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

CHAPTER 2. “The Real ‘Waller’”

At the opening convocation for the class of 1984, in Johnson Chapel, the president of Amherst urged the entering students to overcome ignorance and be tolerant of one another. He ended with a poem by Emily Dickinson, one of whose grandfathers had helped found the school:

Speech is one symptom of affection

And Silence one—

The perfectest communication

Is heard of None.

Exists and its indorsement

Is had within—

Behold said the apostle

Yet had not seen!

Wallace had been assigned to room with Raj Desai and Dan Javit, two young men who wanted to be doctors. Wallace had already marked himself as a bit of an oddball by writing a letter to Desai in the summer, suggesting, because his future roommate lived near Amherst, that he should, as Desai recalls, bring “some of the larger items — the refrigerator comes to mind.” He ended by saying he looked forward to “a productive and inspiring year.” It was the kind of formality that sometimes seized Wallace in unfamiliar situations, part of the reason that, smart as he was, the move from high school to college was bound to be challenging.

The three young men had a two-room suite in Stearns Hall on the main quad. The building was crowded and flimsy, built to house the flood of GIs enrolling after World War II, and so they could hear their neighbors through the wall.¹ The three young men slept in one room, Wallace in the upper level of a bunk bed (he called it the “vag”), Javit below. Desai was in a twin bed across from them. The second room was where they were supposed to study, but Desai had brought a tarantula. The spider unnerved Wallace, who had a fear of bugs. The arachnid would expose its huge fangs, as if trying to bite him through the glass. Wallace quickly came to prefer the library.

Wallace was by turns thrilled and terrified to be at Amherst, but mostly he was just disoriented. He was at a school a thousand miles away from home, nearly all male, and preppy. The first class of freshwomen had not yet graduated and one-quarter of the students were children of fathers who, like James Wallace, had gone to the school. The closest Wallace had come to this sort of world before were the frat houses at the University of Illinois, which could not have been further from his family’s emphasis on the life of the mind. Wallace tended to dislike what he did not know and so he instinctively gave this culture a broad berth. (He would later nickname the Amherst of trust-fund children “Armrest.”) At the same time he was excited — excited to be away from home, excited to be among top professors with other hand-selected members of his generation, excited to be fulfilling what he saw as a challenge to meet his parents’ expectations for him. His self-image was still of a regular guy, a tennis player, a top student, and that was who he wanted to be at Amherst. The school was famous for its many singing organizations, and Wallace told his family he had joined the Glee Club, where another member was Prince Albert of Monaco.

But anxiety and the fear of anxiety were woven into his behavior by now too, and even as he tried to open himself up to the range of college experiences, he also protectively narrowed his life. He was happiest when things were predictable, when his work was under control and the people around him familiar. In Stearns he quickly developed routines. Every day he set his alarm for the same time to give himself the chance to climb down from the bunk and go to the hall bathroom to slick back his hair and then climb back in for a ten-minute catnap, stepping on the lower mattress twice — once coming and once going — and waking the sleeping Javit.

At first, he and his roommates ate together and socialized. They all joined the JV tennis team, whose practices were open to anyone interested. Wallace had lost his tennis ambitions — he told his old friend John Flygare the top players at Amherst were too good — and he never went out for the varsity. But against ordinary players he was still impressive. Desai and Javit were amazed at his big topspin strokes and the power he got out of his beaten-up racket. Otherwise Wallace made a slight impression as an extremely polite, strangely tentative, and very skinny classmate. His acne, which had first afflicted him late in high school, got suddenly much worse, and he treated it with a cream, the application of which involved a prolonged and careful examination of each pimple on his face. Behind his back he was sometimes called “mushface.” His roommates, without knowing precisely what, suspected him to be under some sort of unusual stress. Javit remembers being surprised when Wallace, whom he usually found cerebral and low-key, would once in a while open the window of their room in the morning and scream out into the quad, “I love it here!” There was a loneliness to him, too, in their eyes. The other two boys had visits from family; they had friends. Wallace gave off the impression of having neither; his mother had dropped him there and left. The regular care packages she sent seemed not to satisfy whatever need Wallace had. He did not make friends the way Javit and Desai did. (The good-looking Desai, Wallace would later grouse, had girls lining up to do his laundry.) One day, the three took prank photos on the campus. In one, Wallace, straight shiny bangs, Chicago White Sox T-shirt over a black turtleneck, holds a cupped hand under his empty school mailbox, while he regards the camera with a look of hurt. If home did not seem to miss Wallace, Wallace missed home. He dreamed of the Illinois farmland and the small city he had grown up in. He wrote his family, they remember, that the mountains in Massachusetts were “pretty” but the terrain wasn’t beautiful “the way Illinois is.”

Over time, Desai and Javit, with their shared pre-med ambitions, separated from Wallace — he was the friendly but forlorn third roommate. They could not figure out what was going on in his head, though they suspected it was not what was going on in theirs. In fact, Wallace was probably not so sure what was going on either. No one had found out the things about himself he wished to keep private, but only because no one seemed to care enough to do so. He knew what he needed, what would make him feel better: great grades. It would be satisfying to show everyone what he could do; his shyness did not preclude competitiveness. Getting straight As, as he would later tell Amherst magazine, was “a way to hide from people, to try to earn — through ‘achievement’ or whatever — permission to be at Amherst that I was too self-centered to realize I’d already received when they accepted me.”

Wallace had liked to study high when he was in high school. He reestablished the routine at Amherst, with two young men who lived down the hall from him. They would get together in their room most days in the late afternoon, do bong hits for forty-five minutes while listening to music, and then go to the dining hall as soon as it opened (they called themselves “the 5:01 brigade”). Wallace would eat his food quickly, with a tea bag dunked into a cup of coffee. At 5:45 he’d head for Frost Library, where he’d study for the next six hours until it closed. Over time he found study spaces on campus that stayed open all night — the Merrill Science Center, for instance, or Webster Library with its stuffed polar bears and botany books.

That first semester Wallace dug into introductory courses in English, history, and political science and one elective, Evolution and Revolution. Late at night he’d come back to Stearns with his books. Often he would then head off again to the room where the pot was. The discussion was light. Wallace was happy high, more like the Wallace of high school no one at Amherst had met. One member of the group remembers that the three friends would test each other’s knowledge of TV jingles. “Hazel?” he remembers the discussion. “Now how did that one go?” Munchies were satisfied by the boxes of Freihofer’s cookies in Sally Wallace’s care packages. Afterward, Wallace would clamber back to his room, take his bathrobe, and march off to brush his teeth or have another shower before retiring to “the vag” for the night.

There was a moment in many of his fellow students’ lives when they realized Wallace was not just smart but stunningly smart, as smart as anyone they had ever met. One friend remembers looking over his shoulder in a class on twentieth-century British poetry after the professor returned their essays on Philip Larkin and seeing on Wallace’s, “A+—One of the finest pieces of writing I have ever read.” In epistemology, he was dominant, peppering the professor with so many advanced questions he had to ask Wallace to keep them for his office hours. “I don’t want to say he was scary but he made me work harder than any other student I ever had,” remembers Willem DeVries.² For his freshman roommate Desai, the moment of awareness came one morning second semester around one a.m. when Wallace returned to their suite, likely stoned, and asked to borrow his paper on Henry V. Wallace, Desai remembers, had earlier glanced at the play for the freshman Shakespeare seminar they both were taking. Now he quickly scanned his roommate’s paper, put it down, went away, and worked for several hours, producing an essay that would earn him an A in the class. “I thought I was smarter,” Desai remembers thinking. “Now I was getting a glimpse of how much he could accomplish.” So were others at Amherst. The first semester Wallace got two other As and an A-minus. Second semester he won the prize for the freshman with the best grade point average. “Un veritable bijou,” his teacher wrote on reading his last paper for a class in the gothic.

