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

NOTES

Chapter 1: “Call Me Dave”

1. Amy Wallace says that she never met “anybody who had the need for television David had.”

2. Wallace claimed that as an eleven-year-old he traded lawn mowing with a neighbor for a tutorial on Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. The improbable exchange is echoed in Infinite Jest where Hal Incandenza offers free mowing to an “oral lyrologist” in return for information on the history of the instrument.

3. In his first published story, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” the protagonist says of his depression, “Some people say it’s like having always before you and under you a huge black hole without a bottom, a black, black hole, maybe with vague teeth in it, and then your being part of the hole.”

Chapter 2: “The Real ‘Waller’”

1. The three roommates also heard the other students in the hall bathroom. Wallace said he could recognize the sounds of different people in the stalls and years later made use of these memories in a story told by the son of a men’s room attendant, “Brief Interview #42.”

2. This story was mythologized at Amherst in later years such that Wallace so flummoxed a professor with his superior intelligence that the professor snapped shut his briefcase and left the class in the middle of a lesson.

3. In Senior Rhetoric, for instance, Wallace wrote a story about a man who kills his own clone by pushing him out a window. The tale played off of the Frankenstein myth and ended with a pun, the creator arrested for “making an illegal clone fall.” The teacher told him she was disappointed in the ending but gave him an A-plus.

4. A hint as to other stories Wallace may have been working on at the time is provided in a conversation between two characters at a publishing house in The Broom of the System, Wallace’s college novel, who are looking through a pile of unsolicited manuscripts for the publisher’s quarterly. The stories discussed are “The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer,” which may be a version of “The Clang Birds,” as well as “Dance of the Insecure,” “To the Mall,” “Threnody Jones and the Goat from Below,” “Love” (itself a part of Broom), and “A Metamorphosis for the Eighties.” Comments one character, “That last one is actually rather interesting. A Kafka parody, though sensitively done. Self-loathing-in-the-midst-of-Adulation piece. Collegiate but interesting.”

5. Wallace’s parodies sometimes offended. A piece he wrote about cosseted students at antebellum Amherst arriving with their slaves drew a protest from the Black Student Union.

6. Another philosophical book of the era, Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter, impressed Wallace a great deal. Subtitled “an eternal golden braid,” the book investigates consciousness, logic, language, and the structures of meaning. Wallace borrowed his father’s copy and “actually shoved this book excitedly at people in the eighties,” as he remembered in an interview in The Believer. Gödel is a predecessor to Infinite Jest, at least structurally. Mark Costello remembers Wallace when he was working on his novel “going on about the ‘braid’ or ‘fugue’ shape — disparate elements making a whole.”

7. That “every love story is a ghost story” is a thought that stayed with Wallace from the beginning of his writing career to the end. The phrase appears in a letter he wrote in the graduate program at the University of Arizona, and he is still turning it over in his mind twenty years later when he slips it into a scene in which IRS examiners silently turn pages in The Pale King. From “Planet Trillaphon” to the posthumous The Pale King, moments of happy love in Wallace’s work are rare.

8. That human connections can heal would become the centerpiece of Wallace’s mature credo. As he would write one day in Infinite Jest, “The truth will set you free — but not until it’s done with you.”

9. Wallace never republished “Planet Trillaphon” in a collection, probably because it was too revealing. Also, by the time he had sufficient other short fiction for a collection, after publishing The Broom of the System, the conventionality of the narrative would have seemed amateurish to him.

10. The other students were entranced by Wallace’s recitation of the Underground Man’s monologue in the class.

11. The other opening sentence that Wallace considered of surpassing beauty is (slightly misquoted) from a Stephen Crane story, “The Open Boat.” It sounds a similarly unsettled note: “None of the men knew the color of the sky.”

12. Wallace claimed Lenore’s great-grandmother was loosely inspired by a real Wittgenstein disciple, Alice Ambrose, who lived near Amherst. His knowledge of nursing homes come from a stint working in one in high school.

13. Wallace once wrote Jonathan Franzen he was glad everyone focused on his debt in Broom of the System to Pynchon, because it meant they didn’t see how much he had taken from DeLillo.

14. I owe this observation to Marshall Boswell, in his book Understanding David Foster Wallace.

15. Reading his former roommate’s manuscript in the spring of 1985, Mark Costello noticed that Lenore seemed like an idealized projection of Amy Wallace, especially in her manner of speech—“the dry wit and the tendency to repeat in less inflated terms what someone has said to her.”

Chapter 3: “Westward!”

1. He wrote on his Iowa application that he had also applied to the Johns Hopkins MFA program, where the postmodernist John Barth taught. Unfortunately, the school has no record of an application. If Wallace was rejected, it would lend a more personal slant to his later intense antagonism toward the writer.

2. Containers of waste appear regularly over the years in Wallace’s writing and reach an acme in Infinite Jest. Most critics would trace the leitmotif to his affection for Pynchon, for whom waste was also a central symbol, but personal exposure certainly played a role.

3. This fascination with spiders would appear in Infinite Jest, where the three Incandenza generations that precede Hal fear them. For instance, Hal’s great-grandfather refuses to stand under palm trees out of concern they will drop on his head. And the ferocity of the female may have played a part in the portrait of Avril Incandenza, Hal’s mother, a venomous widow herself.

