Read what follows with a stern caveat emptor in mind, for it has been written by an unabashed David Foster Wallace fanboy, one of those forlorn, bespectacled young men covertly handed a copy of Infinite Jest in his formative years, and who subsequently recited passages from the novel the way early Christians, hiding in dim catacombs, must have read with secret, feverish ecstasy from the epistles of Paul. You know the kind: mop-haired hipsters dragging themselves through The Broom of the System, Wallace’s first novel, getting their angry fix from the essays of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. I was one of them. I am one of them still.
For a while in the mid-aughts, I drifted from the Wallace tribe. He’d published a short story collection, Oblivion, and a book about set theory (nonfiction, obvs) called Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. I was waiting for the next novel, though, a successor to Infinite Jest that would somehow trump Infinite Jest. What was taking him so damn long?
But then, on September 14, 2008, I got an email with the subject heading “so sad.” It was from the college friend who’d first pressed Infinite Jest into my hands, back in the days when I thought American fiction began with Ernest Hemingway and ended with Raymond Carver, back when I actually imagined (oh, youth!) that postmodernism was no more than the cerebral onanism of Donald Barthelme and his metafictional myrmidons: Look, Ma, I broke down the fourth wall!
The old college chum waxed poetic in the aforementioned email about having first read Infinite Jest: “Like coming home to a stiff drink or other drug of your choice after a long hard day or week, it was something I’d look forward to regularly. I’d never read something that so continually blew me away, in a variety of ways, despite being as challenging as it was.” Then, turning suddenly to anger, he chastised those who mistook Wallace’s textual experimentations for the sort of postmodern trickery he’d so thoroughly and explicitly renounced: “Fuck James Wood [The New Yorker’s resident critic] for ignoring this man’s intense effort to communicate human emotion and instead pigeonholing him as a po-mo, ironic, long-winded whatever.”
I understood neither the fury nor sentimentalism of this Sunday morning e-missive. But then I opened the paper and grasped at once what was “so sad.” The headline read, “David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46.” He had been suffering from depression for years, and in 2007 had jettisoned his medication. The ground opened up, and the bottomless darkness swallowed him whole. On the evening of September 12, Karen Green, his wife, went for a walk. “After [she] left, Wallace went into the garage and turned on the lights,” writes D.T. Max in Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace. “He wrote her a two page note. Then he crossed through the house to the patio, where he climbed onto a chair and hanged himself.”
In that brightly lit garage, his wife would eventually find the fragments of a novel long in the making, which Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown, Michael Pietsch, cobbled together into The Pale King. The novel—Wallace’s finest, IMHO, and if you’ve read this far, I am guessing you care at least a teensy bit about what my HO might be—was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, but the committee did not award a fiction prize that year, spinelessly forgoing the opportunity to bestow a well-deserved posthumous honor to a writer who’d never been feted, for whatever reason, on the literary prize circuit. Then again, the Pulitzer board had rescinded the 1974 prize for Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow because some Puritan couldn’t countenance the vision of Tyrone Slothrop’s tumescent member. And when one considers the middling talents who have won the Pulitzer and that Pynchon was Wallace’s foremost literary influence, maybe the snub was a more significant commendation.
Since the arrival of The Pale King, Wallace’s estate and Pietsch have published several books: This Is Water, the philosophical and quietly rousing commencement address Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005; Signifying Rappers, the superannuated but amusing pop-culture treatise he wrote about hip-hop with his college friend Mark Costello; Both Flesh and Not, a collection of lesser-known essays; Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will, a discussion of the philosopher Richard Taylor written when Wallace was in college, where he studied literature and philosophy.
Now comes The David Foster Wallace Reader, a big and handsome tome with selections from both his fiction and nonfiction, as well as a smattering of teaching materials that include discussions with his mother about the finer points of English grammar (e.g., the pesky lie/lay dichotomy). Its selections were chosen by 24 editorial advisers, but the project unquestionably belongs to Pietsch. Now the chief of the Hachette publishing behemoth, he seems to approach the posthumous publication of Wallace’s work with the zeal of a missionary looking over a sea of heathens. Wallace’s death was an abomination he could not prevent, but he will not allow the man’s work to pass into oblivion.
But do we need The David Foster Wallace Reader? According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, probably not. Though the book seems like a Christmas gift in the making, it contains almost no new work. But I think I get what Pietsch is doing here, and I am all for it. You need evidence of miracles for sainthood; you need something only marginally more mundane to sustain a bid for lasting literary greatness, for entrance into that pantheon protected from the vicissitudes of literary taste. This is part of that effort, a reminder of how good Wallace could be, whether he was writing about Kafka or the Illinois State Fair, whether he was making stuff up or trying to see things as they actually are.