Responses like these made Wallace happy, happier than he later felt they should have. And despite his shyness, over time he was piecing together the social puzzle and starting to make friends. Late first semester, he met another freshman, Mark Costello, a bright, mischievous boy who, like Wallace, lived in Stearns and spent every waking hour in the library. Both young men, from large public high schools, felt the gulf between their background and that of many undergraduates at a school that touted the well-rounded over the brilliant. (Costello had sent a photo of the star of his school track team to the freshman face-book in place of his own.) Neither was going to be invited to the DKE champagne party or the Psi U beach party, and both made it a point not to care. Costello had his own throwing-up-at-the-college-interview story: he had gotten sick on Route 9 on the way to the Amherst admission’s director’s office. Wallace responded by claiming he had thrown up in the bushes outside the Lord Jeff Inn en route to his own Amherst interview (and perhaps he had). There were differences, though. Wallace smoked pot; Costello didn’t even drink. Costello, from a large Irish-Catholic family, was considering becoming a priest; Wallace was desperate to get laid. All the same, a close friendship developed. Soon Wallace was letting Costello in on the locations of secret places where he liked to study. Wallace asked Costello to room with him the following year, and his new friend agreed.

When the summer came, Wallace was relieved. Paradoxically, the home that had made him anxious in high school now felt like the place he could go to decompress. It was off the stage that college was to him, safe from observation. Most of his old friends were still there, including Flygare and Maehr. He spent the summer teaching for a sixth time in Blair Park, reading, and getting high. One of his new freshman friends, Fred Brooke, an aspiring writer who had lived in Stearns too, visited him at home, and the two went out late at night to play tennis in the park. They hit balls back and forth amid the mosquitoes and drank beer in the Illinois heat.

Sophomore year Wallace and Costello were assigned one of the worst rooms on campus, a tiny double next to the TV pit in Moore Hall. Once a week at 3 a.m. a truck came and emptied the dining-hall Dumpster outside their window. All the same, Wallace found he was happier than as a freshman. He had his routines down and a growing sense of himself as competent. He no longer worried about disappointing his parents or wasting their money. To have Costello at his side — to have near him another person whose behavior he could rely on — was a huge help. A happier Wallace began to emerge. In the mornings he wore his tattered bathrobe from home — he worried that the smears from Clearasil looked like semen stains — a Parkland College Cobras hoodie, and untied boots to stomp off to shower. “Dave, why don’t you ever tie the belt, walking around like this?” Costello would ask him. “You think I wanna look like a nerd or a jerk?” Wallace would answer. He always gargled and brushed for forty-five minutes, and then there came the microscopic examination and treatment of his acne. Back in the room, he would spread out his towels to dry, hanging them from shelves, chair backs, and bedposts. (Wallace’s fear of germs was typical of his phobic mind. It was at once real and exaggerated, with an overlay of self-deprecating comedy to both underscore and hide the hurt.) His collection of stoner tapes came out: Pink Floyd, Switched-On Bach, REO Speedwagon, Frank Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow.” Wallace had watched little or no television his freshman year, but with the TV pit right next door he could time his indulgences for when it was empty. He enjoyed Hawaii Five-O reruns and a new show, Hill Street Blues, on Thursday nights. Soap operas, though — another favorite with their exaggerated plots and larger-than-life personalities — he was too embarrassed to turn on. In general he did not like being watched watching, and if others were there he’d pass by. Yet it was a welcome bit of routine, a nice refuge from the excess of interactions that communal living brought.

Costello and Wallace sat down at 5:15 at the same table most nights in the Valentine Dining Hall, united in their need to study. During exam periods, Wallace added a second tea bag to his cup of coffee. He’d down the caffeinated drink and go off to the library. (On Sundays he’d be waiting on the steps for the librarians to open after brunch.) Then after the library closed, he and Costello would calm down with a shot of scotch. “I think this is a two-shot night,” Wallace would sometimes say. At various times, he gave up pot, saying it was bad for his lungs. He caught some of Costello’s enthusiasm for political history. He already knew trivia about Illinois politics, about Big Jim Thompson and the Stevenson dynasty that produced the two-time presidential candidate Adlai. Now he set his eye on interning for his congressman, Ed Madigan. With Costello, another friend, Nat Larson, and a fifteen-year-old freshman name Corey Washington, he joined the school debate team. Wallace was afraid of public speaking — his voice was reedy and got stuttery when he was nervous — but he participated because being on the team would look good on his transcript if he applied to law school. They traveled up and down the East Coast competing. Chris Coons, another member of team, remembers Wallace as brilliant and funny in competition, with “literally the worst delivery I have ever heard — mumbling and awkward and turned away from the judges and audience.” Wallace in turn denigrated him as the “Coonsgah” and amused his friends with a mean imitation of the future senator from Delaware.

The first semester Wallace again aced everything, with an A-plus in introduction to philosophy. He also got an A in his English class, his mother’s field. He told friends he wanted to please both parents.

Wallace came back to school early in January. He had left with high hopes and a sense of growing happiness, but when he got back he told Costello that Christmas had been “bad.” He would not be more specific. His banter, his roommate saw, had vanished. He seemed unresponsive. The impersonations were gone; Costello was surprised — he did not know that Wallace’s clowning and showing off were, if more than a façade, not quite a self. He was amazed — but Wallace was amazed too. He was familiar with his anxiety and may even have associated it with depression, but this was a more intense version of whatever he had routinely dealt with in high school; it was as if some switch in him had been flipped. He felt despair and thought of killing himself. He held on for a few weeks, trying to white-knuckle his way back to being himself. But one day William Kennick, a professor of philosophy who had been his father’s mentor, saw what was going on — he was familiar with depression from his own family — and took Wallace to see a therapist. Shortly after, Costello came into their room to find his roommate slumped over, his gray suitcase between his legs. Wallace was dressed in a Chicago Bears watch cap and tan parka. “I have to go home,” he told Costello. “What’s wrong?” Costello asked. “I don’t know. Something’s wrong with me,” he said. He was hugely apologetic and told Costello he was worried the college would slot someone awful into the room once he left. “I’ve let you down,” he told his roommate. Costello thought it was strange that Wallace kept focusing on him. Wasn’t Wallace the one in distress? In silence he walked his roommate to the bus to Springfield, which would take Wallace to the airport.

Wallace’s parents took their son in and put him back in his bedroom on the second floor. After his difficult senior year in high school, they could hardly have been surprised by such an outcome, but if they felt this, they did not say it. They were not unfamiliar with suicidal depression: Sally’s sister and uncle had both taken their own lives. The family let Wallace come and go as he pleased. “We didn’t press him,” his mother says. “We figured if he wanted to talk about it he’d talk about it.” But he began to confide in his sister, Amy, whom up until then he had mostly looked on as a nuisance. He told her how frightened and uncomfortable the world felt to him and how nothing seemed meaningful anymore. He wondered who he really was — the star Amherst student or a young man who would never make it out of the home on his own? — and his sister quietly worried the same thing. Yet over time he began to heal, and by the spring he got a job driving a school bus. It was good to be back in the Midwest, experiencing the comforting flatness of the prairie. But when the kids mouthed off at him, he quit, left the bus behind, and walked home. In semi-mock outrage, he wrote Costello how appalled he was that Urbana would permit someone with a known history of mental disease to handle a motor vehicle with children on board. Never liking the phone, he instead established a lively correspondence with Costello, who was kept informed of his travails.