4. When “Forever Overhead” was chosen for Best American Short Stories 1992, Wallace dismissed it in his contributor note as “straining to make a personal trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be.”

5. When Mary Carter died in 2011, many of Wallace’s fellow classmates were surprised to find that she had been in her sixties at the time she ran the writing program.

6. “I completely deny ever once kissing any part of my sister’s feet at any time whatsoever,” Wallace wrote in his contributor note for “Forever Overhead” in Best American Short Stories 1992, setting that record straight at the same time as he claimed the “excruciatingly shaming” trauma of panicking on the top of the high dive for himself, when the person who froze atop the high dive, according to his family, was actually his mother.

7. Though never a Zumbye, Wallace enjoyed singing songs from their album in the shower, especially “Tears of a Clown” and “Since I Fell for You.”

8. Minimalism was political too, practically the literary world’s univocal response to the Reagan era, as if the cuts in budgets had trimmed countless words and emotions from writers’ vocabularies at the same time.

9. When Wallace brought up Derrida and De Man, from his literary theory class, to support his respect for brat pack writers, Elman said he didn’t care. He derided him as Herr Doktor Wallace, as Wallace’s face flushed and his voice rose. Afterward, Wallace worried that he had transgressed and speedily wrote Elman an apology, explaining he was “passionately interested in this stuff, and I’m afraid I sometimes forget where I am and whom I’m talking to.”

10. The evident comic appeal of the excerpt is why Wallace’s agent Bonnie Nadell later suggested that he begin the book with it, rather than the original opening, a conversation between Lenore and her great-grandmother that was eventually cut.

11. Wallace’s readings in literary theory hang heavily over the story, especially his fascination with Derrida. For Wittgenstein language was speech and without a speaker there could be no meaning. By contrast, Derrida insisted that writing was no less fundamental to language and the absence of the speaker/author was precisely what allowed the reader to assert the meaning of the written words — Derrida’s famous dictum that “there is nothing outside the text.” In creating a character who is all disembodied speech in a written narrative, Wallace was joining the two approaches.

12. These are Penner’s notes. He says he would in the actual class have expressed himself more diplomatically.

13. Penner told Wallace that the fantastical ending of “Solomon Silverfish” was too short, the rest too long, showing he was a more complicated reader than Wallace gave him credit for. All the same, the students had no doubt where his heart lay. “Penner,” Robert Boswell remembers, “was really uptight about what was and what wasn’t a story; he was the worst person to work with David.”

14. Penner has a different interpretation of these words. “As I interpret them,” he says, “they mean we’d hate to lose him as a real writer, hate to see him sink to a trivial level. I don’t remember telling David that, but I certainly felt it.”

15. A small print run of hardcovers, now extremely valuable, was also planned, under the Viking imprint.

16. Soon after selling the book, Wallace confessed to Corey Washington his fear that “only me and Mom will buy the book…and my name will be economic and literary mud — even shit.”

17. “…so that word and reference are unified…in absence,” Wallace noted to Nadell happily.

18. “He was very polite in ignoring me” is Howard’s too-modest memory of his editorial interactions with Wallace. He told Leon Neyfakh of the New York Observer after the writer’s death, “I’m sure I may have changed a comma to a semicolon or maybe fixed a couple of words in Broom of the System but yeah, he knew what he was about, David, even if I didn’t.”

19. The name of another musician from Placebo Records, Michael Pemulis, would later attach to an important character in Infinite Jest.

20. Wallace appended a note on the copy of the story he circulated in his workshop apologizing if the story offended and asking if the grotesqueries seemed unnecessary, because “that would obviously be bad narrative news.”

21. Carter made no effort to hide who her favorites were at the event. While she walked Wallace around, she asked Heather Aronson to serve hors d’oeuvres.

22. Julie’s autistic brother lives in Tucson. The two children are premature adults, abandoned by their parents and largely ignored by their foster parents (pun surely intended). The setup suggests how upset the fracture in his parents’ marriage may have left Wallace.

23. There may also, as ever, have been an element of parody to the story, Wallace trying out the sort of heartfelt encounter that teachers like Penner admired. (If so, it did not work. When he submitted it to his fiction workshop the instructor, Buzz Poverman, another teacher who favored realism, told him, others in the class remember, that it was “not a story.”)

24. In the interview Wallace gave to Larry McCaffery, he made a try at explaining the dynamic of his surprising public success: “I’m an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.” He cut the comment before the interview was published in 1993.

25. The story went through a number of intriguing titles before settling on “My Appearance.” Wallace called it at various times “40,” a reference to the actress’s age, “All Things to One Man,” “Lettermania,” and “Late Night.”

26. Wallace’s acceptance to Yaddo showed some of his academic sleight of hand. Richard Elman was one of his recommenders. “I’ll shine your shoes for a week,” he’d written his old teacher, asking for his help. He’d also asked Jonathan Penner, who wrote a glowing endorsement.

Chapter 4: Into the Funhouse

1. Wallace may have first encountered the poem in the famous early advertisements for a farm implement, which he knew:

The Plough That Broke the Plains…McCormick Reaper

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

He was also aware of the painting by Emanuel Leutze that hangs in the Capitol.

