Gerhard Schtitt in Infinite Jest meant when he said that the important thing was to “learn to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn’t good its own self.” Wallace considered, he wrote Franzen, “forgetting about writing for a while if it’s not a source of joy. Who knows. Life sure is short though.” He thought about focusing only on his nonfiction.¹⁸

The Federer piece had been a complete joy. He stopped the nonfiction for a period to see if it made the fiction come easier — was the magazine work dissipating his ability to finish The Pale King? “It just made him crazy to think he had been working on it for so long,” Green remembers. In his final major interview, given to Le Nouvel Observateur in August 2005, he talked about various writers he admired — Saint Paul, Rousseau, and always, Dostoevsky, among them — and added, “What are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings — capacities of spirit — rather than technical abilities or special talents.”

Around this time, Wallace wrote Nadell, telling her that he needed “to put some kind of duress/pressure on myself so that I quit futzing around and changing my mind about the book twice a week and just actually do it.” Franzen’s example had been an influence; he told Wallace that having a contract for Freedom, the novel that followed The Corrections, had helped focus him. Wallace wasn’t sure. He explored the tax consequences of taking a single payment versus spreading the advance out over the years and worried about the alternative minimum tax. And he prepared a stack of about 150 pages of The Pale King. There were plenty of equally finished pages — among them the story of the levitating Drinion — which, for whatever reason, he did not include. “I could take a couple of years unpaid leave from Pomona and just try to finish it,” he wrote to Nadell. When she encouraged him, he responded more hesitatingly: “Let me noodle hard about it. It may not be until the end of summer that I’d even have a packet together.”

Wallace had never been certain that being on Nardil was the right thing, and whenever he was not writing well, he wondered if it played a role. But the memories of how it had saved his life were also always present. He had read widely about other antidepressants but never found one he thought he should change to. In the summer of 2007, Wallace was eating in a Persian restaurant in Claremont with his parents and began to have heart palpitations and to sweat heavily. These can be the signs of a hypertensive crisis, although Green thinks he may have merely had an anxiety attack — the chicken and rice dish he ordered was one he had eaten many times; he never saw a doctor for a diagnosis. In any event, he eventually went to a physician, who told him what he already knew: there were a lot of superior antidepressants on the market now. Compared with them, Nardil was “a dirty drug.”

Wallace saw an opportunity. He told Green that he wanted to make a change. “You know what? I’m up for it,” she remembers answering, figuring he could not be stopped anyway. She knew the decision came out of an area of deep conflict for him. “The person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the person he liked,” she says. “He didn’t want to care about the writing as much as he did.” Soon afterward, he stopped the drug and waited for it to flush out of his body. For the first weeks, he felt that the process was going well. “I feel a bit ‘peculiar,’ which is the only way to describe it,” he emailed Franzen in August, who had checked in to see how he was doing. “All this is to be expected (22 years and all), and I am not unduly alarmed. Phase 4 of withdrawal/titration commences today. It’s all OK. I appreciate the monitoring.” The next month brought “disabling nausea/fatigue” and left him more concerned: “I’ve been blowing stuff off and then having it slip my mind,” he wrote his friend. “This is the harshest phase of the ‘washout process’ so far; it’s a bit like I imagine a course of chemo would be.” He remained “fairly confident it will pass in time.” GQ took his picture for their October 2007 issue, and in it, he looked skinny and unshaven, a grizzled version of his Amherst self. Wallace had never entirely put out of his mind the fundamentalist faction in recovery that regarded prescription drugs as a crutch. The plan was for him to go from Nardil to another antidepressant, but he now decided he should try to be completely drug free. Green was worried. Her husband, she remembers thinking, was expecting “a Jungian rebirth.” Soon afterward, Wallace had to be hospitalized for severe depression. When he got out, doctors prescribed new drugs. But he was now too panicked to give them time to work. He took over the job of keeping himself sane, second-guessing doctors and their prescriptions. If he tried an antidepressant, he would read that a possible side effect was anxiety, and that alone would make him too anxious to stay on the drug. He wrote to Nadell in December, “Upside: I’ve lost 30 pounds. Downside: I haven’t even thought about work since like September. I’m figuring I get 90 more days before I even remotely expect anything of myself — the shrink/expert says that’s a fairly sane attitude.” When his sister, Amy, would call, he would tell her, “I’m not all right. I’m trying to be, but I’m not all right.”

He continued to write in a notebook, but he did not have the strength to return to his challenging manuscript. “The Pale King” had once referred to the IRS, and possibly to the state of contentment and focus the book advocated; but now it was a synonym for the depression that tormented him, or death. Not all days were bad. He taught throughout. He emailed friends. He and Green tried to maintain their lives. Always self-critical, Wallace would rate good days as “B-plus” or “cautiously optimistic.” They joked about the unthinkable. Green warned him that if he killed himself she’d be “the Yoko Ono of the literary world, the woman with all the hair who domesticated you and look what happened.” They made a pact that he would never make her guess how he was doing.

