Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (14 page)

The page from Penguin’s winter 1987 catalog promised “an ambitious, irreverent novel that speaks to the anxieties and concerns of a new generation,” but trade magazine reviews of
Broom
failed to spot what was special about Wallace.
Kirkus Reviews
, for instance, dismissed the author as “a puerile Pynchon, a discount Don DeLillo,” though conceding he was “even a bit of an original.” Walden read the review to Wallace over the phone, sending her boyfriend into a tailspin. “The guy seemed downright angry at having been made to read the thing,” an upset Wallace complained to Howard afterward. He took particular issue with the reviewer’s characterization of the ellipses in quotes to denote a non-response that Howard had warned him against overusing as “pseudo-Wittgensteinian” pauses. “If the technique is a rip-off of anyone it’s of Manuel Puig,” he noted. The book was officially published on January 6, 1987, and came with a nasty surprise. Viking Penguin sent Wallace a bill for $324.51 for his reversal of some of the copyedits. He was incensed. “Maybe,” he wrote Howard, “they never found out that the copy editor had a wild hair up every orifice of his/her body? I can’t see any way that I made 300 bucks worth of my own whimsical corrections in galleys.”

Post-publication book reviewers were kinder than
Kirkus
. If they didn’t exactly see
Broom
as a portent, they at least tended to appreciate that a writer in his mid-twenties was reviving some of the energies of postmodern fiction in the midst of the entropic wasteland of minimalism. The
Washington Post Book World
put its review of
Broom
on its front page, declaring it “a hot book…a terrific novel.” The
New York Times
Book Review
proclaimed the book

But the review’s author, Caryn James, didn’t like the ending of the book, in which a “tortured running joke turns into a contrived explanation and
characters we expect to appear never show up.” Other reviewers filed in in similar fashion: exuberant versus sloppy, homage versus theft. Wallace was particularly hurt by the review in the daily
New York Times
by Michiko Kakutani. Many first-time authors would have been excited to be written up by a critic known for spotting young talent. Her praise of Wallace’s “rich reserves of ambition and imagination” was flattering, to be sure, but Wallace told a friend he hid in his room for two days and cried after reading yet another paragraph devoted to parallels between his first book and Pynchon’s most popular novel. “I didn’t think the review was all that favorable,” Wallace wrote Howard afterward. “But if you and Bonnie think it’s nice, I’m more than happy to see it that way.” To Howard he noted in general that the reviews had him “kind of down.”

A film company, Alliance Entertainment, optioned the book for $10,000. There was talk that Terry Gilliam, famous for the near-future satire
Brazil
, a movie Wallace had loved, might want to direct it. Wallace took a try at writing a treatment in the winter of 1987, simplifying the plot and minimizing the philosophical underpinnings. The story, he wrote in the précis, “is one not only about coming of age, but also about romantic love, and familial love, and the reconciliation of the heroine’s present with her past, and how these three sub-elements relate to the process of ‘growing up’ in particular and being a person in general.” “Bonnie,” he wrote, “I’ve never had more difficulty and less fun working on anything in my life. This project is dead to me, and my head is full of fiction.” He joked that if she would write the screenplay she could have the money.

For all the misgivings and the mixed reviews,
Broom
made its mark. A consensus among critics emerged that Wallace was a writer worth paying attention to, if for no other reason than as a corrective to the literary brat pack of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, as well as the short-story writer Tama Janowitz. Some readers may even have seen the “portent” Howard did, the emergence of a new, youthful self-questioning sensibility. Penguin printed fourteen thousand copies of the paperback and went back to press for more. One indication of the book’s standing was that the
Wall Street Journal
ran a short profile of Wallace entitled “A Whiz Kid and His Wacky First Novel.” “You would think that a brilliant young man who had produced his first novel before commencement would forgo more classes, but this one is not only well-educated, he is smart,” the writer began. Wallace
responded to Nadell, “Nice, in a condescending way. I kept getting the impression that my hair was being affectionately ruffled by an elderly relative.”

Another sign of the growing interest in Wallace’s writing that spring was an invitation to participate in a reading at the West Side Y in Manhattan. Other authors reading that night would be T. C. Boyle, Laurie Colwin, and Frank Conroy. Wallace had never performed at such a large or important gathering, and thinking about it terrified him. “I’m so nervous about the reading,” he wrote Nadell just beforehand, “I can hardly breathe.” The night of the event he went to a dinner with the other authors at a Chinese restaurant in the west 60s. He quietly excused himself several times to throw up in the bathroom.

At the theater, the writers read in alphabetical order, so Wallace’s nervousness had time to swell, as Gerry Howard looked on with worry. Finally Wallace’s turn came. Howard introduced him, Wallace stood up on the stage, very slowly poured himself a glass of water, took a sip, put it down, and, smacking his lips, said, “Aaaah.” “You know,” he told the audience, “I always wanted to do that.” Peals of laughter. Wallace opened the book and read one of the stories within a story that Rick Vigorous tells to Lenore, in which a child’s crying unleashes a chain of improbable, catastrophic events. The audience loved the bravura homage to and parody of John Irving and sensed the young writer’s charisma, participating in the pleasure he took in having surmounted his own anxiety. Howard thought the performance was “maybe the best reading I’ve ever seen.” A Penguin publicist wrote Nadell a few days afterward to assure her she had nothing to worry about. For his part, Wallace wondered what had gone on. “The reading went really well,” he reported to Nadell, “and I had a marvelous time on stage (a bit disturbing).”
²⁴

As Wallace began his last semester at Arizona, things between him and Gale Walden reached a breaking point. School would end soon and what was ahead was blank. Wallace wasn’t clear on what he wanted, unless it was to be left alone—except when he didn’t. He drank and got high a lot, which was helpful in keeping Walden at a distance. They decided to get married—Walden says Wallace wanted to elope—but by late spring it was clear no
wedding was going to take place. “I guess the engagement is more or less off,” he wrote to Nadell in mid-April, whatever relief he felt buried under a sense of being wronged; “it’s hard to be engaged to someone who won’t speak to you.”