He also wrote some fiction. Wallace had written occasional comic stories in high school but any interest had dropped away when he got to Amherst.³ Fiction on campus was the province of, as he would later describe them, “foppish aesthetes” who “went around in berets stroking their chins.” They were sensitive, and his sensitivity was not something he wanted to emphasize. The cast of mind he thought it took to be a writer was scary to him. But home on his own he gave it another try. One story he worked on, according to Costello, was called “The Clang Birds,” about a fictional bird that flies in ever decreasing circles until it disappears up its own ass. In Wallace’s story, God ran an existential game show where contestants were asked impossible or paradoxical questions. God wielded the buzzer and no one could stop playing. He also tried writing in a more delicate vein. He started a prose poem about the cornfields of Illinois, which he sent to Costello to read, and also a story about a pretty girl whose drunk boyfriend kills her in a car crash. There may have been bigger efforts — certainly he conceived his goals ambitiously. Costello remembers getting a letter from Wallace announcing that he wanted to write fiction that would still be read “100 years from now.” He was impressed — he had no inkling either that his roommate wanted to write or could write fiction.⁴

There had been problems in the Wallace parents’ marriage for some time. In early summer Sally Wallace discussed them with her daughter and told her she was moving out. She asked Amy to tell David in turn. The blow to her son was enormous. He refused to visit her in her new home. Her brother, Amy realized, “felt personally betrayed. He really thought that in a family everybody is expected to tell the truth by word or by deed.” Years later, he would write a girlfriend that what had devastated him about the moment was his mother’s “not trusting me with reality, fearing it would pain me.” Yet at the time these events did not derail Wallace’s recovery. The relationship between event and crisis for Wallace was not always a direct one. It may have helped cushion the blow that as the summer wore on, he started hanging out with Susie Perkins. Perkins was now a psychology major at Indiana University. They became involved. Wallace was deeply drawn to her, seeking a caregiver to replace his mother. To Costello, her affect toward his friend reminded him of a girl looking after a wounded bird.

Wallace came back to Amherst in the fall of 1982. He was extremely embarrassed: the myth of his capability had been shattered. He was elusive about what had happened — among his close friends only Costello knew the truth. The two friends had agreed to live together again, adding Nat Larson to their group. Just before the start of school, they went on a camping trip to Maine and Nova Scotia. “We stuffed ourselves with fresh seafood from buffets and lay around on the beach,” remembers Fred Brooke, who also went along. For Wallace, all-male dynamics were often the most comfortable, but he was also so agitated by the bugs, he chose to sleep in the car. The rest were amused by the slapping noises they heard through the night, though to Costello, who knew him best, Wallace’s behavior was as frightening as it was funny. He knew that Wallace when he was under stress or fragile acted out his full complement of phobias.

In the housing lottery the group was awarded a room in Stone, one of the “social dorms,” as they were called. The social dorms were designed with bedrooms radiating off a common room and were much more pleasant than the rooms in Stearns or Moore. Wallace, his friends noticed, looked different now. He no longer wore the generic clothes — the corduroys and White Sox and Bears T-shirts of the Midwest — choosing instead worn thrift-shop T-shirts and torn shorts, often with his beloved hoodie. He liked untied Timberland boots and double socks. The sartorial change was representative of an interior one. He was beginning to distance himself from the culture of the Midwest that had formed him, where one could be radical but never rude. Adopting the “dirt bomb” look, as it was called, was one small way of saying he was done trying to be Joe College. His inchoate political hopes were gone too. “No one’s going to vote for someone who’s been in a nuthouse,” he told Costello, and mentioned Thomas Eagleton, the senator and Amherst graduate who had briefly been a vice presidential candidate before the news that he’d had electroconvulsive therapy for depression forced him to withdraw in 1972.

Wallace took no chances with his classes on his return. His first semester back he enrolled in logic, Christian ethics, and ancient and medieval philosophy with Kennick. The only nonphilosophy course he took was French, which was necessary if he wanted to get a degree in the department. He aced all four classes, taking particular pleasure in logic. The course description promised to cover “the categorical, hypothetical, alternative and subjunctive syllogism,” as well as the “concepts of consistency, completeness and decidability.” In logic, you were either right or you were wrong, and the things that could keep you from always being right — lassitude, sloppy thinking — with Wallace’s enormous focus he could always overcome. He would later talk about the “special sort of buzz” logic gave him, how after “a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions,” you almost heard a “click.” In no time he was a self-described “hard-core syntax wienie.”

Wallace’s father thought little of the discipline, objecting that logicians tended to replace important questions — free will, beauty — with technical discussions about the language behind those questions, but this was work of the sort that made Wallace’s mind hum. It replaced the ambiguity of actual life with clarity. And as he would later tell an interviewer, highly abstract philosophy gave Wallace both the pleasure of being in his father’s field with the “required thumbing-the-nose-at-the-father thing.” (Another interpretation is that he was still trying to please both parents — grammar is another logical system, after all.)

Kennick’s ancient and medieval philosophy was a class that gave Wallace pleasure for a different reason. His father had taken the course some thirty years before, and much as he wanted to escape his father’s shadow, he also wanted to be protected by it. The ancients were part one of Kennick’s three-part introduction to the field he loved. Kennick required a paper every two weeks. The student was supposed to encounter the material fresh, using only original research and thinking, without consulting secondary sources. “I want you to be writers of prose, not processors of words,” Kennick would explain. Wallace met this rigorous timetable with a routine of his own. He would write a draft, then revise it twice longhand, then revise that revision twice on his Smith-Corona, pecking away with two fingers.

Kennick restricted papers to five pages, because he thought that compression made for better thinking. Wallace, in thrall to his galloping mind, could not write short. One time Kennick had Wallace count the words in one of his papers and found he had squeezed five hundred onto each page, nearly double the norm. He gave Wallace an A-plus in the class anyway. Wallace for his part basked in Kennick’s affection.

Wallace liked comedy, and comic writing had come easily to him from childhood. So that semester he and Costello revived the campus humor magazine, Sabrina. From an office in the basement in Frost Library they put out several issues a year modeled on the Harvard Lampoon. The headquarters also served as an informal social club to gossip and postulate, an extension of their table in Valentine Dining Hall. The atmosphere was, appropriately, sophomoric. One member of the editorial team remembers a long discussion on whether women farted, with Wallace insisting they did not. The magazine itself was likewise often juvenile, but in its pages Wallace could satisfy his passion for parody, mimicry, and farce. In Sabrina, he wrote an advice column called “Ask Bill,” in which readers were invited to bring their questions to Professor Kennick. Bertrand Russell wrote in to reveal his crush on Alfred North Whitehead and ask what he should do. “Any relationship that depends for its security on the proposition that monistic atomism has any relevance to post-Enlightenment conceptions of phenomenological reality is not worth saving,” the Sabrina Kennick sternly replied. Most stories were collaborations, but Wallace revived his childhood love of Hardy Boys mysteries to write “The Sabrina Brothers in the Case of the Hung Hamster” himself:

Suddenly a sinister, twin-engined airplane came into view, sputtering and back-firing. It lost power and began spinning in toward the hill. It was heading right for the Sabrina brothers!

Luckily at the last minute the plane ceased to exist.

“Crikey!” exclaimed Joe. “It’s a good thing we’re characters in a highly implausible children’s book or we’d be goners!”⁵

By spring semester Wallace and Costello were becoming well known on campus because of the magazine. Their table in Valentine began drawing a small but intense group of adherents. Nicknames had been a staple of his friendships in Urbana, and Wallace reveled in them here. He was “the Daver” and also “the Waller.” Costello was “Marcus Aurelius” for his first name, philosophical air, and high forehead; Nat Larson was “the Bumpster,” via the name “Natty Bumppo.” Corey Washington, Wallace’s friend from the debate team, was “Apple” or “the Reactor,” a play on “core reactor.” Eventually they were joined by Washington’s roommate Miller Maley, a wunderkind who had entered the school at twelve, Amherst’s youngest student in decades. Self-conscious about his iffy entry into puberty, Wallace liked having the younger Washington and Maley around. Washington was African American too, a distinct minority at the school, adding to the flavor of a table of refuseniks amid the mostly hail-fellow-well-met atmosphere of Amherst. In their undertrafficked corner of the dining hall, the conversation among the group bounced between social and sexual frustration, intellectual enthusiasm, and nerdy inquiry. Washington remembers the roving subjects as “Wittgenstein, the New Deal, Cantor, current politics, mathematical logic, Descartes, hot girls, Kant, etc.” They’d talk about classes, imaginary or hoped-for girlfriends, and weekend parties at the University of Massachusetts or Mount Holyoke College, where Amy Wallace now went.