2. The fried roses, whose “noisomely oily smell” Wallace confirmed on the family stove, was central enough to his thinking that he chose it for the title of the story and the collection, until Nadell objected.

3. Wallace told Costello that another character in the story, Magda, the orange-faced stewardess—“an aloft waitress, she terms it”—of the story, came from real life. While he was working on “Westward,” a flight attendant who was a fan of postmodernism recognized him from the sketch the Wall Street Journal had published alongside their article. She took him to her condo in Hartford for three days.

4. The passsage plays off Barth’s own essays on literature and generational conflict with their premise that the aesthetic of modernism was no longer useful and something new had to be found.

5. He would add in a 2002 letter to the critic Marshall Boswell, in the course of his by then customary putdown of The Broom of the System, “The best thing to come out of that was that I still have the same agent, and she’s a dear friend and merciless critic.”

6. He would later speak of “sort of an artistic and religious crisis” in these months, words reminiscent of his description of the breakdown that first spurred his creativity at Amherst in 1983.

7. He usually drank alone until he lost consciousness. He would describe himself in a later interview as “sort of a joyless drinker.”

8. After Broom’s success, the IRS claimed Wallace owed them money. He had always been a careful taxpayer, part of his midwestern upbringing of cooperation and order. “A certain Uncle wants a certain sum far in excess of proper family obligation,” he wrote Howard in surprise. The problem was traced to an erroneous 1099 form. Wallace dashed off an explanation and there it ended, though he would have other similar mix-ups with the agency over the years. Perhaps these planted an interest in the agency.

9. These sorts of paradoxes were of absorbing interest to Wallace and extended beyond verbal tricks for undergraduates; they feature in much of twentieth-century mathematical logic. They also play a role in Broom, where a plot point revolves around a riddle whose implications Wittgenstein wrestles with in his Tractatus: The barber cuts the hair of anyone who doesn’t cut his own hair. Who then cuts the barber’s hair?

10. Wallace did not overestimate the appeal of this habit. He wrote to Franzen that tobacco chewing “turns the mouth to hamburger in a week, is stupid and dangerous, and involves goobing big dun honkers every thirty seconds.”

11. The program Wallace joined stressed anonymity. For that reason I don’t identify it by name and use the first name and first letter of the last name when quoting members who spoke about Wallace.

12. He would in a 1990 letter to Jonathan Franzen explain that the role drugs played in his writing was “not working under the influence, but somehow using the influence as a counterpoint to the work — hard to explain.” This is somewhat evasive; according to Costello, he also wrote high.

13. “Title imposed by editor,” he wrote Brad Morrow, who ran Conjunctions, noting that he now found the story “Girl with Curious Hair” “pretty gross.”

14. In later years, Wallace would boast about “a seventeen-page letter about literary theory” that he had written to Howard to argue his editorial vision for Broom, but there is no such letter; he was either misremembering his explanation to the Viking legal department or trying to make a grim experience more palatable.

15. The nineteenth-century German critic Gustav Freytag designed a widely used triangular representation of a typical story line, in which the action rises to the climax or moment of reversal and then descends through the denouement.

16. Wallace was not always so impressed with the idea that his generation faced unique challenges. He wrote an undergraduate in 1995 that the idea was “a lot of hooha. Kids write about Jeopardy and Letterman exactly the way elders write about trees and the sky-reflecting mudpuddle. It’s what’s there.” Then, reconsidering his reconsideration, he added, “That may be a bit disingenuous.”

17. Amy Wallace says her brother exaggerates. Their father came from nonpracticing Catholics. Their mother was from a religious family but her own parents were not churchgoers. “David and I were encouraged to believe what we wanted,” she says.

18. “Order and Flux in Northampton” is an homage/parody of James Joyce. Wallace shared Joyce’s fascination with wordplay though they approached literature from very different perspectives. But he took what he wanted from other writers. He told Mark Costello that he had gotten the idea of the discontinuous interview numbers in Brief Interviews after reading in a biography that Joyce loved putting puzzles in his work.

19. His intense sense of competitiveness returned quickly though. Reading the work of William Vollmann, he felt a familiar twinge of envy and anger. When he learned that Vollmann’s new book, The Rainbow Stories, was also about to be published, he worried that Girl was “going to get dwarfed by that fucker Vollmann’s coming out only a month sooner,” as he wrote Brad Morrow. He also tarred Vollmann’s first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, with being, of all things, “too Pynchonian.”

20. When Steven Moore mentioned in a letter that he was submitting Wallace’s essay “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” for a $1,000 prize, Wallace joked, “My nose could use the grand.”

21. Bangs in turn likely got the image from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which Roger Mexico’s heart “grows erect, and comes.”

22. Costello’s literary aspirations would bear fruit in a pseudonymous noir novel, Bag Men, published in 1997, and Big If, which came out in 2002 and was nominated for a National Book Award.

23. This rating should be taken in context. Wallace turned to letters when his fiction was not going well, so his letters rarely report a good day’s work. All the same, in mid-1989 he was clearly frustrated. Adrift in his current work, he devalued his old. Broom he was embarrassed by, though Girl with Curious Hair he still admired. It had furnished “some real personal mind-blowing successes,” he wrote his friend Franzen.

