Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (41 page)

He was back at school now teaching and could be short-tempered, perhaps resenting the time it took up. In one creative writing class he shoved a student who had shown him attitude and then threatened to fail him: “I
too have used outrage, abrasiveness, and irritation as a way to keep people at arm’s length,” he wrote Lee Freeman in a note. “So trust me: it is a bush-league defense, and painfully obvious in the terror it betrays.”

By now the new relationship energy with Harms had completely dissipated. Wallace bolted himself in his dark workroom, and when Juliana came home she watched TV alone. Costello was worried by how praising Wallace was when he talked of Harms. He knew, as he remembers, that “admiration was always the tomb” of his friend’s relationships. Wallace and Juliana went to St. Louis to visit Franzen, who felt like Wallace’s interest in her was largely theoretical.
¹²

Harms, too, saw that Wallace was pulling away. The search for the ring had stopped. He got a rescued puppy to replace The Drone, but he found the presence in the house of the new dog, Werner, a pit bull mix, unbearable. “I can’t work,” he complained to Harms. “I have to take care of him all day.” The couple went to a MacArthur Fellowship reunion in Chicago, and Wallace stayed in the hotel room, trying to write. “I need to be ready to write,” he explained to her. But to Costello he acknowledged, “Clean pages are safe around me.” He told Juliana he felt like he was always disappointing her, then got mad when she said he had all the qualities she could hope for in a partner. She grew suspicious—she guessed he was hiding something larger.
¹³

Harms confronted Wallace, who denied being involved with another woman. She pulled out all his papers. A trained investigator, she knew where to look. She found several notes from a graduate student in Wallace’s department. “I haven’t had a physical affair with her but I’m contemplating it,” Wallace explained sullenly. Harms had had enough. A few weeks later, in early January 2000, Doug Poag helped her move out. Wallace contributed to the down payment for her new house out of his MacArthur money and then was peeved when a new boyfriend quickly moved in.

The graduate student became Wallace’s girlfriend. They exchanged books—he gave her
The Screwtape Letters
, she gave him the J. D. Salinger collection
Nine Stories
—“She was a girl who for a ringing phone dropped exactly nothing” was a line he loved. Things grew increasingly intense, but as ever the work came first for Wallace and the relationship faltered.

In April 1999,
Salon.com
asked Wallace for his list of underappreciated novels, and in his response he included longtime loves like
Omensetter’s Luck
,
Wittgenstein’s Mistress,
and
Blood Meridian
, but added Jerzy Kosinski’s little-known
Steps
, “a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close.”

Kafka’s fragments may have been the comparison he wanted reviewers to make when they read
Brief Interviews
. He had written a book that was, as he told an interviewer, “mean to just about everyone it’s possible to be mean to,” and had to hope for thoughtful readings. He was, though, resigned to what might come, perhaps even to being ignored. He wrote Brad Morrow that he was glad to be out of the spotlight: “The big Attention eyeball has mostly passed on to other poor schmo’s.” Still, Little, Brown asked him to go on a book tour and he obliged, as long as it was short. “I’m in the midst of the world’s smallest tour,” he boasted to Steven Moore in June. “Just four cities.” Even short book tours filled him with misgivings. “The Statue Talks!” he joked to a friend.

He avoided interviews as much as he could and tried to show as little of himself as possible when obligated to sit down for them. He met a writer from
Book
magazine at the Cracker Barrel by the I-55 interchange in Bloomington, where he grouchily averred that he “just want[ed] to be left alone to eat my meatloaf.”
Publishers Weekly
found him at a K-Mart. In Los Angeles, he went on
Bookworm
, a radio show hosted by Michael Silverblatt. Silverblatt was special—he had been so excited by
Infinite Jest
he had called Michael Pietsch to ask to read the outtakes. In their conversation now, Wallace suggested that the collection was meant as a corrective for those readers who had misunderstood his last novel:

Silverblatt gave a persuasive explanation of how Wallace was attempting to effect this:

To which Wallace answered, “Wow. You’re giving—I mean, this is why I look forward to coming to L.A.—is you tend to give interpretations of the stuff that’s real close to what I want.”

