Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (26 page)
What was really behind this objection, which gathered strength with the years? The stance was a nearly complete turnaround for a young writer who had made his identity as a clown and then a parodist and whose gifts as a “weird kind of forger” hardly depended on clarity of intent. Suddenly, in his eyes, sincerity was a virtue and saying what you meant a calling. Nostalgia seemed to play a part, as well as discontent with the person he had grown up to be, the two intertwined. Wallace was signaling that cultural health lay in a return to the earnestness he’d grown up with. Back then in his midwestern boyhood, a person said what he or she meant. It did not matter that he had never really been that person nor that his mental health issues had walled him off from ever becoming that person; it was reassuring for him to imagine it.
This led Wallace to conjure—easy enough since he was simultaneously already working on it—a new kind of fiction that might one day displace the Leyners of the world:
The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse single-entrendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.
He continued:
The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “how
banal
.”
Wallace knew whose thinking had influenced his own. He sent Franzen a draft of the piece, “mostly just to see what you think about all the anti-irony stuff. You’ll see I’ve adopted a Franzenian view of Leyner, too.”
And he dedicated the article to M. M. Karr, his other fount of sincerity. Crucially, Wallace was confident that his malaise was not just a personal issue but a societal condition. He sensed that there were others like himself. He mentioned to an interviewer after the publication of
Infinite Jest
that it was in Boston that he had
decided that maybe being really sad, and really sort of directionless, wasn’t just that I was fucked up. Maybe it was, maybe I was, maybe it was
interesting
in a way…. I just had
so many
friends who went through terrible times exactly when I did. In so many various different ways. And so many of them seemed to have so much going for ’em…. We’re talking lawyers, stockbrokers, young promising academics, poets.
His new commitment to single-entendre writing, writing that meant what it said, brought with it a surge in confidence that Wallace hadn’t felt in years, not since his 1987 visit to Yaddo. Not even his breakdown in November could stop it. And Karr’s departure for Syracuse didn’t hinder it: in fact it may even have been the spur for it, leaving Wallace with the need to prove he deserved her love. At any rate, he later wrote about the following year in the margin of a book, “The key to ’92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were).” “The writing is going surprisingly well,” he wrote Karr, probably in the spring of that year. “I’m scared, and physically I write very slowly, rather like a small child. It’s a long thing I want to do, and I’d started it before, so right now I divide my time between writing new stuff, which is a little disjointed…and looking back through two Hammermill boxes worth of notebooks and notecards and incredibly pretty laser print from my computer, which is now with Mark.”
He had been eyeing his old drafts for a long time without knowing what to make of them. He hadn’t known what the right or wrong track was because he didn’t know where he was going. That explained his fitful efforts since Yaddo. He told Karr, “I’d remembered the old stuff, a couple years old, as being just awful, but it turns out it isn’t; it just doesn’t go much of anywhere and is way too concerned with presenting itself as witty arty writing instead of effecting any kind of emotional communication with people. I feel like I have changed, learned so much about what good writing ought to be.”
There is no clear start date for
Infinite Jest
. Pieces of the novel date back to 1986, when Wallace may have written them originally as stand-alone stories.
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The work contains all three of Wallace’s literary styles, beginning with the playful, comic voice of his Amherst years, passing through his infatuation with postmodernism at Arizona, and ending with the conversion to single-entendre principles of his days in Boston. These three approaches correspond roughly to the three main plot strands of the book: the first, the portrait of the witty, dysfunctional Incandenza family; the second, the near-future dystopian backdrop of the book, in which the United States has united with Canada and Mexico to form the Organization of North American Nations (“O.N.A.N.,” its symbol an eagle crowned by a sombrero, maple leaf in claw), spawning a Quebecois separatist movement; and the third, the passion of Don Gately, set in the thinly fictionalized version of Granada House. Some parts of the book had already been with Wallace for five years by the breakthrough of 1991–92. In the fall of 1986, in Arizona, for instance, Gale Walden noticed a draft of some pages with her sister Joelle’s name under Wallace’s bed. She asked what he was working on and Wallace said it was fiction about a terrorist organization in Canada. “At which point,” she remembers, “my eyes glazed over and I didn’t ask any more.” This is at least the beginning of the dialogue between the two secret agents, Marathe, of Québec, and Steeply, of the U.S., which takes place on a mountain not unlike the ones Walden and Wallace liked to hike outside of Tucson, where the desert had, as Wallace writes in
Infinite Jest
, “the appearance of [a] mirage…. The sun of A.M. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and businesslike and harmful to look upon.”
16
On his first application for Yaddo, filled out in September 1986, Wallace wrote that along with “Westward” he was also working on a novel with the tentative title
Infinite Jest
, adding that one reason he wanted to go to the retreat was to “try to determine just where and why the stories leave off and the novel begins.” Likely, by then, the Incandenza family’s follies were already in draft. Stylistically, they follow closely in the hyperverbal footsteps of the Beadsmans:
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Hal, the family’s “tennis and lexical prodigy,” corresponds to Lenore of
Broom
; his father, the brilliant suicide James, a filmmaker, tracks to Lenore’s great-grandmother, another absent
genius. In addition, without the Incandenzas the title on the Yaddo application makes little sense. You can’t have
Hamlet
without a ghost.