24. When Boogie Nights came out in 1997, Wallace called Costello and told him the movie was exactly the story that he had been trying to write when they lived together in Somerville.

25. Vollmann’s reportage among prostitutes and skinheads in San Francisco for stories like “Ladies and Red Lights” and “The White Knights” likely inspired Wallace’s own attempt to mix reporting and fiction in his pornography novel.

26. Franzen did not win the grant until 1996, but he did get a Whiting Award that year thanks in part to Wallace (as did Vollmann).

27. Jim Wallace remembers his son’s surprise at the hierarchical nature of the Harvard program. “The students did their professors’ laundry and clustered around them, and he thought that was just ridiculous. He was a published author and expected to be treated as an equal.”

28. The attentive observation in Infinite Jest of Denial Aisle — the back row at recovery meetings full of “catexic newcomers crossing and uncrossing their legs every few seconds and sniffing compulsively and looking like they’re wearing every thing they own”—likely comes from this period.

Chapter 5: “Please Don’t Give Up on Me”

1. Wallace found it funny that a “marine hospital” should be nowhere near water.

2. Wallace fictionalized Larson with affection in Infinite Jest. “It turned out Pat Montesian liked the color black a lot. She was dressed — really kind of overdressed, for a halfway house — in black leather pants and a black shirt of silk or something silky,” he writes of the executive director of Ennet House.

3. All the same Wallace liked to quote one of the veteran recovery members, the group known in Infinite Jest as “the crocodiles,” who told him, “It’s not about whether or not you believe, asshole, it’s about getting down and asking.”

4. Members of recovery groups were supposed to be anonymous. So when Infinite Jest with its many scenes set in a thinly fictionalized Granada House came out, Wallace was forced to dissemble. “I mean,” he told an interviewer, “I got very assertive research and finagle-wise. I mean, I hung out. There were twelve halfway houses in Boston, three of which I spent literally hundreds of hours at.”

5. Big Craig didn’t trust Wallace when he first met him. Marijuana was a lightweight addiction in his eyes. Craig was just out of prison; Wallace was just out of Harvard. “My suspicions were that he was looking for material for a book,” he remembers.

6. Wallace was well aware that suffering could help a writer produce his best work. In Somerville he had read Paul De Man’s essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” and wrote “brilliant” when he came upon the following disquisition on authorship: “The mere falling of others does not suffice; he has to go down himself. The ironic, twofold self that the writer or philosopher constitutes by his language seems able to come into being only at the expense of his empirical self, falling (or rising) from a stage of mystified adjustment into the knowledge of his mystification.”

7. The exchange was not entirely so serious. Wallace also gave Franzen some practical advice for his upcoming stay at Yaddo: “Seek out the artists and composers. I’ve found them almost without exception nicer!! Less cliquish, and less apt to fuck with your head than the fiction writers. Poets tend to be OK as long as they’re old. Avoid any fiction writer you don’t already know. Do not fuck anyone (you’ll pay a huge psychic price later).”

8. A few years later he would tell a recovery audience that during this time the only way he could stop his whirring brain was either to masturbate or go to a movie and sit in the front row.

9. Wallace similarly hyped Costello to Karr. “I expected to meet some guy that was like seven feet tall, wearin’ a cowboy hat, chewing tobacco, with his dick coming out the bottom of his pant leg,” she remembers.

10. “The big reason” for the prohibition, Wallace explained ably in Infinite Jest, “is that the sudden removal of Substances leaves an enormous ragged hole in the psyche of the newcomer, the pain of which the newcomer’s supposed to feel and be driven kneeward by…and intense romantic involvements…tend to make the involvees clamp onto one another like covalence-hungry isotopes, and substitute each other for meetings and Activity in a Group and Surrender.”

11. Around this time Karr was working on an essay on poetry called “Against Decoration,” published in Parnassus in 1991, where she took as the twin poles of authorial error “absence of emotion” and “lack of clarity.” She urged poets to move their readers, writing that emotional response was the main goal of art, and was not shy in passing on the same message to Wallace. When he told her he had put certain scenes into Infinite Jest because they were “cool,” she responded, “that’s what my fucking five year old says about Spiderman.”

12. The book was a platform for some of the themes Wallace had first tried out in Arizona, especially the damage wrought by irony. “Serious rap’s so painfully real,” he wrote, “because it’s utterly mastered the special 80s move, the ‘postmodern’ inversion that’s so much sadder and deeper than just self-reference: rap resolves its own contradictions by genuflecting to them.”

13. Big Craig had a role in inspiring the climactic scene in Infinite Jest too. He had his wisdom teeth out with only Novocaine.

14. A typical line from an ad featuring the pathologically inaccurate spokesman: “Hi, I’m Joe Isuzu and I used my new Isuzu pickup truck to carry a two-thousand-pound cheeseburger.” The prospect that horrified Wallace most was that Americans were so used to being lied to that any other relationship with media would feel false.

15. When the critic Marshall Boswell wrote to Wallace in May 2002 to ask when he had started Infinite Jest, Wallace replied, “It doesn’t work like that for me. I started IJ or somethin’ like it several times. ’86,’88,’89. None of it worked or was alive. And then in ’91–’92 all of a sudden it did.”

16. At Arizona Wallace wrote a character sketch, which he called “Las Meninas,” in which a young African American woman named Wardine is beaten by her mother, who is jealous that her boyfriend is attracted to her daughter. Likely for some years the sketch stood alone, but in Infinite Jest it becomes connected to other stories. Wardine’s mother’s boyfriend lives in the same housing project where an addict named Poor Tony goes to buy drugs (the project was actually close to Granada House). Poor Tony, a transvestite, in turn winds up visiting a store run by a pair of Quebecois terrorists.

17. There exists an early two-page draft of a scene from Infinite Jest titled “What Are You Exactly.” In the brief scene, Hal (called “David”) goes for a visit to a man described as a professional conversationalist, who turns out to be his father in disguise. The scene is reminiscent of the therapy sessions between Lenore and Dr. J. in Broom; both share an unacknowledged sadness and a brittle despair.

18. The word “Incandenza” also appears on a list of character names Wallace made on the title page of Erotic Communications, a collection of readings that he used in Somerville for his research on pornography.

19. The addicts’ time at Ennet House is in some way therapy for an overdose of consumerism. In the margins of his copy of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, Wallace noted, “AA’s = those driven mad w/ fear by the paradigm of scarcity in a commodity/capitalist economy; require return to basically 1st-century communism of spirit.”

20. She diverges from Wallace grammatically when she asks her psychiatrist, “Listen, have you ever felt sick, I mean nauseous? Like you knew you were going to throw up?”

21. Both Gompert and Erdedy wind up in Ennet House, along with others of Wallace’s troubled legions, the facility proving an effective fictional device for Wallace. For where else do addicts congregate but a rehab house? It is their Rick’s.

22. In the letter to Larson, sent nearly two years after the incident, Wallace says that he kept his plan from Karr for fear she’d think he was “crazy and reject me.”

23. He also went to various locksmiths in Boston and explained that he was a postmodern novelist doing research on how to disarm a burglar alarm system. “Finally,” remembers Mark Costello, “the fifth didn’t throw him out.”

24. Wallace had an interest in his family’s Scottish origins. He went to see Braveheart, the story of William Wallace, the national hero, when it came out in 1995. And as he moved from city to city, among the few possessions he brought with him was a painting of a Scottish battle scene his father had given him.

25. As Rick Vigorous comments in Broom, “It’s when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or of any use to those who are.”

26. “Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink” was a standard warning against self-pity in recovery, one that Wallace would cite in Infinite Jest.

27. Wallace admired Raymond Carver, whom he distinguished from his minimalist acolytes (Wallace dismissed them as “crank turners”). He was a man who had outrun alcohol in moving from a deflected style to a more sincere one, and Wallace doubtless saw the relevance to his own story.

28. Hints of effeminacy always brought out a bit of Wallace’s anxiety. When he moved to Illinois he placed a special order from a Bloomington store for T-shirts with dark squares on the front meant to hide what he saw as his flabby chest.

29. As he explained in a later letter to the critic Sven Birkerts, he found writing directly onto a computer to be like “think[ing] out loud onto the screen,” adding, “Writing by hand and typewriter not only brings out the best in me — it brings out stuff I never would have dreamed was there…. It is this — not improvement, but transfiguration of the contents of my head that I am addicted to. It is astonishing when it happens — magical — and it simply doesn’t happen on a computer.”

30. A hint as to Karr’s motive is to be found in Infinite Jest, where her stand-in, Joelle Van Dyne, comments, “Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it. She’s learned this through sheer experience.”

31. The name was a source of some amusement to Wallace, viz this from Infinite Jest: “That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is Unit, which is why Ennet house residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital’s designations of its campus’s buildings.”

32. Typically, Wallace met DeLillo through worries about plagiarism. He was concerned that DeLillo’s work was a too obvious source for the Eschaton scene in Infinite Jest, in which Ennet Academy students pretend to wage a nuclear war with computers and tennis balls. DeLillo, who admired Wallace’s writing, responded that it was not, a generous gesture given the scene’s overlap with his novel Endzone.

Chapter 6: “Unalone and Unstressed”

1. In Infinite Jest the government sells naming rights to each year. The year in which the key action in the story takes place is the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which most Wallace researchers agree was 2009. There is, however, one bit of data that points to 2011, possibly an error, possibly a deliberately misleading clue on Wallace’s part.

2. Marathe is an example of the pleasure Wallace takes in recursion: He is a quadruple agent whose Quebecois bosses think he is a triple agent. In other words, he pretends that he is only pretending to betray the people he is in fact betraying.

3. In Infinite Jest, Wallace traces Americans’ neediness with a Freudian touch to the original mother-infant bond. The lethal “Infinite Jest” cartridge is said to consist of a baby looking up at a mother’s face, the mother intoning, “I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am.”

4. “Ticket to the Fair” was not the first time Wallace had improved on reality. In “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” for instance, he says he was born in Philo, Illinois, a claim that later found its way onto websites and into books on the author. And who but an East Coast reader would have believed that a tornado could blow up out of nowhere and suddenly sweep Wallace and his tennis opponent over the net, “blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet over to the fence one court over”? As Amy Wallace remembers, in the Wallace family, ”We quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for.”