During the spring of 2008, a new combination of antidepressants seemed to stabilize Wallace. It looked like the worst might be over. In February, he had written to Tom Bissell, a writer who was a new friend, “I got really sick over the fall. Pneumonioid-type sick. Lost a scary amount of weight. I’m still not all the way back on my feet. I’m twelve years older than you; I feel more like 30 years older right now. This return letter will probably be the most ‘work’-type thing I do today, writing-wise.” He added that he had been reading Camus lately: “He’s very clear, as a thinker, and tough — completely intolerant of bullshit. It makes my soul feel clean to read him.” He taught a class in creative nonfiction that semester. Students who had studied with him before, though, noticed that his comments were terser, his playfulness muted. On the last day of class, he choked up. The students were confused; where was the Wallace they knew? At a coffee shop afterward he cried again. “Go ahead and laugh,” he told them, but they knew something was wrong.

That spring GQ asked him to write an essay on Obama and rhetoric and he felt almost well enough to do it. Obama gave him hope; he and Green even talked about his being a speechwriter for the candidate. The magazine reserved a hotel room for him in Denver for the Democratic convention and began to make arrangements, but soon he canceled. When the New York Times Magazine approached him to write about the Olympics in Beijing that summer, he apologized but said he wasn’t feeling well enough. Nadell was busy explaining that her client had a stomach malady. “It had to be severe enough to explain why he couldn’t travel,” she remembers. Wallace would mine House for diseases he could suggest to others he might be suffering from.

Wallace’s parents were slated to come visit. His relationship with them was the best it had been in years; he told Green he had no idea what had made him so mad at his family in his thirties. “We’ll have big fun,” he promised them. But then he asked them to wait. That June, the annual booksellers’ convention was in Los Angeles, and Green and Wallace drove the thirty miles of roadway to have dinner with Pietsch, Nadell, the humor writer David Sedaris, and his publicist Marlena Bittner, who also worked on Wallace’s books. Sedaris was surprised at how funny and gentle Wallace was, how full of praise for his students. At the end Pietsch asked Wallace how he was doing. “You don’t wanna know,” his writer replied. When they hugged, Pietsch looked into Wallace’s eyes and thought they looked “haunted.”

About ten days after the dinner, Wallace checked in to a motel about ten miles from his home and took all the pills he could find. When he woke up, he called Green, who had been searching for him all night. She met him at the hospital and he told her that he was glad to be alive. He was sorry that he’d made her look for him. She had him transferred to the university’s hospital, his speech still slurred for a week. The suicide note he’d mailed got to her several days later. She painted their garage door red to match the inside, a promise she’d made him in the hospital. He switched doctors and agreed to try electroconvulsive therapy. He was terrified at the prospect — he remembered how ECT had damaged his short-term memory in 1988—but he underwent twelve sessions.

Franzen came for a visit while the treatments were in progress in July. He now spent part of each summer in nearby Santa Cruz writing. He was astonished at the changes in his friend’s body and mind. They would play with the dogs or go outside so Wallace could smoke. Franzen asked what he had been thinking when he tried to kill himself and Wallace winced and said he didn’t remember. He was barely able to read, not even the thrillers he ordinarily devoured. Instead he mostly watched TV. After dinner, Werner licked out his mouth.

Wallace’s illness was taking a huge toll on Green; she was exhausted. For one nine-day period, she didn’t leave their house. When she did go out, Wallace’s friends from his Claremont recovery group kept him company. Later in the summer a yard hose went missing and Green found it in the trunk of their car. He had planned to tie it to the exhaust pipe using his bandana. When she confronted him, he insisted he had already decided not to go through with it. She did not believe him and had him hospitalized again.

In August, Stirling suffered an athletic injury, and Green wanted to be with him, so Wallace’s parents stayed with Wallace for ten days. He was close to giving up hope. “It’s like they’re throwing darts at a dartboard,” he complained to them about his psychiatrists. They went with him to an appointment; when the doctor suggested a new drug combination, Wallace rolled his eyes. He was a shut-in now, worried he’d run into his students if he went into town. Sally Wallace cooked him the meals he had loved as a child — casseroles and pot pies; they watched The Wire. It was obvious to his family that he was in unendurable pain. Before she left, he thanked her for being his mother.

Eventually, Wallace asked to go back on Nardil, but he was too agitated to give it the weeks it takes to work. Franzen would call and encourage him to stick with it — the worst was over. “Keep talking like that,” Wallace said. “It’s helping.” In early September, Nadell spoke with him and thought that he sounded a bit better. He was writing notes to himself, making gratitude lists and lists of symptoms and fears and keeping a journal. In his last entry he wrote that he would stay awake so that when Green got home he could help her with the groceries.

Green believes that she knows when Wallace decided to try again to kill himself. She says of September 6, “That Saturday was a really good day. Monday and Tuesday were not so good. He started lying to me that Wednesday.” He waited two more days for an opportunity. In the early evening on Friday, September 12, Wallace suggested that Green go out to prepare for an opening at Beautiful Crap, which was about ten minutes away in the center of Claremont. Green felt comforted by the fact that he’d seen the chiropractor on Monday. “You don’t go to the chiropractor if you’re going to commit suicide,” she says.

After Green left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights. He wrote her a two-page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself. When one character dies in Infinite Jest, he is “catapulted home over…glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues.”

Green returned home at 9:30 and found her husband. In the garage, bathed in light from his many lamps, sat a pile of nearly two hundred pages. He had made some changes in the months since he considered sending them to Pietsch. The story of “David Wallace” was now first. In his final hours, he had tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages — drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel over the past decade. This was his effort to show the world what it was to be “a fucking human being.” He had never completed it to his satisfaction. This was not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen.