Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (34 page)

Wallace, amid all the cutting and rewriting, gave it a try. “Potential insertion into page 1229 about which I’m not exactly qualmless,” he faxed Pietsch on June 11 and sent a scene, with overtones of
1984
, in which Quebecois terrorists trap Orin under a surreally massive inverted “tumbler” and unloose roaches on him—his “special conscious horror.” The goal is to suffocate him—a fate similar to that which he inflicted on the roaches infesting his bathroom several hundred pages earlier.

Another set of alterations was forced by a phone call. In May, Mary Karr, who had read some of the portions of the novel serialized in magazines, called Pietsch to point out that many of the Ennet House scenes were taken either from what Wallace heard or saw at Granada House and in recovery meetings, where conversations were supposed to be private. For Wallace, an accusation of this sort could elicit maximum anxiety, the
threat of new exposure and problems. He might find himself once again in
Girl with Curious Hair
territory. But this time things went far more smoothly. He changed some names in the manuscript, altered other details, and added a strongly worded but evasive denial to the copyright page that the events in the novel were disclosed at confidential recovery meetings.
¹⁰

Wallace flew to New York once more at the end of June with the manuscript in a box on his lap. Kymberly Harris came with him this time. Their relationship had revived in the spring. Wallace had even requested a sit-down with her parents and, arriving highly nervous, asked if it would be okay for Kymberly to live with him. “David is asking for my thumb,” she joked. The Harrises gave their consent, amused by Wallace’s formality, but he had been serious, in a way; a midwestern rigor in certain matters was still within him and this was a major step in his mind. Kymberly had moved in with her clothes and furniture in April, but, now just a couple of months later, she planned to audition for the Actors Studio in New York. Wallace dropped in on Pietsch and handed off his bundle and was back in Bloomington a week later. Soon after, the Actors Studio wrote Kymberly to say she had been accepted. Wallace pronounced himself thrilled, delighted that she had gotten into the “Yale Medical School of Acting,” then, quickly less thrilled, asked her to wait a year before she went east. At first she agreed, but by August she realized that the more deeply she got involved with Wallace the less likely she would be ever to leave Bloomington. She told him she was going to New York, with him or not, and four friends came and moved her and her things out, leaving him the silver velour recliner, Jeeves, his old bed, and little else.

Soon Wallace found other companionship. One day he was out jogging and a dog appeared by his side. Wallace realized it was a stray and decided to take it home. “The Drone,” as he named him after the mythic club in P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, was a black Lab mix, as Jeeves was.
¹¹
He was more rebellious than Jeeves, less of a house pet.
¹²
Together the two ruled the house, their chew toys and fur everywhere. Their water came from the cooler. If Wallace was away for more than a few hours, he brought in a sitter.

To Wallace’s surprise, Little, Brown had already produced a brochure with a short piece by Wallace on writing and a brief excerpt from the novel and distributed it at the annual booksellers’ convention in late spring. And just a few weeks after he brought his final manuscript to New York with Harris, Pietsch sent him bound copies for subsidiary rights sales and prepublication quotes. After discussion, the cover was a picture of blue sky with puffs of clouds. It was inspired by the “wallpaper scheme” of the administrative offices’ waiting room at the tennis academy that incites Hal’s agoraphobia, with its “fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky.”
¹³
Wallace wrote to DeLillo that the book had “a cover that’s (troublingly, to me) identical to the passenger safety card on American Airlines flights.”

The work of
Infinite Jest
almost done, Wallace was casting around for new projects. The state fair piece and the sections of
Infinite Jest
that had run in journals had made him in demand. He said no to a week at a nudist colony and a chance to attend the launch of a scent endorsed by Elizabeth Taylor at an air force base, the similarity of these offers sparking the suspicion, as he later told an interviewer, that all the magazine editors in New York read each other’s mail.
¹⁴
Wallace was vulnerable to being wanted and he had liked all the new readers his magazine work got him. So he agreed to write a piece for
Details
about the tennis star Michael Joyce (it was ultimately published in
Esquire
), and another on the U.S. Open for
Tennis
, a magazine that he’d devoured as a teenage player. Both magazines were looking for a piece of the Wallace voice, that tone of a sensitive, sincere genius operating in second gear. His nonfiction persona was, as Wallace told an interviewer, “a little stupider and shmuckier than I am.” He became adept at the back-and-forth of magazine work, limiting the psychic cost of the editing by calling and leaving long messages at night on his editors’ voice mails.

Wallace also began a review of Joseph Frank’s four-volume biography of Dostoevsky for the
Voice Literary Supplement
, where Lee Smith, the editor of
Signifying Rappers
, was now working. Wallace had over the years become deeply attracted to the Russian’s writing and life. The parallels between Dostoevsky’s and his own certainly caught his eye, as they had at Granada House. Wasn’t his time there comparable to Dostoevsky’s exile in Siberia, where the Russian had first seen how much he had in common
even with the most desperate souls? He left this implied in the lengthy article he produced:

Wallace spent most of July on the essay and became more and more impressed. Here was a writer impossible in modern America, one earnestly and unapologetically moral. He wrote in a notebook around this time.

He wanted to extend the point he had made in “E Unibus Pluram” two years before. Then he had mostly diagnosed a disease; now he was giving a model for the cure. American writers were still content to describe an ironic culture when they should be showing the way out. They had still not discovered, as he wrote in
Infinite Jest
, that “what looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage.” “Who is to blame,” he concluded in his
VLS
piece, “for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction.”