5. Wallace was aware that he had transgressed, and many times he hinted to journalists that their rules weren’t his, as in an interview he gave to a writer for the Boston Phoenix in 1998: “The thing is, really — between you and me and the Boston Phoenix’s understanding readers — you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there’s going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.”

6. The problem of how to use an innovative writing style to carry out a conservative fictional purpose would become Wallace’s biggest artistic challenge and would prove insurmountable in The Pale King.

7. One suspects the silver lamé outfit was borrowed from Wurtzel and the vomit, as at the Illinois State Fair, was invented, both being, in magazine fact-checking parlance, on author. A description of losing to a nine-year-old girl at chess in the ship’s library that only appears in the book version of the piece also has the sort of headlong specificity that characterized Wallace’s enhancements for effect, viz: “My first inkling of trouble is on the fourth move, when I fianchetto and Deirdre knows what I am doing is fianchettoing and uses the term correctly…. My second ominous clue is the way her little hand keeps flailing out to the side of the board after she moves, a sign that she is used to a speed clock. She swoops in with her developed QK and forks my queen on the twelfth move.”

8. The news reports Wallace refers to were probably about Grant Medeiros, fourteen, of Saanich, British Columbia. On February 17, 1995, on the last night of a cruise aboard the Royal Princess, Medeiros vanished. His eyeglasses and shoes were found on the deck, and he left his necklace and a note in his parents’ cabin, but no one saw him jump, and his body was never found. The press ascribed his misery to fighting with his parents over having to join them on the cruise. The part about a “a ship-board romance” was likely Wallace’s invention.

9. On the junior circuit, Wallace and his friends had run into a player with the name of the movie star; this spurred them to make lists of ordinary people with famous names.

10. When Big Craig read the novel after it was published he remembers thinking, “Holy crap! The bastard was just looking for information.” For all that Wallace subscribed to the ethos of anonymity in recovery, his fiction always came first. “You didn’t get sober to fuck people over [but] it’s a hazard in writing,” he wrote a friend.

11. Another source for the name may have been the nickname he and Costello shared for junior lawyers, “compliance drones.”

12. He wrote in a notebook a few years later, “My dog-emotions shifted when Drone came — there was sort of one to break my heart w/ goodness and one who was ‘trouble.’”

13. Blue is a dominant color in Infinite Jest. One character is killed drinking Drano, “blue like glittershit”; another reveals “a blue string” behind an eyeball; Joelle vomits “blue smoke” into “the cool blue tub” when she hits bottom; the Charles is transformed to “robin-egg’s blue” by the Clean US Party; the skies of the novel range from “Dilaudid-colored” to “pilot-light blue”; one section begins simply, “The following things in the room were blue.”

14. Wallace was becoming a brand of his own. “I think he will fulfill Nick’s request for a big-name writer,” an editor at Tennis wrote a colleague after approaching Wallace to write a piece on the U.S. Open for the magazine.

15. The point of his style he omitted. Perhaps he thought it was self-evident, but in a similar fax to Harper’s before the editing of a piece he published in 1998 on Kafka, he explained that his goal was to “preserve an oralish, out-loud feel” to his writing. That piece began as a talk, but it is also true of Infinite Jest. You are meant to think of it as a story being spoken rather than written — or even better, thought.

16. As Amy Wallace remembers, when mother and son discussed Infinite Jest that winter, Wallace insisted to his mother that Avril Incandenza was not based on her. She was not persuaded, and the parts of the book about Avril left her deeply upset.

17. Rock music was the cultural venue in which signs of disaffection and dis-ease first appeared with serious energy. In the early 1990s bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana sang of alienation and sophisticated frustration. Their music emphasized the personal rather than the political, much as Wallace’s fiction did.

18. At a panel discussion on ethnicity and literature in 1998 held in Seattle, Wallace indicated that he understood his privileged status. When the moderator announced that the authors — the others were Sherman Alexie, Cristina García, and Gish Jen — would discuss their experience as members of marginalized minorities, Wallace picked up his chair and with comic exaggeration moved it to the side of the stage.

19. Younger readers had an easier time with Infinite Jest’s structure. It was in fact an undergraduate who captured Wallace’s strategy best. In the fall of 1995, Christopher Hager, who was studying literature with Gilbert Sorrentino at Stanford University, wrote to the author to discuss Girl with Curious Hair. Wallace offered him a galley of his next work instead if Hager would get his friends to buy the book when it came out, joking that if they bought ten copies among them, it would increase Little, Brown’s net sales “by at least 25 %.” In “On Speculation: Infinite Jest and American Fiction after Postmodernism,” his undergraduate thesis, Hager captured the novel’s “incomplete” ending with delicacy:

The resolution that reviewers complain the novel lacks isn’t in the text, but sits chronologically & spatially in front of the novel proper, which, as a satellite dish, serves to focus myriad rays of light, or voices, or information, on that central resolution without actually touching it.

Wallace was thrilled; battered by critics who said the novel just sort of stopped, he was waiting for just this type of reading. He offered a similar thought about the book in an online chat room for the e-zine WORD in May, saying that “there is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an ‘end’ can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.”