Costello and Wallace were the twin centers of the group. Costello had authority, gravitas, and a boundless interest in the New Deal. Wallace was intense, with a brain that seemed to whirr faster than he could speak, and he was funny, shooting off clever comments and entertaining with his impressions. He had been in an economics course that semester. Did anyone want to see Friedrich Hayek hit on by a girl from Wilton, Connecticut? He could do his grandparents, his neighbors in Urbana, or Costello (when he wasn’t at the table). But his affection for his roommate was evident to all. Many people never saw the one without the other. To young Washington, their relationship was “like a marriage.”

His new popularity didn’t prevent Wallace from bearing down even harder in his studies. John Drew, another member of the circle, remembers an undercurrent of competitiveness in the group, of “a whole lot of score keeping and who’s the smartest.” That spring Wallace took the next installment of Kennick’s class, on early modern philosophy. This second unit began with Hobbes, continued through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and finished with Kant. Wallace thrilled to (and had fun imitating) the announcement Kennick made when he got to the German idealist: “Fasten your seat belts. We’re going up!” He also took French again, metaphysics, and economics. In economics, Wallace had to try. He was good at theory, not calculation. But with his grade point average at risk, he worked ceaselessly at the subject and even won a prize for best undergraduate work in the discipline. Costello, also in the class, now had his moment of realization about the gifts of his roommate. Wallace got straight A-pluses that semester, spring 1983, his grades perfect. The depression of early 1982 was in the past, forgotten almost, even perhaps by him. When people would ask about why he had left school, he would not answer, or say vaguely that a friend had died and he had needed time away to get over it.

In May, Wallace returned home. He signed up for a summer logic class and another in calculus at the University of Illinois. He would study right through the summer break. But soon he was sorry. He wrote Washington that he just couldn’t focus while “the smell of flowers is in the air and the birds are singing and the pop of frosty Old Mil cans can be heard from the classroom window. I rose one day and said ‘No.’ That’s what I said.” In fact the reason may have been Susie Perkins — Wallace told friends the two were growing more deeply involved. He dropped calculus and contented himself with more logic classes, which he preferred to math anyway — in math he didn’t hear the “click.”

Home was not the place it had been. His father had spent the year alone, keeping a radio on for company. But nothing could tarnish Wallace’s exuberance. He was on a high and cocky, the smartest kid at Amherst. He felt raised up and vindicated. Early in the summer, he warned Washington, who was going to work at the particle accelerator at Stanford University, that he needed to get used to “dealing with, yes, living with, dull, unappealing people.” This brotherly advice was a sign of how far Wallace’s confidence had come back since his breakdown.

Though they lived apart, Wallace’s parents had not given up on their marriage and continued going to therapy. They now wanted the family to attend as a group. Wallace and Amy reluctantly agreed. Seeking to get to the root of the Wallace family’s dynamic, the therapist asked Amy to position the different members of the family in the room as she perceived them. She refused, drawing instead a schema of interlocking gears on the blackboard.

Afterward, Wallace was no less sour about the experience than he had been going in: “Marriage therapy degenerated into family therapy,” he would later write in The Broom of the System. “God knows what all went on.” He fictionalized the marriage therapist’s attempt to get Amy to draw images of how she saw her family into a scene in the novel in which Lenore’s sister’s family put on masks in a ritualized attempt to express their emotions, to the applause of a LaserDisc audience. Perhaps Wallace was angry because the therapy did not avert the formal dissolution of the family. Soon, Jim and Sally told the children they were getting divorced. But one day a month later, their mother was back in the house she had not been in for a year. The children didn’t ask what happened and the parents didn’t offer, Amy remembers.

During the summer Wallace was also beginning to think about fiction differently. He had always liked and read novels; he found them absorbing and relaxing and mined them for the information they provided. He had hoovered everything on his parents’ shelves, from a compilation of the underground nineteenth-century porn magazine The Pearl, a favorite, he once told a therapist, of his high school masturbations, and Fanny Hill, to popular crime novelists like Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald, to creators of literature — Updike and Kafka. Friends and relatives often tried to suggest books to him that combined his parents’ two interests. This usually meant recommending the big popular philosophical titles that were a mainstay of the era, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which, Wallace noted in a letter to Washington that summer, his mother “practically rammed…up my ass.”⁶ But this wasn’t the reading he was after. Instead, the first story that, as he later put it, “rang his cherries” was Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon.” Barthelme didn’t tell straightforward stories. He sought to fracture the surface of fiction to show the underpinnings on which its illusions depended. As with other postmodernists, the point was not to make the reader forget the conventions of the charade but to see them more clearly. A truly fulfilled reader was one who always remembered he was just reading a story.

“The Balloon” is typical of Barthelme’s work. In the story, a large balloon appears over Manhattan. While it hangs above the city, various characters approach and consider it, each from his own point of view. Children jump up and down on it for fun, while adults grouse that it serves no purpose or talk about how looking at the balloon makes them feel. The police worry about the threat to public order. In the end the narrator reveals that the balloon is an artifact, something he just felt like inflating because he was lonely. This was writing that a self-described “hard-core syntax wienie” like Wallace could appreciate. It peeled back the skin of literature just as logic peeled back the skin of language. Wallace told an interviewer years later that Barthelme was the first time he heard the “click” in literature. He added that Barthelme’s sort of writing appealed to him far more than the fiction he had enjoyed in high school, writing that contented itself with telling a story. “Pretty” as Updike’s prose was, Wallace acknowledged to the interviewer, “I don’t hear the click.”

Soon another postmodern work came his way. That book was Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Charlie McLagan, a fellow student, had turned him on to Pynchon the semester before. McLagan, who was a year behind Wallace, was different from the rest of their circle. He came from a wealthy suburban Chicago family who belonged to a country club. At Amherst he kept himself apart, rooming alone in Tyler House, a distant dorm, in a room he nicknamed “the Womb” with madras prints on the wall. His two cats were named Crime and Punishment. McLagan read widely and imaginatively, and let everyone know he had sex with his girlfriend. When Wallace and Costello would go to his dorm, the three would drink gin and tonics and eat Nutter Butter cookies and listen to U2. (Wallace was delighted to find his roommate looked like the band’s guitarist, The Edge.) But when Wallace came alone, the atmosphere was more intense: despite Wallace’s effort to stop smoking pot, he and McLagan would get high together. “God damn Charlie and his damn drug-allure,” he wrote Washington that summer. The two would sometimes even drop acid, but Wallace found he preferred mushrooms. “Don’t do LSD, and don’t do coke, because they’re both dangerous and expensive in that order,” Wallace advised Washington, but “mushrooms are fun and giggly and they make you think you’re smarter than you are…which is fun for a while.” While they tripped, Wallace and McLagan would listen over and over to “The Big Ship” by Brian Eno on McLagan’s expensive stereo. McLagan heard birth in it; Wallace thought it captured the earth in the time of the dinosaurs.

One day McLagan had run into Wallace and Costello discussing One Hundred Years of Solitude and tossed them his copy of Lot 49, which they promptly read. The novel is the story of Oedipa Maas, a young woman trying to uncover a centuries-old conspiracy involving a secret postal organization known as Trystero. Maas travels around California encountering people who give her clues to the puzzle — or the whole action of the novel may be a hallucination or a hoax set in motion by an ex-boyfriend; the reader is left uncertain. One thing that caught Wallace’s eye about the book was the idea that to live in America was to live in a world of confusion, where meaning was refracted and distorted, especially by the media that engulf and reconfigure every gesture. As one character announces, pointing at a television, “It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine.”

Lot 49 was an agile and ironic metacommentary, and the effect on Wallace cannot be overstated (so much so that in a later letter to one of his editors Wallace, ever nervous of his debt to the other writer, would lie and say he had not read the book). Wallace reading Pynchon was, remembers Costello, “like Bob Dylan finding Woody Guthrie.” One postmodernist made way for another. Barthelme was hermetic, Pynchon expansive. He tried to take in the enormity of America in a way that Barthelme did not. And he showed you that the tone and sensibility of mainstream culture—Lot 49 drew its energy from pop songs, TV shows, and thrillers — could sit alongside serious issues in fiction. At the very least, the book was funny, and Wallace already knew how to be funny. The irony of the writing was a more directed version of what he and Costello had been turning out at Sabrina.

