Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (46 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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