20. Journalists in general were unsure what to make of the sincerity Wallace had worked so hard to earn. Interviewing him for Infinite Jest, Laura Miller of Salon.com described him as having the manner of “a recovering smart aleck.” Wallace, though, was clear in his own mind that the change from who he had been was real. When an interviewer asked him what the old Wallace would have thought of his new writing, he answered, “I don’t think he would have hated it — I just don’t think he woulda read it. I think he would’ve looked at the first two pages and gone, ‘Huh! Wonder who likes this kind of stuff?’ And then looked for something else.”

21. “Using skills…only Elizabeth has,” as Wallace would comment in a later interview.

22. Perhaps more apropos to Wallace’s own struggle was Nirvana’s mournful ballad “All Apologies,” whose last chorus, repeated over and over, is often quoted as “All alone is all we are.” (The official version on the liner notes reads: “All in all is all we are.”)

23. The grunge references probably irritated Wallace, who told friends he’d never heard of Nirvana until after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the band’s lead singer, in April 1994. “A grad student lent me some tapes,” he remembered in a letter to a friend written in the late 1990s, “and I came rushing in the next day saying I thought these guys were kind of brilliant and had anybody ever heard of them…the students were too embarrassed for me even to laugh. (That’s a true story, by the way.)” Which most friends doubt it is.

24. Similar assurances allowed Wallace to give Nadell free rein to do with his film rights as she saw fit throughout his career.

Chapter 7: “Roars and Hisses”

1. When he went over his 1993 piece on television, “E Unibus Pluram,” he added — or more likely, restored from the draft of the article — another dig at Mark Leyner, changing his identification from “writer” to “New Jersey medical ad copywriter,” in fact one of the jobs Leyner had held before he became a novelist.

2. Wallace told one young mother he was dating he was jealous that her breasts were “no longer public property,” but in less petulant moods he acknowledged a worthy competitor. “Babies,” he told Mark Costello, “are famous to themselves.”

3. Wallace was an extraordinary listener, with “a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment.” (The description is of Lyle, the weight room guru in Infinite Jest.)

4. The syllabus averred, “If, in a piece of creative nonfiction, an event is claimed to have happened, it must happen.” But in the classroom Wallace was known to be the less dogmatic of the two teachers when it came to literal accuracy, and one senses his hand in a later sentence on the syllabus: “And yet, the ‘creative’ half of the title suggests an impulse rather than Enlightenment perspicuity motivates the writer and shapes the writing.”

5. An alternate reading of “The Depressed Person” is that the author sympathizes with her. The space he gives to narrating her experiences confers a validity to them, a gift that mimics at the same time the gift of therapy.

6. When from Las Vegas he called Francis B. to complain the mirror on the ceiling was keeping him from sleeping, his friend told him to roll over.

7. Wallace liked the way unwritten questions forced the reader to use his or her imagination. He had practiced the form in a six-page endnote in Infinite Jest in which Hugh Steeply, the O.N.A.N. agent, posing as a female journalist, interviews Orin Incandenza. The only voice we hear is Orin’s.

8. Wallace had first come upon the story of a man who specialized in finding such women in Cracking Up, a psychoanalytic casebook published in 1996.

9. The problem with the relationship might be captured on either side by the comment the outraged male narrator of “Here and There” makes about his girlfriend: “She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the ‘me’ she seemed so jealously to covet.”

10. His habit was worsened by Nardil, which increases nicotine’s addictiveness.

11. In 1999, he sent DeLillo a card with the words, “May the peace and blessing of almighty God descend upon you and remain with you forever” on it and added the quip, “Today’s Catholic isn’t afraid to send cards like this.” Later he mailed another one, with a token indicating he had made an offering at mass, with the words, “Already paid for — like a sort of cosmic gift certificate.”

12. Franzen would later capture his impression of the relationship in one of a suite of stories called “Break-Up Stories,” published in the New Yorker, in which a Heidegger-spouting university instructor insists he is going to marry his girlfriend even as he is scouting around for the next woman.

13. At some point in the late 1990s, Wallace hired a prostitute. It was a logical step for a writer who was interested in the point where sex and marketing met. Plus it was an opportunity for a new experience. Wallace negotiated a price of $200 but when he got into bed with the woman he lost his desire. “We sort of ‘cuddled and talked’ instead,” he wrote Evan Wright, who had helped him with his adult entertainment awards article for Premiere in 1999; “she was nice about it.”

14. Gale Walden’s father, whom Wallace admired, had left the ministry to become an IRS agent, a living metaphor.

15. In a notebook entry, Wallace suggests that Drinion might be the child in the micro-story “Incarnations of Burned Children,” and that his penis photographs better than one that has not been scarred by scalding water.

16. It is likely that this plot about a porn performer whom the viewer can digitally replace with himself dates back to the pornography novel that Wallace abandoned in the late 1980s; he mentions the video technology in Signifying Rappers, which he was working on around the same time.

17. Other names the novel had, at least briefly, included Glitterer, Net of Gems, What Is Peoria For? and Sir John Feelgood (Drinion’s nom de porn).

18. The theme of the novel is anticipated in an essay Hal Incandenza submits for “Mr. Oglivie’s seventh-grade Introduction to Entertainment Studies” in Infinite Jest, about a future television hero who represents the conclusion of a lineage that begins with the “hero of action” (Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-O) and passes on to the “hero of reaction” (Frank Furillo of Hill Street Blues). “We await,” Hal writes, “I predict, the hero of non-action, the catatonic hero, the one beyond calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines.”