Weighing Wallace down was the growing certainty that he would soon be a professional writing teacher. Income from
Broom
, he knew, would not support even his modest needs. “Writing means teaching,” he told anyone who would listen. But if he needed to teach, the past year had also taught him to be careful how much. Dale Peterson at Amherst held out the prospect of a part-time engagement. Wallace was interested; he had turned down a tenure-track job offer from Northwestern (or so he wrote Peterson, though the school has no record of it and it seems unlikely). The prospect of being back where
Broom
had unscrolled held special appeal. “Could you give me a general idea about the whole thing’s modal status?” he followed up in the spring. Peterson said to be patient; it would take time to get his protégé the appointment.

In April Wallace was the subject of a profile in
Arrival
, a small glossy magazine based in Berkeley. The article, written by a friend of Nadell’s, carried a photo of Wallace in a saguaro cactus–dotted desert, dressed in jeans and a checked button shirt. His arms dangled loosely, as if ready to grab his gun. “Hang ’Im High” was the title. Clearly, there was a new sheriff in FictionTown, USA. In the article, Wallace made evident his disdain for the workshop writing he had spent the past two years battling. “I’m not interested in fiction that’s only worried about capturing reality in an artful way,” he asserted. “What pisses me off about so much fiction these days is that it’s just boring.”

Alongside the profile,
Arrival
published a sample of Wallace’s work, the story “Lyndon,” a fictionalized biography of the thirty-sixth American president in the style of Robert Coover’s 1977 novel
The Public Burning
, which Wallace had read shortly before. Wallace fabricated an aide to LBJ named David Boyd and gave him a male lover, anachronistically dying of AIDS, and indeed the challenges of love—theirs for each other, Lady Bird’s for LBJ, strangers’ for a public figure—form the creative core of the story. “I never saw a man with a deeper need to be loved than LBJ,” an aide comments.

“Lyndon” was noteworthy for its tight control of tone and careful observation, some of it gleaned from books and another portion borrowed
from JT, whose mother had had a friend in the administration. What was also noticeable was that Wallace’s characteristic manic quality was again tamped down. As with “Little Expressionless Animals,” it was as if a newer, more serious writer had entered the room. Pynchon as model was being replaced or at least added to. In a later interview, Wallace would credit the movie
Blue Velvet
, the offbeat noir film by David Lynch, for this new poise. He had seen the film several times and found it revelatory, so much so that he brought it up in an interview he gave nearly a decade later:

Around this time Wallace was also finishing a new short story about a guest on
Late Night with David Letterman
. Wallace told Costello he had gotten the idea for it from a show he’d seen several years before. The singer Billy Idol had bragged to the talk show host that his songs were so popular that dealers named street drugs after them: cocaine was “White Wedding,” Quaaludes were “Rebel Yells,” and marijuana was “Dancing with Myself.” Letterman, after a beat, responded, “You must be a very proud young man.”

This was the general inspiration; the direct source was that Wallace had watched the actress Susan Saint James on a recent Letterman show and taken extensive notes—“w/r/t [with respect to] the fact that the idea of having a television actress who’s agreed to represent Oreos face questioning by Letterman on why she would do such a thing and what the potential implications for her career might be seemed fascinating,” as Wallace would later write in response to a publishing lawyer’s inquiry when the story raised legal issues.

In the story that resulted, “My Appearance,”
²⁵
Wallace wanted again to show the way media colonized everything from history to our private
thoughts. But in the Letterman story, Wallace narrowed his concern, focusing on what he saw as television’s elevation of a rising attitude of knowingness in the culture. “My Appearance,” set, like
Broom,
slightly in the future, begins with a straightforward statement of fact: “I am a woman who appeared in public on Late Night with David Letterman on March 22, 1989.” The story then goes on to recount how her media-savvy husband, Rudy, and his friend Ron prepare the actress for a segment in front of the talk show star. At first the actress resists the idea that to be on Letterman is any different than, say, to be on the talk show hosted by Johnny Carson. “I don’t see this dark fearful thing you seem to see in David Letterman,” she objects. Her handlers patiently explain that their coaching is about more than Letterman; it’s about understanding that the definition of what is admirable or acceptable behavior has changed. We no longer esteem those who know or care; we esteem those who affect not to know or care. There is no arguing with this cultural change, of which Letterman is just a symptom.

Ron and Rudy continue to talk, explaining that irony has become the language of the elite. “I think being seen as being
aware
is the big thing, here,” the actress’s husband stresses. The actress goes on the show, mocks herself lightly, and succeeds with her host—the fictional Letterman pronounces it “grotesquely nice to have her on”—but she feels somehow depleted afterward. This isn’t, after all, the way she is.

Wallace had already proposed to follow
Broom
with a collection of stories. Howard, after some hesitation—story collections didn’t sell as well as
novels—came around to the idea and paid an advance of $25,000. This was great news to Wallace, confirmation that
Broom
had done what it had to—made him a writer with a publisher and a career. The new book, tentatively titled
Long and Short of It
, would give him, he wrote Nadell with delight in April 1987, a chance to “try…to fuck a bit with the fiction current on the scene.”