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But at Yaddo, Wallace clearly found writing “Westward” more urgent, and it was likely not for several years that he returned to the novel. The third strand, the pages on Don Gately, could not have been begun before early 1990, by which time Wallace had entered the real-life counterpart to Ennet House. By fall 1991 he had likely begun interweaving his narrative; the delicate design of the novel was beginning to fall into place. On one side were the Incandenzas led by Avril, the dominating and complex matriarch. Hal, addicted to pot, is the youngest of her three sons, the emotional center of this part of the book, except that one of the points of the book is that that center is empty:
Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like
joie
and
value
to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being …when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.
Hal’s two older brothers are Orin, a professional football player and womanizer in Phoenix, and Mario, who suffers from a cognitive and physical disability. Avril is now in a relationship with her late husband’s brother, another of the many whiffs of
Hamlet
in the story.
The family runs the Enfield Tennis Academy, where perfection is the goal and the best of the players are trained to satisfy, through their tennis games and commercial endorsements, the appetite of the consumerist culture they came from. On the other side are the residents of Ennet House, led by Gately. The Ennet House addicts are not being cultivated to feed America’s obsessions; they are the people who’ve OD’d on them.
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The two worlds, as in real life, live in parallel, interacting only when they have to, with only a “tall and more or less denuded hill” separating them. Yet they are thematically joined—the Enfield Academy world is preppy, team-focused, and saturated with drugs; the Ennet House world is poor, crime-ridden, and shattered by drugs. Both are hemmed in by self-absorption: for the Enfield players their solipsism is narcissism, the risk
that all the attention being focused on them will make them believe they are blessed in some more than ordinary way; for the Ennet House residents the solipsism is that of despair, but also the self-centeredness at the heart of therapy and recovery, a world where the self is so damaged that nothing else can get near it. Character after character there sees his or her wounded past and nothing else, while up the hill player after player sees only his or her potential. Overseeing both sides, literally, are Marathe and Steeply, competing (or possibly cooperating) secret agents, whose function in the novel is to sound the themes as well as give a motor to the plot, which centers on the idea that before committing suicide James Incandenza had made a movie so absorbing that anyone who watches it succumbs to total passivity. The original of the video cartridge—Wallace imagines cartridges as something like minidiscs—has disappeared and if the Quebecois find it they will have the ultimate terrorist weapon to use against their decadent neighbors to the south.
For Wallace to orchestrate his material was enormously complex, and as he rewrote scenes he must have had to work hard to keep straight the various voices he was using. He had always been good at mimicry, but the voices in the recovery house chapters are subtler and truer than in the other sections. They seem to descend from a caring narrator rather than be roused up as proof of his talent. Wallace created dozens of characters, many capturing aspects of how he saw himself. There is Kate Gompert (her name borrowed from a woman who had played on the junior tennis circuit with Wallace and would subsequently sue him unsuccessfully for libel). Addicted to pot and brutally depressed, Gompert casts a practiced eye on the psych ward where she finds herself:
Kate Gompert was on Specials, which meant Suicide-Watch, which meant that the girl had at some point betrayed both Ideation and Intent, which meant she had to be watched right up close by a staffer twenty-four hours a day until the supervising M.D. called off the Specials.
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Another pot addict, Ken Erdedy, embodies a different side of Wallace. We first meet him barricaded in his apartment as he waits for an obliging young female acquaintance to bring dope—“a fifth of a kilogram of marijuana,
200 grams of unusually good marijuana.” The woman—the friend of a dealer—has promised it to him so he can go on one last binge before quitting for good, spurring an obsessively branching set of contingencies in Erdedy’s mind:
Where was the woman who said she’d come. She said she would come. Erdedy thought she’d have come by now…. He did not use the phone to call the woman who’d promised to come because if he tied up the line and if it happened to be the time when maybe she was trying to call him he was afraid she would hear the busy signal and think him disinterested and get angry and maybe take what she’d promised him somewhere else.
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Once Wallace had his setup, he seems to have worked with remarkable speed because by April 1992 he had 250 finished pages for Nadell. He was not just in the grip of inspiration. The point was to get a contract for the book. It was “the bravest thing” he had done since getting sober, he would later tell an interviewer, but he believed the work was going so well that he could deal with the pressure. “Life is good. I’m trying to get together enough of this Long Thing to plead for an advance,” he wrote Brad Morrow with uncharacteristic confidence that March.
As promised, on April 15, 1992, he was ready with his proposal and partial manuscript of
Infinite Jest
, “a novel,” he noted in his cover letter, “although structurally it’s not much like any other novels I’ve seen.” “Plot-wise,” he added, “this thing proceeds according to something more like a broad arc than a Freytagian triangle. The low gear in which plot stuff proceeds in sections 1 and 2 is intentional.” He warned of footnotes that were “just brutal.” He addressed his note to “Bonnie and Gerry and Whatever Other Trusted and Hopefully Trustworthy Persons End up Reading this,” and urged everyone to mail the manuscript back or destroy it when they were done. He sent the package off to Nadell.