In August the copyedited manuscript of
Infinite Jest
arrived. Wallace had been dreading this day. He had written Pietsch in the winter that if his editor would give him the name of “your/our copyeditor…I’ll start sending candy and sweet nothings now.” He had sent a prophylactic note along, almost a compendium of Wallace stylistic tics, in the hopes he could limit disagreement:

To Copyeditor:

Hi. F.Y.I., the following non-standard features of this mss. are intentional and will get stetted by the author if color-penciled by you:

Now he braced himself for several months of unraveling the mistakes and foolish consistencies of people who knew grammar less well than he, a fear that was shortly confirmed. He wrote his Boston friend Debra Spark in October that he was “in the 8th circle of page-proof-proofreading hell. Never again anything over 150 pages.” He wheedled and begged Pietsch for more time, presenting evidence that it was the publisher who had messed things up. “The more I proof these page proofs, the more convinced I get that it would be a
mistake
to disseminate bound galleys before typos and solecisms are corrected,” he wrote Pietsch. “I’m going over each word and line with a loupe, almost,” he assured him. To Alice Turner, to whom he sent the bound proofs, he claimed in December to have caught “about 47,000 typos in the bound galley.” (Later he would tell an interview from
Time
that he had corrected all but one of “about 712,000.”) One of
his graduate students, Jason Hammel, remembers going over to Wallace’s house to find him with loose pages of
Infinite Jest
spread out in front of him, watching the movie
Beethoven
over and over on a TV/VCR combo from Rent-A-Center. He told Hammel it was the only way at this point he could bear to read the book. His eyes, by now, he complained to the chief copy editor, were “wobbling like a vestibulitiser’s.”

Wallace was not the only member of his family to play copyeditor. He had also tried to test-drive the family’s response to the book by hiring his sister for that task even before the manuscript had been finished. She immediately saw what was going on and asked him if he really felt this was the right way to deal with his anger at his mother; Wallace just shrugged. But he still felt he had to give his mother the manuscript to read. He sent it to Urbana and waited. In December, six weeks later, he wrote Alice Turner that he was worried still to have heard nothing, “wholly ominous given our family’s normal communication grid; I fear someone sees more autobiography in it than there is.”
¹⁶

As the February publication of
Infinite Jest
neared, Wallace felt neither he nor his book was ready. Any hint of impending clamor made him glad he was in Illinois, safe from curious eyes and the intoxications of admiration and publicity. But Little, Brown had the job of making sure Wallace felt necessary or at least familiar to literary readers. He had not had a book of fiction come out since 1989. The massiveness of the novel was the central fact to be dealt with. It became a joke at the publisher’s marketing meetings to ask, as one participant remembers, “Has anyone here actually read this thing?” Soon Little, Brown realized that the obstacle could be made the point. To read
Infinite Jest
was to accept a dare. It began a campaign of postcards sent to four thousand reviewers, producers, and bookstore owners. With each round of postcards a bit more of the title was revealed against the toneless blue sky of the jacket. One postcard had glowing quotes from earlier Wallace books, another promised “the biggest literary event of next year” and a third promised, “Just imagine what they’ll say about his masterpiece.” This was too much for Wallace, and in a mid-September letter, in the midst of the “
fucking, fucking
nightmare” of the page proofs, as he would later call it, he begged Little, Brown to stop. “‘Masterpiece’? I’m
33 years old; I don’t have a ‘masterpiece,’” he wrote Pietsch. “‘The literary event of ’96?’
What if it isn’t? What if nobody buys it?
I’m getting ready, inside, for that possibility; but are you guys?” At least, he begged, could they reduce the size of his name on the publicity material? A deeper worry, though, was that in the cascade of edits, the nebulous, fine-veined schema of the novel had been compromised. Wallace himself wasn’t sure anymore. When David Markson wrote him to say how much he enjoyed the advance copy of the book he got but there were parts he couldn’t figure out, it touched a chord in the author and he answered, a bit ungratefully:

Seven years after
Girl with Curious Hair
had come out
Infinite Jest
was to be published into a very different literary terrain. Minimalism had vanished. Postmodernism was a yet more distant memory: no recent graduate of a writing program would have bothered to make one of its authors the patriarch for his patricide. Importantly, the American political climate had changed, changing the literary climate. Both minimalism and postmodernism, as Wallace had noted in his “Fictional Futures” essay, were forms of social protest, and as the 1990s progressed, just what was to be protested grew harder to define. Ronald Reagan had left office at the beginning of 1989, the Berlin Wall had been pulled down the next year, and the Soviet Union had dissolved in 1991. Political worry was replaced by economic abundance. Americans had never felt more masterful than in the mid-1990s, living in the space between the Cold War and the time of ill-defined threats that was to come.

Wealthy eras usually repair to realism, at least for a while. This was true too of the 1990s. The well-wrought short story—“no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past,” as Wallace wrote in “Fictional Futures”—returned to the fore, if indeed it had ever been anywhere else. Lyrical realist novels like Jane Smiley’s
A Thousand Acres
, E. Annie
Proulx’s
The Shipping News
, and Richard Ford’s
Independence Day
dominated awards lists. Cormac McCarthy became the best-known literary author of the decade, but it wasn’t the intense McCarthy Wallace loved of
Blood Meridian
and
Suttree
but the more romantic one of
All the Pretty Horses
, the story of a young cowboy who crosses into Mexico to look for love and a friend’s stolen horse.