Wallace had been free of depression since the beginning of 1982, but now, twenty months later, the black hole with teeth got hold of him again. Toward the end of an otherwise happy summer, he began to have acute anxiety attacks, perhaps brought on by a feeling of letdown after his perfect semester. His life had had the quality in the past year of using one click to drown out another. He himself in later interviews would — not entirely credibly — blame the breakdown on a sudden realization that he did not want to be a professor of logic, that he had “a kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur real well for my longevity,” as he told an interviewer. The discipline suddenly seemed lifeless and pedantic to him; and his amazing grade point average was just an evasion, a reflection of his fear of dealing with living people as opposed to dry equations. “The same obsessive studying that helped me come alive,” he would later explain to an interviewer, “also kept me dead.” Whatever the onset of the attack, things got worse when a psychiatrist prescribed Tofranil, a tricyclic antidepressant, to help ease the anxiety.

Wallace hated the drug, which made him feel apathetic. He was preparing for the third leg of Kennick’s history of philosophy course, but now when he tried to read Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations—“Uncle Ludwig” in his formulation — he couldn’t focus. Wittgenstein was a core interest of Wallace’s. His father had studied with a disciple of the Austrian philosopher, as had Kennick. For a while Wallace tried to ignore the side effects. He played tennis, went to the gym, swam “a teenyweeny bit,” “farting off,” as he wrote Washington, to whom he did not at first mention the crisis. The upset was augmented by the fact that Wittgenstein seemed to be saying what he was thinking and Pynchon writing: that experience was like a game, that people were all and ever radically disconnected. Still hopeful, he went to rejoin his classmates, only to find himself falling into deeper agony.

Back at school for the fall, he found himself in an uncongenial housing situation. He and Costello, now a senior, had joined a large rooming group, some eight people divided into two suites. Wallace could not find a way to be comfortable among so many young men. The group included preppy students, who on principle rubbed Wallace the wrong way (Wallace had ended a friendship with one of his freshman stoner friends when he had joined a fraternity). His brittle balance shattered, Wallace began to withdraw into himself. He would sit quietly at the Valentine dining table in the midst of his friends’ chatter and say nothing. They would urge him to do his impersonations but he wouldn’t respond. Just as Costello had the year before, they were learning that there was another side to their friend.

Quietly, Wallace again thought about hurting himself. McLagan was on his mind. During their hours in the “womb,” Wallace had debated suicide with McLagan. Music playing, they kicked around the fate of Ian Curtis of Joy Division, who hanged himself at the age of twenty-three. In high school McLagan himself had once stood on the edge of an overpass with a bottle of champagne in his hand, contemplating throwing himself onto the Illinois Tollway. For McLagan, killing yourself could be the fitting — maybe even necessary — exit for the sensitive artist from the brutal world. Wallace, though he’d known a despair deeper than his friends could imagine, wasn’t so sure. Suicide looked to him like an escape rather than a solution. He knew depression too well to see it as glamorous. He looked around for ways to harm himself but decided instead to withdraw from school again and find a psychiatrist.

Leaving school a second time for Wallace was even more humiliating. No one had known him sophomore year; no one cared if he came or went. But by the fall of 1983 he was one of the school’s champion students. He had just won a scholarship for most promising philosophy student and would have to give the money back. The scene from sophomore year repeated itself with variations. Costello drove Wallace to Bradley Airport outside Hartford for the flight home. (The car, an AMC Pacer, would later surface, with Wallace’s mother’s Gremlin, in The Pale King.) The first time Wallace had left, a year and a half before, he had fought back tears; this time he showed little emotion. He kept telling Costello he had thought he’d had a strategy and now it was clear he had been deluding himself. For the last twenty miles he was silent and wouldn’t let Costello park the car to see him to his gate.

Wallace had told none of his other friends that he was leaving. He did not give his trust easily but felt he could bring Corey Washington into his confidence by now. So, shortly after he got home, he explained his departure in a letter: “I came very close to doing something stupid and irrevocable at Amherst but finally opted, sensibly or wimpishly, depending on whether your point of view is that of my parents or that of Charlie M[cLagan], to try to get better so that I could exist.” He added that he now found himself in the hands of a doctor he trusted. He made light of some of the revelations to his friend: “One hideous symptom of severe depression is that it is impossible both to do anything and to do nothing; as a devotee of Jumping Joe’s [their logic professor’s] Celebrated Excluded Middle I am sure you can assess that this is an Intolerable Situation.” More seriously the psychiatrist, whom Wallace nicknamed “Dr. Tetemaigrir” (French for Head Shrinker), had, he wrote Washington, “real valid and non-sterile things to say” about depression. The doctor took him off Tofranil and likely put him on a different antidepressant. Wallace was beginning to understand things that had either never been told to him before or that he was only now ready to hear: that he had a biological condition that was with him for the rest of his life. He couldn’t just ignore it. Though he shared his family’s worry that, as Amy says, “his potential as an autonomous adult was pretty much vaporizing,” Wallace began healing, the “festering pus-swollen c[h]ancre at the center of my brain” diminishing, as he wrote to Washington. He apologized for the façade he had been putting up, adding in another note, “You now see before you, indirectly at least, the real ‘Waller’: an obscurely defective commodity that has also been somewhat damaged in transit.”

Even in the midst of his depression and treatment, Wallace continued to read widely. He picked up Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and finished it in eight nights, or so he told McLagan. He wrote as well, focusing as he had not before. The work Wallace undertook now was at a different level. His hope that he could lose himself in the rigors of logical philosophy shredded, he may have felt he had no other choice. He had nowhere left to hide. In the event, he was now able to achieve things he had not before. One result was “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” the story of a young man who withdraws from college with psychiatric problems. Though it was not pure autobiography, the authorial “I” and the “I” of the narrator parallel each other in the story in a way they never would again in Wallace’s fiction; the sense of dismay at being mentally ill is fresh. The layers of asserting and then hedging those assertions to assert slightly more emphatically and imaginatively that would constitute Wallace’s style are beginning to form. For much of his story, Wallace drew on his memories of his recent traumatic breakdowns. His nameless narrator is also suffering from “the Bad Thing”—his phrase for depression. He has tried to commit suicide in his parents’ house—“a really highly ridiculous incident involving electrical appliances in the bathtub about which I really don’t wish to say a whole lot”—and at story’s beginning he finds himself in a psychiatric hospital. In the ward, Dr. Kablumbus gives the narrator a choice between electroconvulsive therapy and a course of antidepressants. The narrator chooses the latter, but the drug he is given, Tofranil, makes him feel tired and affectless, just as it had Wallace the previous summer. Still the narrator — earnest in the style of Wallace when he first entered Amherst — assures us that being medicated is not so bad. “They’re fine, really,” he claims of antidepressants, “but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously.”

A fellow patient may come to the rescue, though. In the ward the narrator meets May Aculpa, a young woman likely recycled from the story Wallace had shown Costello the year before. May Aculpa and the narrator chat and flirt, but just as a human connection is being made, the pretty young depressive is discharged, only to die in a car accident shortly after. “I tried to call May’s parents,” the narrator tells us at story’s end, “just to say that I was incredibly sorry,” but he gets the parents’ answering service.⁷

“Planet Trillaphon,” which Wallace would publish in the Amherst Review when he got back to college, is more original in subject than in style.⁸ Its structure and pacing are those of well-made student fiction; Wallace was still deconstructing existing stories trying to find what held them together. He boasted to the interviewer David Lipsky years later that his gift in college was to be “a weird kind of forger. I can sound kind of like anybody.” Here he was rifling Pynchon for names and J. D. Salinger for tone, but the Salingerian faux naïveté becomes magnified with a lens worthy of Gogol as Wallace reimagines his nightly battles with acne as something surreal:

I began to suffer from what I guess now was a hallucination. I thought that a huge wound, a really huge and deep wound, had opened on my face, on my cheek near my nose…. Right before graduation — or maybe a month before, maybe — it got really bad, such that when I’d pull my hand away from my face I’d see blood on my fingers, and bits of tissue and stuff, and I’d be able to smell the blood, too…. So one night when my parents were out somewhere I took a needle and some thread and tried to sew up the wound myself.

