Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (30 page)

Both in therapy, they spent a lot of their time discussing their painful pasts and how they had come to be the way they were—a catalog of ex-lovers and family, with Wallace focused on Karr and his mother. They talked about wanting community and children. Kymberly was astonished at the intense way Wallace listened. He had become interested in Buddhism through a woman he met in Syracuse and gave Kymberly works on the religion that had been suggested to him, plus the Big Book. One day Victoria Harris found them deep in conversation on the couch in the Harrises’ living room. “Stop talking about your relationship and start having it!” she admonished them.

Michael Pietsch read the portion of
Infinite Jest
that Wallace sent as soon as he got it in May 1993. He made his way through the 750 pages Wallace had mailed off and responded just as Wallace was getting ready to leave Syracuse. His letter was remarkably insightful, given how little time he’d been able to spend thinking about the partial manuscript of a very complicated book:

Pietsch wrote Wallace that he was “seriously loving being inside” the “huge roiling story about addiction and recovery, their culture and language and characters, the hidden world that’s revealed when people come in and tell their stories.” But he also saw a major problem on the horizon: length. Good as it was, the book was on its way to being too long. Wallace had tried to trick him with narrow margins and a tiny font in sending the first 400,000 words, but Pietsch had pulled out a calculator and tallied that if what he had on his desk was two-thirds of the finished book,
Infinite Jest
would be twelve hundred pages, at the least. He doubted the marketability of such a tome. “This should not,” he lectured Wallace, “be a $30 novel so thick readers feel they have to clear their calendars for a month before they buy it.” He urged Wallace to “try cutting now,” even while he finished his story. His other major editorial worry related to the physics of reading. The fragmentary structure of the book—three plot strands that seemed to come to the fore and then recede without pattern—was a lot. A little structural innovation was enriching, but too much and you lost the reader entirely. This was a harder problem for Wallace to solve, because the book consistently confounded the reader’s expectations on purpose. If reality was fragmented, his book should be too. It was also in keeping with Wallace’s insistence that the story not be so amusing that it re-create the
disease he was diagnosing. It must not hook readers too easily, must not allow them to fall into the literary equivalent of “spectation.”
Infinite Jest
had to be, as he subtitled it, “a failed entertainment.” To the extent the novel was addictive, it should be self-consciously addictive. That was one reason he’d structured the story like a Sierpinski gasket, a geometrical figure that can be subdivided into an infinite number of identical geometrical figures. The shape of the book—following Wallace’s natural cast of mind—was recursive, nested. Big things—
Infinite Jest
, a novel you keep having to reread to understand—find their counterpart in smaller things: “Infinite Jest,” the video cartridge, which itself plays in an endless loop. One character fears she is blind, so she never opens her eyes. Another has an answering machine message that is like one of those infinite man-holding-a-book-whose-cover-is-the-man-holding-a-book visual regressions: “This is Mike Pemulis’s answering machine’s answering machine.” The effect is to emphasize the characters’ isolation, their lives in a funhouse that isn’t all that fun. As in
Broom
, the apparent casualness of the structure was intensely thought through.

What Pietsch found most off-putting was the political overlay Wallace had given the book centering on the attempts by Quebecois terrorist groups to wrest back their province from O.N.A.N. “Almost everything that matters emotionally works without reference to the time frame or the interAmerican huggermugger,” Pietsch noted, wondering about the necessity of what he called “the ornately bizarre-to-goofy superstructure” of the book. He warned, “the dog is awfully shaggy already.” The letter left Wallace upset and unsatisfied. “He seemed to agree with most of it, glumly,” Pietsch scribbled on a copy of the letter he later sent to Nadell.

Wallace had not been waiting for Pietsch’s response to resume writing. By the time he left for Illinois in July 1993, as he later told an interviewer, he had reached the scene in which Gately is shot protecting his charges at Ennet House, nearly three-quarters of the way through the story. Likely Wallace had more in rougher form. But the combination of the memo and the move to Illinois deflated him. He was home in Illinois again, or nearly, and near home he often found his momentum dissipating. He spent many summer days staring at the ceiling of his new home. He asked a friend from Syracuse to call him every night to make sure he had written, hoping that guilt would spur him to productivity, but the trick did not work.

Wallace had been stumped in a similar way when he moved to Syracuse, and he drew again on the patience and endurance he had learned in recovery to try to get past the roadblock. But as he was settling down to get back to work, a distracting nonfiction project came his way. The editors at
Harper’s
were longtime fans of his writing. In 1991, they had published “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” his fanciful remembrance of his high school sports life, and, a year later, an adept parody of John Updike’s Rabbit books called “Rabbit Resurrected.” Updike had been an early love of Wallace’s, before he had awoken to literature, and even now he was stunned by the grace and ease with which Updike wrote. But as he’d changed his attitude toward his own work he had reconceived of Updike as part of the American problem, and of Rabbit Angstrom, his principal character, as symptomatic of the prison of self-absorption and egoism that afflicted so many Americans. There was nothing outside his priapic neediness. Rabbit had died in the fourth installment in the series,
Rabbit at Rest
, published in 1990. Wallace imagined the next chapter in the pages of
Harper’s
, resurrecting Rabbit into “a solipsist’s heaven, full of his own dead perceptions.” Rabbit asks, “Would there be vaginas, where he was going, vaginas finally freed from the shrill silly vessels around them, bodiless, pungent, and rubicund, swaddled in angelic linen…the odd breast or two, detached, obliging?”