I don’t mean that his writing is flawless. In fact, the flaws are all too obvious: a charming loquacity that could lapse into annoying logorrhea, an inability to fashion anything resembling plot, and, most damning, the inability to resolve the question of irony, namely whether it was a useful strategy or a dangerous disguise. Some were simply “allergic” to his style, which in both the fiction and nonfiction scrambled technical jargon with mall-escalator colloquialisms. The novelist Richard Ford once told me that he tried reading Infinite Jest but saw no point in continuing after a while: “OK, that’s enough,” he remembered thinking as he closed the book.
But those who love Wallace overlook those faults. His voice seems geared to the overeducated American college graduate plodding toward adulthood, tired of sarcasm but resorting to it too often, suspicious of belief but desperate for faith, awash in meanings but lacking Meaning. He is the slightly older, vastly smarter friend who’d break it all down over a joint; I don’t think his ever-present bandanna and stubble, which lent him the aura of a New Age guru, were accidental vestments.
Infinite Jest, with every declarative statement beginning with the pronoun that: Wallace did not subscribe to Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of fiction, wherein the unsaid was the greater part of artistry. If Wallace had written “Hills Like White Elephants,” it would have been an incredibly frank, convoluted and informed (not to mention unbelievably verbose and sometimes even weirdly jaunty) debate about abortion, not a sparse short story about the same. Indeed, Wallace’s work can sometimes take on the voice of a plainspoken prophet, as in these passages from
That cockroaches can, up to a certain point, be lived with.
That “acceptance” is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
That different people have radically different ideas of basic personal hygiene.
…
That it is permissible to want.
That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn’t necessarily perverse.
That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels.
It’s a long way from cockroaches to angels. You might say that Wallace was one of the few writers equipped to travel the distance.
Wallace grew up in a small Illinois town that he called in one essay (“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”) “a tiny collection of corn silos and war-era Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbana’s university.” His father, Jim, was one of those academics, teaching philosophy at the University of Illinois. His mother, Sally, taught English at Parkland College. If one of the Wallace children made a grammatical error at dinner, she would lapse into a paroxysm of coughing until the error was caught and corrected. Max writes in his biography of Wallace that “he would later tell interviewers of his memory of his parents lying in bed, holding hands, reading Ulysses to each other.” In other words, a family as average as the Joneses.
Jim Wallace had gone to Amherst College; Wallace fils went there, too. Though signs of mental distress had shown themselves earlier, in the form of childhood anxiety, they now blossomed like black flowers. He had to take time off from school in 1982, then again in 1983. During the second of these depressive episodes, he read Gravity’s Rainbow and wrote a short story called “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing.” Trilafon is an antipsychotic medication. You have surely divined, already, the nature of “the Bad Thing.”
“Trillaphon” was published in the Amherst Review, and more recently in Tin House, but appears here for the first time for popular consumption in book form. It inaugurates The David Foster Wallace Reader with these ominous words: “I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, 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.” This is juvenilia, sure, but it is revealing. “Everything in you is sick and grotesque,” Wallace writes in “Trillaphon” of the depression that never relinquished its hold on him. This slight story may be the most personally revealing thing he ever wrote.
After graduating from Amherst, Wallace decided to get a graduate degree in creative writing. He was admitted to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but chose the program at the University of Arizona instead, where, according to Max, he “wouldn’t have to come out writing like John Cheever”—a horrifying thought, much as I adore the Ovid of Ossining. He acquired an agent who managed to sell his first novel, The Broom of the System, to Viking’s Gerry Howard.
Trying to choose a representative selection from one of Wallace’s three novels (average length: 717 pages) is like trying to choose a single boulder to capture the feeling of climbing Mount Everest. There are only about 40 pages of Broom here, which Howard notes in his afterword is “a novel of ideas, most of them deriving from the gnomic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein,” a collegiate favorite of Wallace’s. The whimsical names of the characters (Biff Diggerence, Vance Vigorous, Candy Mandible) hint at Pynchon’s influence. Published in 1986, the novel clashed with the superficial Brat Pack style that had recently come to reign over American fiction. Wallace made Bret Easton Ellis, whose Less Than Zero had come out the year before, seem like a coke-addled interloper in literature’s grand cathedral, kind of amusing but totally ephemeral. “Clearly Mr. Wallace possesses a wealth of talents,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, though she worried that the 24-year-old novelist was too enamored of his own intelligence. The same charge would hound Wallace for the rest of his life.
In 1989, Wallace published the short story collection Girl With Curious Hair, two stories from which are in the Reader (“Little Expressionless Animals” and “My Appearance”). The experimental stories inflated his reputation as a Serious Young Talent (as the capitalization-prone Wallace might have put it), but they left me impressed yet unmoved. Though their preoccupation with sincerity in an age of screens—because aren’t screens just masks?—is central to Wallace’s oeuvre, this concern finds fuller expression in his novels than in his stories—and there are several included in the Reader from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999) and Oblivion (2004). He was a better marathoner than sprinter. In an essay called “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed” (yup, it’s in the Reader), Wallace noted that “the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression.” Kafka could compress meaning into a single gut-punch of a paragraph; Wallace needed the arc of hundreds of pages to make his point.