A literary sensibility is emerging too. The prose feels fraught and necessary. The writing conveys a sense that consciousness tricks and torments us, helps us build a wall to hide from who we are, yet at the same time the pleasure-giving power of words eases the despair of the story, along with a hope that love can rescue, a wispy hint that is quickly obliterated and will not appear in Wallace’s work again for many years.⁸

What is most original and distinctive in “Trillaphon,” though, is the precision with which the narrator captures what it is like to be deeply depressed, his skillful evocation of a state of mind he wants us urgently to understand. One would hardly mistake this for ordinary student fiction about depression, the kind the narrator dismisses as “just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies…and in a couple days it’s gone altogether.” Real depression, the narrator insists, is different:

To me it’s like being completely, totally, utterly sick. I will try to explain what I mean. Imagine feeling really sick to your stomach….[Now] imagine your whole body being sick like that…. Imagine that every cell in your body, every single cell in our body is as sick as that nauseated stomach. Not just your own cells, even, but the e. coli and lactobacilli too, the mitochondria, basal bodies, all sick and boiling and hot like maggots in your neck, your brain, all over, everywhere, in everything. All just sick as hell. Now imagine that every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick like that, sick, intolerably sick. And every proton and neutron in every atom…swollen and throbbing, off-color, sick, with just no chance of throwing up to relieve the feeling. Every electron is sick, here, twirling off balance and all erratic in these funhouse orbitals that are just thick and swirling with mottled yellow and purple poison gases, everything off balance and woozy.

But even this doesn’t capture the overwhelming experience of depression for the narrator. “The Bad Thing is you,” he concludes, echoing the caption under the Kafka picture he had on his bulletin board at home (the disease was life itself),

nothing else…you are the sickness yourself…. You realize all this, here. And that, I guess, is…when you look at the black hole and it’s wearing your face. That’s when the Bad Thing just absolutely eats you up, or rather when you just eat yourself up. When you kill yourself. All this business about people committing suicide when they’re “severely depressed”; we say, “Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!” That’s wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts…. When they “commit suicide,” they’re just being orderly.⁹

Wallace wrote Washington a bit of doggerel to herald his return for the second semester of the 1983–84 school year:

Roses are Red.

Violets are Blue;

I am well

And hope you are too.

Wittgenstein,

Was a raving fairy;

I’ll be in Amherst

In January.

Charlie McLagan, leaving his parents’ house in suburban Chicago, picked him up in Urbana and drove him east in the family’s station wagon. They listened to Joy Division and Brian Eno as they sped along the interstate. McLagan was himself taking a year off, and Wallace stayed with him and his roommate for a week in Boston. McLagan thought Wallace seemed different now — fragile, tentative, apologizing for everything he did, whether it was playing the TV too loud or using up the soap in the shower (he washed his hair with soap, not wanting to waste his friend’s shampoo). McLagan’s roommate joked to him that Wallace seemed on the point of apologizing for using the oxygen in the air. On New Year’s Eve, the three went to a nudie bar in the Combat Zone. Wallace said he found it depressing. McLagan told him he needed to toughen up. “This is reality,” he pronounced.

When the semester started, Wallace showed his new commitment to fiction. He believed that if he was going to write better, he had to study it, just as he had philosophy. So during the next two semesters he took classes in the American novel and modern British poetry, finding himself particularly drawn to Frank Norris’s ungainly naturalist novel McTeague in the former and to T. S. Eliot’s cryptic “The Waste Land” in the latter. He took a course in literary approaches and theory and reveled in Jacques Derrida’s essays, “The Double Session” and “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Norris’s novel showed how much room there was for the bizarre in fiction, even in supposedly realist works; Eliot, whose poem has dozens of famously ambiguous endnotes, suggested a place for self-consciousness in literary creativity. (Wallace would one day say that he loved endnotes because they were “almost like having a second voice in your head.”) Derrida would be the longest-lasting influence of the three. Wallace told his professor, Andrew Parker, that he was happy to find a philosopher who cared about literature.

The biggest innovation in Wallace’s life was a class in creative writing he signed up for. For him, this was an extraordinary departure. He still did not like the literary environment at school. It seemed effeminate and sensitive and self-absorbed. And then, too, he was a young man from the Midwest, and midwestern boys might teach or read or make ironic fun of novels, but they did not go to college to learn how to write them; fiction wasn’t quite school and it wasn’t quite work. Wallace’s attitude might be summed up by a comment the narrator makes in “Planet Trillaphon” about May: “She wanted to write made-up stories for a living. I said I didn’t know that could be done.”

Amherst was similarly skeptical of creative writing. The school offered only one class, under the sponsorship of the English department. That year its teacher was Alan Lelchuk, the school’s visiting writer. The veteran novelist immediately noticed the skinny boy in the back with the backward baseball cap and strong opinions. Wallace submitted a story; Lelchuk told him the writing was shallow and tricky, “philosophy with zingers.” The young man would have, Lelchuk remembers, a clever thought and then “three wise-ass sentences around it.” Lelchuk called Wallace in to discuss it with him, expecting the student might get angry and quit the class. He told Wallace that he could be a philosopher or a writer, and if he wanted to be a writer, Lelchuk could be of use; he should take the week to think about it. To his surprise, Wallace was back the next day asking for help. Lelchuk was pleased; he thought Wallace was acknowledging how much he had to learn. But privately, Wallace was seething. He was probably Amherst’s best student and expected the respect that came with that rank. He did not like to be criticized. But then Lelchuk, a realist in the style of Philip Roth, gave a reading of a portion of his new novel, Miriam in Her Forties, and Wallace relaxed. At one point an inmate has his first meal after getting out of jail and exclaims, “A mite better than prison fare.” A new punch line was born among Wallace and his friends, as Costello remembers. Looking at the weather: “A mite rainy, no?” And on the way to Valentine: “Care to get some breakfast fare?” To Wallace, Lelchuk’s effort embodied the clumsiness of mainstream realist fiction. He thought he could do better.

Lelchuk was never thrilled with Wallace’s writing, but he recognized his unusual talent and gave him an A-minus. This was the lowest grade Wallace had gotten since the first semester of his freshman year. (He would claim in a later interview that he had to write his stories once, then rewrite them more conventionally to get the grade.) Elsewhere that semester, he got A-pluses in the literary theory class, epistemology, and ethical theories, and an A in American fiction after the Civil War. He was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa and won three academic awards, one for having the highest grades for his first three years.

Back at Amherst in the fall of 1984 for his senior year, Wallace found himself with a new challenge. Costello was gone, having graduated with a double summa, said to be the first student to do so in forty years. He had written two theses, one a novel, the other a study of the New Deal. Ever competitive, Wallace decided he would match his friend. In philosophy he remained interested in the structures of language. Though fiction had taken over his enthusiasms, this highly technical subject still intrigued him and he was aware that once he graduated it would be easier to make a living in a philosophy department than writing fiction. In school he had encountered the work of Richard Taylor, a professor of philosophy at Brown University, who in 1962 had written an elegantly spare paper that argued that the future is predestined. The assertions in Taylor’s “Fatalism” weren’t philosophical in the commonly understood sense but really assertions about the implications of the logic behind language. In their contentions Wallace saw room for a thesis-length response.

Taylor’s argument went like this: Since every statement is by definition either true or false, all statements about the future are also currently either true or false. But if that’s so, then how can our actions have any causal influence over how things turn out? Aren’t we merely acting in accordance with a future that is already set in stone? One example Wallace gave in his paper was of a bomb going off at Amherst. If a terrorist were to set off a nuclear explosion at the school, then there would be a high amount of radiation on campus. So if it is true now that there will be that amount of radiation, then it must follow that a nuclear explosion will go off. Contrarily, if it is false now, then an explosion won’t go off. But since that proposition is right now either true or false, then one or the other result is already fated to occur.