Despite not having taken his television essay, the
Harper’s
editors were again on the lookout for assignments to give Wallace. So, soon after they learned he was returning to the Midwest, they asked him if he wanted to go to the state fair. The fair was a massive event, with thousands of booths and tens of thousands of visitors attending its 4H shows, dance competitions, and junior boxing tournaments. Wallace hesitated. He worried that he had never done reporting—to his mind the failed pornography piece no longer counted. But he was intrigued too, eager to make some money, and happy for the chance to escape his own head and see a different side of his native region.

Wallace cast around for someone to go with him, asking Costello, Charlie and Victoria Harris, and in the end chose their daughter, whom he then barely knew. In August, in the sweltering Midwest summer heat, he and Kymberley drove to Springfield, the state capital. At the fair, they visited the Horse Complex and the Swine Barn, and then went on to the
amusement ride section. Harris took a ride called the Zipper, a steel cage that spun at the end of a long elevated arm. Wallace was not thrilled to watch his new friend get lifted away, and was thoroughly mortified when the ride operators—he called them “carnies”—kept flipping the cage around to make Harris’s skirt fall up. When they finally brought her back to earth, Wallace was furious. He wanted to press charges. Harris told him it was no big deal, but Wallace remained upset. Harris went home the next day, and Wallace continued his reporting. He chatted with the local evangelists and watched a car race without interest (“Certain cars pass other cars, and some people cheer when they do”). A dance competition touched him more deeply, when he saw how sincere was the pleasure the ordinary midwestern couples took in it, a moment worthy of
Sullivan’s Travels
.

Back home in Bloomington, surrounded by his
Infinite Jest
research material, he sat down to try to organize his notes. He put a layer of myth over his experience. In Wallace’s telling, the Illinois fair grew increasingly Boschian as the days went on. Drawing on his gift for comic exaggeration and not particularly worried by veracity, by the end, bald men farted as they arm-wrestled, vomit spewed from the mouths of patrons being spun in the Ring of Fire, and, at the “Illinois State Jr. Baton-Twirling Finals,” the insanity reaches a kind of climax as

Harris became an old heartthrob, someone who “worked detasseling summer corn with me in high school.” She was in real life neither “a Native Companion,” as Wallace called her in the article, nor a graduate of Urbana High—that was more Susie Perkins or his sister. And when it was time for Native Companion to speak, Wallace gave Harris the voice of the woman whose star still twinkled over his head. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” Native Companion reproofs the upset Wallace after being exposed during the Zipper ride, “it was fun—son of a bitch spun that car
sixteen
times…. Buy me some pork skins, you dipshit.”

Wallace took pleasure in writing the piece. For him, the challenge in nonfiction was always what to leave out, but the state fair was a subject with natural boundaries and one that invited a light style that moved to bigger, more serious questions: What made Americans so obsessed with entertainment? Could whatever void they were trying to plug ever be filled? It helped that at the fair the people were gluttons and the animals miserable. It was another chance to assert the thesis of
Infinite Jest
, to anatomize the unending American quest for distraction, the failure of his countryman, as Remy Marathe, the Quebecois terrorist agent,
²
says in
Infinite Jest
, “Choose with care. You are what you love. No?”
³

Shortly after, Wallace sent in his long draft, several times the possible length of the piece. Colin Harrison, the editor, set to work cutting with Wallace. The process reminded Harrison of a game of tennis, the prospective edits turning into “here’s-what-I-think, what-do-you-think rallies that sometimes went on for many minutes,” as he wrote in a remembrance, and ended with a cut accepted or partially accepted or traded off for a cut somewhere else. Wallace was strategic and aggressive, but when he lost a point, he moved on. Together they shortened the piece almost by half. Harrison, an experienced editor, was aware that Wallace sometimes embellished. At one point, he asked Wallace if a vial of crack that Wallace reported had fallen out of the pocket of a young man on the Zipper had really “direct-hit a state trooper alertly eating a Lemon Push-Up on the midway below.” Wallace was coy. “I’m going to give you this one,” Harrison remembers saying. He wanted Wallace to pursue his comic vision. “I drank the Kool-Aid,” he recalls. So if Wallace wrote it, it aided the narrative energy, and could not be disproven when the piece was fact-checked, it could run.
⁴
,
⁵

The article, which came out the next July, also unveiled a new Wallace to readers, neither the creator of elaborate fictional worlds nor the Cavellian essayist but someone more of a piece with the characters in his fiction. At one point, Wallace describes being too afraid to go into the Poultry Building, explaining that as a child he had once been attacked by a chicken “without provocation, flown at and pecked by a renegade fowl, savagely, just under the right eye.” The story was likely made up, but its exaggerated stance toward the traumas of childhood captured something readers began to want from him. They, too, this affluent and confused
generation, had felt the large reverberations inherent in small events. That Wallace was a slightly more neurotic version of his reader helped forge a bond, a bond that would carry over when he published his very big novel.

For the fall 1993 semester, Wallace was assigned a fiction workshop for undergraduates and another for more advanced writers, mostly graduate students. He taught around thirty pupils in all. He gave his classes in Stevenson Hall, a midcentury building that hummed with overhead lights. Claiming that his time as a security guard at Lotus had made fluorescent lighting unbearable for him, he asked his students to bring in lamps, creating a cocktail lounge atmosphere in the classroom. Then, with the excuse that there were not enough plugs for them, he moved the class to his home, where the students made themselves comfortable amid
The Compendium of Drug Therapy
and
Psychiatric Nursing
and wondered at the junior circuit tennis championship chart on his wall. In his bandana and untied work boots, a cup at hand to spit into, he was like no professor they had ever met. During smoking breaks, he would go to the bathroom and brush his teeth.