19. Its previous tenant had been Planned Parenthood. Wallace told Costello that if he got bombed or shot there, the police should look for right-to-lifers with an outdated phonebook.

20. The earnest authenticity that was Wallace’s core literary voice had by now spread far. It was even in the process of being appropriated by advertising, no doubt to Wallace’s horror. But the change was bigger than this. The 1980s era of masculine hyper-certainty that had spawned Wallace in rebellion was far in the past. He had helped to move the culture and, with the culture moved, the question he had to answer was what new to write against.

21. Wallace told the New York Times Magazine that Franzen exercised in black socks, but then felt ashamed, as he wrote DeLillo. (The comment was not used in the article.)

22. “He spent his entire life apologizing to me,” Amy Wallace remembers. “Almost every time I saw him he’d apologize.”

23. As did others. The Onion, the satirical newspaper, ran a parody with the headline “Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter at Page 20” in February 2003, shortly before he left Bloomington.

Chapter 8: The Pale King

1. But, as Wallace himself would have asked, was he writing these letters to be open and honest or merely to make Green believe he was open and honest — which would actually make him the opposite?

2. Stecyk’s flaw, in Wallace’s eyes, was the same as that of the men described in Brief Interviews who are so busy worrying about pleasing their sex partners that they get no pleasure themselves; being pleased is an indispensable part of giving pleasure, just as being helped is an indispensable part of being helpful.

3. The story may have been inspired by an episode of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom, a show Wallace loved.

4. Wallace had met DeLillo only one time before for a dinner set up by Franzen at an East Village restaurant in 1998. He was amazed then at how much the older writer looked and sounded like his father.

5. Zeno’s dichotomy is the idea that motion is impossible because it requires an infinite series of submotions. To get somewhere, you must first get halfway there, but to get halfway there you must first get halfway there, and so on.

6. The two longest are set in offices. What drew Wallace to office life were its codes of conduct, the implicit restraints on the individual that were so lacking in his own life. For him office life bore the same relation to real life that literature did. It was a beguiling simulacrum, a cleaned-up imitation, a playful variation with rules.

7. A draft of “Good Old Neon” ends, “Ghosts talking to us all the time — but we think their voices are our own thoughts.”

8. After Costello read Oblivion he told Wallace it could be the road map for The Pale King. Wallace snapped back, “You don’t understand how tough the problem actually is.”

9. This was a past he made mild attempts to deny over the years. To an acquaintance who read in Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace that the author had had a promiscuous period in the late 1980s, he responded, “Huh? I’ve never been ‘promiscuous’ though I would have loved to…. Where do people get this stuff[?]” To another he refuted stories about Elizabeth Wurtzel: “I know her, may have been at the same table as her at a coupla dinners. But we have never ‘dated.’”

10. Wallace enjoyed having younger sponsees in particular. “Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces,” the narrator reflects on Hal in Infinite Jest, where his job is to be a Big Buddy to younger players.

11. The speech, transcribed from a recording made by a member of the Wallace-l email list, moved around the Internet quickly, to Wallace’s surprise. When an acquaintance mentioned seven months later that he had read it, Wallace wrote back, “I never gave Kenyon a transcript of it. Much of it was handwritten. I don’t get it.”

12. From the notebooks for The Pale King: “Would that we scrutinized our technology the way we do our people.”

13. This passage updates nicely Wallace’s insistence in his “Fictional Futures” essay that successful contemporary writing must recognize “a loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread.”

14. In 2007, when a former colleague from Illinois State University, Becky Bradway, asked him to explain for a textbook she was writing the role research played in a novel, Wallace wrote back, “What’s tricky is just what you’re asking: how much is enough? You can drown in research. I’ve done it. I’m arguably doing it now.”

15. In a later section of the novel, a picture of the infant on his desk comforts Dean, an evangelical Christian, in a moment of despair. Dean is processing forms, trying to visualize a sunny beach as the agency taught him to do during orientation, but he cannot maintain the image — it turns in his mind to a gray expanse covered with “dead kelp like the hair of the drowned.” Overcome with boredom, he considers suicide. “He had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor.”

16. Wallace informs the reader that during a suspension from college he was hired by the IRS as a wiggler. “I arrived for intake processing at Lake James, IL’s I.R.S. POST 047, sometime in mid-May of 1985,” he writes. Upon arriving at the intake center, he is mistaken for another David Wallace — a high-powered accountant transferring to the facility from Rome, New York. For much of the chapter, everyone at the IRS thinks that David Foster Wallace is the other Wallace, a double to his fictional double.

17. From a notebook: “Beneath S[tecyk]’s niceness is incredible rage. Sadism. Waiting only to be unleashed. His rage is a secret within a secret — a secret even from himself.”

18. In keeping with his new maturity, Wallace also became more straitlaced about the need for literal accuracy in nonfiction. When Becky Bradway, his former colleague at Illinois State, wrote him for her textbook on creative nonfiction in 2007 and asked what his standard of accuracy was in his writing, he answered, “We all knew, and know, that any embellishment is dangerous, and that a writer’s justifying embellishment via claiming that it actually enhances overall ‘truth’ is exceedingly dangerous, since the claim is structurally identical to all Ends Justify Means rationalizations.”