Taylor’s elegant formulation seemed airtight, and if it were correct, then vast, unappealing implications followed. But perhaps even more important to Wallace was that such a simple-seeming line of reasoning — he called it “the famous and infamous Taylor argument” in his thesis — with its suggestion that free will was an illusion, constituted a sort of wormhole in the logic of the universe, and Wallace himself, always struggling with the world as it was, did not like the idea of another wormhole.

He was not the first to try to counter Taylor’s argument. He was impressed with how well it had withstood determined opposition; it would not be easy to overturn. “It’s really ulcer-city,” he wrote Professor Kennick. He chose to combat Taylor on his own linguistic and formal grounds. He asserted that Taylor had confused two slightly different forms of futurity in his paper. There is a difference, Wallace pointed out, between a future that (paradoxically) shapes the present and a future that (commonsensically) is shaped by the present. When, looking back at the past, you say either, “It was the case that X could not happen” or “It cannot be the case that X did happen,” you are actually saying slightly different things. In the first case, you are arguing controversially that events in the future constrained what happened in the past; in the second case, you are merely noting that events in the future were consistent with the past. Taylor, he believed, could only assert that the future was determined by the present, not the other way around.

Wallace wrote his philosophy papers in an informal, conversational tone, almost like offshoots of the bull sessions at Valentine. But analytic philosophy also required formal mathlike notations. Wallace, for all his gifts of mimicry, didn’t know how to do them. He had avoided straight math classes at Amherst, afraid they might lower his grade point average. He was aware how odd this looked: being good at the theory of math without being able to solve math problems. “It seems sort of cheaty,” he had written Washington his junior year, “something like throwing a girl’s skirts over her head and kissing her on the bare stomach before you’ve even introduced yourself or taken her for a malted or anything.” An undergraduate acquaintance, Jamie Rucker, helped him on some of the notations. A junior professor at Hampshire College, Jay Garfield, who was an adviser to the thesis, worked with him on the others. Wallace ended his thesis with a scold that almost sounded out of the mouth of his father: “If Taylor and the fatalists want to force upon us a metaphysical conclusion, they must do metaphysics, not semantics. And this seems entirely appropriate.” The philosophy panel awarded him a summa. He spent the remainder of the semester helping other students with their work. “It was a great year for theses,” Willem DeVries remembers.

That same fall he began his second thesis, a novel, and saw immediately that he preferred it to debunking Taylor. (He would later say that fiction took 97 percent of his brain, philosophy only 50 percent.) He already had a slight reputation on campus as a writer. He had, after consulting with his friends, published “The Planet Trillaphon” in the college literary magazine, the Amherst Review, the semester before. “As far as we know,” the editors wrote for Wallace’s author note, “he has never left this planet.” But some of the undergraduates who read the story wondered. They rightly took its portrait of a boy with depression for the autobiography it partially was. Students would see Wallace and tell their friends there was the guy who had had electroshock treatment. They showed one another an oak crossbeam in the former fraternity house for Chi Phi — the fraternities were banned from campus Wallace’s senior year — and confided knowledgeably that Wallace had tried to hang himself from it. For the first time in his life he was becoming a person of note, his reputation consisting in equal parts of his huge appetite for work and the penumbra of mental illness that hung about him.

Amherst women were becoming interested in him in particular. They admired his nonconformity and his extraordinary intelligence, and they admired how he admired them. Given purpose or courage by being a writer—“Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers,” he would write in a later essay — he began appraising them in a way he had not dared before. One, he told his friends, “applied make-up skillfully.” Another — pretty to him — had “puke-white skin.” His comment about the pale blue-green eyes of Washington’s first girlfriend was that they “needed some food coloring.” His extreme self-consciousness about his own body was turning outward, into sustained erotic — a favorite word of his — focus. He remembered that his sister’s best friend in high school was a pretty girl with really ugly feet and made the observation into a truth universally acknowledged in the novel he was starting for his thesis. He had relationships, avidly and with guilt. He began what he called his “body count.” “Smell that, Core?” he said to his friend one day in April as they walked on the green in front of the Valentine Dining Hall. “It’s springtime. The smell of cunt in the air.” He took up clove cigarettes, got headaches, took Advil, quit the cigarettes, and the headaches went away. He joked that he was responsible for most of Bayer’s profits. He would try to quit pot, then start it again, never quite admitting that he had. After getting high, he would dig up Washington and persuade him to go to the convenience store to calm his munchies. “Core,” he’d ask his friend, “don’t you want chips?” and get him to buy them for him. He had a work-study job as a telephone operator, working the 1970s-era contraption with its big square buttons. He enjoyed the jumble of voices pouring in, callers asking for directions, the campus police, or information they should already have had — he refused to give out the delivery number for the most popular pizzeria. During quiet times, he would write scenes from the novel.

Wallace also watched TV in Moore, in a common room that he told Washington smelled of the women students who worked out in it each morning. He watched his usual programs and added Late Night with David Letterman and religious programs on weekends, the latter useful for sections of the novel he had started. Mostly, though, with Costello gone and the novel moving fast, he wrote. As a senior, he was entitled to his own room and the privacy he had little of since high school. The towels came out to be spread over everything. On the wall over the desk of his single, he put the famous photograph of Thomas Pynchon as a bucktoothed undergraduate at Cornell. Most evenings Wallace could be found either at his desk or in Frost Library writing. He had gotten to know Dale Peterson, an English professor who taught a class on the literature of madness.¹⁰ Peterson — Wallace nicknamed him “Whale”—was gentle and supportive. He understood Wallace’s enormous gifts and wanted to encourage them. He became Wallace’s thesis adviser and simply let Wallace do as he wished. Wallace could feel the words pouring out, and superstitiously he tried to follow the same routines day after day to keep them coming. He had bought a motorcycle jacket from Charlie McLagan and wore it whenever he was working on the thesis, listening at one point, for example, to U2’s “MLK” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” over and over as he worked. He composed with cheap Bic pens. If he lost one that he had written well with, he would retrace his steps until he found it, then keep using it until it ran out of ink. He referred to these luck-filled pens as his “orgasm pens.”

After he had finished his first draft, he’d type it up on his Smith-Corona, making changes as he went, into the early morning. His typing was so relentless that the student in the next-door dorm room in Moore moved his bed away from their shared wall. Wallace asked Professor Kennick if he could borrow his office, to spare his neighbor the noise of his “Blob-like” and “out of control” English thesis. When McLagan asked him how things were going, Wallace told him the book was coming so fast it was like a scroll unwinding in his head; he wasn’t the author so much as the transcriber. He told Washington that during one three-hour session he had written twenty-four pages. He was so excited that when he wasn’t writing he would go to the gym and do sit-ups until he puked.

Word of his gargantuan project got out — most undergraduate English theses were fifty pages — and stoked his celebrity. He wasn’t above using his renown as a buffer for his long-standing insecurity. After one classmate beat him at tennis, Wallace invited him back to his library cubicle. “I’m writing this five-hundred-page-novel,” he bragged, and showed him his transcript for good measure.

The premise of the novel that became The Broom of the System began, he would later tell his editor, with a chance comment from a girlfriend. She had told him that she would rather be a character in a novel than a real person. “I got to wondering just what the difference was,” Wallace wrote. In addition, he had been mulling over the hoary literary advice given by Lelchuk: “Show, don’t tell.” What did that mean, really, since all writing was telling? But if words were pictures of the things they represented, wasn’t all writing also by definition showing? This last was an extension of the thinking of Ludwig Wittgenstein (“Uncle Ludwig”), whose explorations of the relationship between language and reality were becoming more and more interesting to Wallace. His enthusiasm for technical philosophy was declining, and Wittgenstein was filling the gap. The Viennese philosopher had written two very different treatises on language. In one, as a young man, he wrote that language mirrors reality, that the concept of an abstract thought is meaningless — words correspond to reality in the same way that a photograph corresponds to the thing photographed. The concomitant of this idea, in Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic vision, is that you can with certainty know nothing outside of yourself. This identification—“the loss of the whole external world,” as Wallace put it to a later interviewer — frightened him but also intrigued him deeply. He considered the opening statement of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which Wittgenstein laid out this thesis, one of the two “most beautiful opening lines in Western Lit”: “The world is everything that is the case.”¹¹ Language — and by extension thought — only had dominion over things of which we can have direct sensual knowledge. The Tractatus’s preface begins, “This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it — or similar thoughts.” If the Tractatus wasn’t calling out for him, nothing was.

But he also knew that Wittgenstein had gone on to reverse his early thinking and come later to the idea that language was communal, a Ponzi scheme based on shared acceptance; language, in Wittgenstein’s later appraisal, was like a game. This point of view also spoke to Wallace, with its invitation to unleash his sense of humor and verbal playfulness. Later, Wallace would make the issues Wittgenstein raised in him seem trite and funny. To an interviewer he would describe Broom as banal, a covert autobiography, “the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who’s just had this midlife crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction…which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6°F calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct.” But at the time the implications of Wittgenstein’s theories were very alive for him. After all, late Wittgenstein was Wallace well; early Wittgenstein, the author depressed.

Wallace’s fictional manuscript and the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it and even altered it. Does our understanding of what we experience derive from objective reality or from cognitive limitations within us? Is language a window or a cage? Of course, Wallace, with his mental travails, wanted a real and truthful view, or at least a benign and playful illusion. There was a favorite example of the vibrant bond between language and objects that Wallace and his friends kicked around in Valentine. Which was the more important part of a broom, the brush or the handle? Most people would say the brush, but it really depended on what you needed the broom for. If you wanted to sweep, then indeed the bristles were the important part; but if you had to break a window, then it was the handle.

Wallace set his story in the near future, 1990, and to give these sorts of philosophical questions an airing, he created twenty-four-year-old Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, a recent graduate of Oberlin College (though all her female relatives went to Mount Holyoke and all her male ones to Amherst). Like Wallace in college, Lenore is a switchboard operator. And like women in general to Wallace, she is a mystery, a cipher, an erotic object for the male eye. Dressed in a “uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse hightop sneakers,” she is “an unanalyzable and troubling constant,” an uncomfortable soul who “works in neurosis like a whaler in scrimshaw.” At root what worries her is whether she is real or made up. As her boyfriend, Rick Vigorous (Amherst, class of ’69), comments:

She simply felt — at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinct intuitive moments — as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control.

Lenore comes by this anxiety through her genes: her great-grandmother and namesake, Lenore Beadsman, now in her nineties and in a local nursing home, studied with Wittgenstein, from whom she adopted his radically potent idea of the independence of language.¹² Says Rick:

She has, from what little I can gather, convinced Lenore that she is in possession of some words of tremendous power. No, really, Not things, or concepts. Words. The woman is apparently obsessed with words. I neither am nor wish to be entirely clear on the matter, but apparently she was some sort of phenomenon in college and won a place in graduate study at Cambridge…. There she studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equaled being clogged with linguistic sediment. To me, the whole thing smacks strongly of bullshit.

He adds, “Words and a book and a belief that the world is words and Lenore’s conviction that her own intimate personal world is only of, neither by nor for, her. Something is not right.”

At novel’s beginning, the older Lenore has disappeared from her nursing home, taking with her many of the other residents. She has left behind a clue, a drawing of a head bursting, as a guide to her whereabouts. Lenore pursues her forebear, Oedipa Maas — like, as she tries to figure out where her great-grandmother went and how this relates to her ontological unease. To accompany Lenore, Wallace gave her a parrot based on his thesis adviser Dale Peterson’s cockatiel, now reimagined as the horrible bird Vlad the Impaler, who quotes scripture and bits of dirty conversation he overhears.

There is another character of importance to Wallace, LaVache Stonecipher. Lenore’s brother, LaVache is a depressive and brilliant Amherst undergraduate, who helps other students with their schoolwork in return for drugs that he hides in his artificial leg. (Wallace claimed that he traded thesis help for pot in school.) LaVache is the cleverest character in the book, smart enough to put Wittgenstein to his own uses. He, for instance, calls his phone “a lymph node,” so that when his father, whom he wishes to avoid, asks if he has a phone, he can honestly say no. Unlike his sister, Lenore, LaVache is protected by his irony and his distance, but simultaneously he is trapped, marginal, without a center: he literally barely has a leg to stand on. He exudes what Wallace would later call “the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature.” “No one expects me to be anything other than what I am,” LaVache says, “which is a waste-product, slaving endlessly to support his leg.” It is hard not to see in him a foreshadowing of Wallace’s soon to be deepening problems. The novel’s title came from a phrase Sally Wallace remembered from her grandmother, who when she would encourage her children to eat an apple would say, “Come on, it’s the broom of the system.” With its overtones of Wittgenstein, the image delighted Wallace.

If Wittgenstein was the obvious philosophical point of departure for Wallace’s book, the literary influences were even clearer. Wallace had a technical mind, and in Broom he reverse-engineers the postmodern novels he was enjoying. The overwhelming influence is Pynchon: from him come the names, the ambience of low-level paranoia, and the sense of America as a toxic, media- and entertainment-saturated land. He took the flat, echoing tone of his dialogue from Don DeLillo, whose novels he had been reading while working on the book. (One night a friend who did part-time work as an Amherst security guard bumped into him at his switchboard working his way through Ratner’s Star.)¹³ The minute, flirtatious appraisal of women seems borrowed from Nabokov, himself a teacher of Pynchon. The farrago of forms — stories within stories, transcripts of meetings, duty logs, rock medleys, and madcap set pieces — comes from Pynchon too, as well as from other postmodernists like Barthelme and John Barth. When Lenore points out that East Corinth, the suburb of Cleveland she lives in, is meant to look like the outline of Jayne Mansfield seen from the air, it is hard not to think of Oedipa Maas getting her first look at San Narciso, the imaginary city near Los Angeles, which, she muses, resembles a transistor radio circuit board with its “intent to communicate.”¹⁴

Pynchon saturates the book’s DNA: he is in the atmosphere of not quite serious corporate intrigue, in the meetings in obscure bars, and the psychiatrists more in need of help than their patients (Dr. Jay shares Lot 49’s Dr. Hilarius’s “delightful lapses from orthodoxy”), so much so that when Wallace gave his manuscript to McLagan, he read a few pages and returned it; he did not have time for a Pynchon rip-off. And yet McLagan was too dismissive. The book is original. It differs from Pynchon in delicate but pervasive ways. Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas is emotionless, surfing above dysfunctional America with a light 1960s sense of indestructibility. By contrast Wallace’s Lenore—“a beautiful, bright, witty, largely joyful albeit troubled and anyway interestingly troubled” girl, as Dr. Jay describes her — strives for contact.¹⁵ There is an ache in Broom. If on the surface even lighter than the Pynchon novel, just a bit below it exudes discomfort and yearning. Wallace’s anxiety, his fear of a world in which nothing is rooted, and his intense attempts to understand what women want and how to form a relationship with them (“How do you know when you can kiss her?”) are apparent. The borderline between the self and the other preoccupies: Rick Vigorous’s penis is too small to have sex with Lenore; another character, Norman Bombardini, is so vast he literally tries to eat her, while Lenore herself almost seems as incorporeal as her great-grandmother. The bizarre up-and-down of Wallace’s Amherst life is there too, the school that for Wallace, as for Vigorous, was “a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of mood with the paddle of Immoderation.” Wallace would in future years dismiss the book as written by “a very smart fourteen-year-old,” but that is unfair: this adolescent is not just smart; he is attempting to communicate.

In the late spring of 1985 Dale Peterson and the other members of Wallace’s thesis panel gave Broom an A-plus, and Wallace matched Costello double summa for double summa. But he had also discovered something more important about himself — he knew now what he wanted to do. Fiction held him as no other effort had; it took him out of time and released him from some of the pain of being himself. He told his roommate that when he was writing, “I can’t feel my ass in the chair.” On a visit to campus the spring of Wallace’s senior year, Costello bumped into Kennick walking across the college green. “Costello? Wallace’s friend, right?” The professor commanded, “Tell him he must study philosophy.” Costello passed on the message to Wallace, who shrugged it off.