The country’s reviewers on the whole were more positive than Wallace expected. He was welcomed to the short story form (although in fact this was his second collection), and critics tended to play up his formal inventiveness and shy away from the knotty problem of what the reader was supposed to come away with. Benjamin Weissman in the
LA Weekly
praised this “full-scale harassment of the short story form,” while Andrei Codrescu in the
Chicago Tribune
admired Wallace’s “seemingly inexhaustible bag of literary tricks.” Adam Goodheart, writing in the
New York Times Book Review
, sounded a mixed note, comparing Wallace to Edgar Allan Poe, “another mad scientist of American literature.” But Michiko Kakutani of the
New York Times
chose to do unto Wallace as he had done unto Updike:

She accused Wallace of writing an “airless, tedious” book that failed to live up to the promise in “E Unibus Pluram” to reanimate the “deep moral issues that distinguished the work of the great 19th-century writers.” “The NY Times just slaughtered the book,” Wallace wrote Moore afterward, “just panned it, in a review that caused my editor pain (he actually called
me about it).” Wallace was in fact also devastated and could recite several sentences in it from memory.

The
New York Review of Books
soon afterward published the first major overview of Wallace’s mature work, taking a stance between impressed and skeptical and implicitly psychoanalyzing the author along the way. “The Panic of Influence,” by A. O. Scott, emphasized Wallace’s anxious relationship with post-modernism and also his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness. Scott also accused Wallace of fencing off all possible objections to his work by making sure every possible criticism was already embedded in the text.
Brief Interviews
, especially, the critic wrote, was not so much anti-ironic as “meta-ironic,” driven much like the characters in its stories by the fear of being known. This sort of writing, he continued, was clearly connected to the self-centered self-absorbed culture of late-twentieth-century America, but “does Wallace’s work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it’s both.” Wallace was not pleased but he was impressed. In the margins of a draft of the story “Good Old Neon,” which he began around this time, he noted (punningly), “AO Scott saw into my character.”

Brief Interviews
, though, sold well, which made Little, Brown happy and, for better or worse, helped buff the statue. Though Wallace claimed he no longer read reviews, he printed out a post by a critic for
Slate’s
book club to tape inside his composition notebook: “The difference: BIWHM’s just too much telling, not enough showing. He needs to combine that urge to confront what matters with his ability to spin a wonderful tale. When that book comes out, I’ll be waiting in line.”

Wallace had been mulling the possibilities for a third novel since the mid-1990s, even as he began the stories that would form the heart of
Brief Interviews
. The setting had come early, possibly even before the publication of
Infinite Jest
: he knew he wanted to write about the IRS. The agency fit well with Wallace’s Pynchonian appetite for clandestine organizations and hidden conspiracies. And like the tennis academy and recovery house
in
Infinite Jest
, it was a world unto itself, where characters would be in charged apposition to one another. Wallace himself had had numerous small brushes with the agency over the years, usually involving trivial errors on Form 1099s that he or his accountant had to get corrected. These encounters touched off the same anxiety within him as communications from lawyers and fact-checkers. He had an idea as well of the IRS as a secular church, a counterpart to Alcoholics Anonymous in
Infinite Jest
.
¹⁴
But, finally, he probably settled on the IRS for the most obvious reason: it was the dullest possible venue he could think of and he had decided to write about boredom.

Wallace had no direct knowledge of life at the IRS or indeed in any office—he had never worked in one—and his grasp of accounting was shaky, but he was an avid study, so, soon after the publication of his novel, he began taking classes at the university. He went from beginning financial accounting in the fall of 1996 (“Examines the nature of accounting, basic accounting concepts, financial statements, accrual basis of accounting…”) to federal income taxation in summer 1997 and advanced tax that fall. He read countless agency publications and books on accounting and the IRS, from
West
Federal Taxation
to D. Larry Crumbley’s
The Ultimate Rip-Off.
He interviewed real-life IRS employees and went to Peoria, where the agency had a large facility. He boasted to Costello that he was only a few credits short of passing the state accounting exam.

As Wallace moved forward, he acquired vocabulary and context for his novel, much as he would for one of his nonfiction pieces. He used to tell his classes that a novelist had to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him or her on an airplane; Wallace easily surpassed that benchmark. He learned that what outsiders called an IRS agent might actually be an examiner, an auditor, or an investigator. He read that the IRS had changed its focus in the Reagan era from an agency primarily involved with compliance to one engaged in revenue maximization; a fiscal mission had replaced a civic one. He thought there might be something in that conflict to dramatize. When something wasn’t true that would be good, he made it up. He decided junior employees were called “wigglers” or, dismissively, “turdnagels.” (This became his email address for a time, after he started using email in the early 2000s.) “‘Snout’=IRS Investigator /
‘Immersive’=Talented IRS examiner,” he wrote in a notebook. He imagined that all IRS agents got a new social security number when they entered the agency. Wallace found a prose poem by Frank Bidart that suggested a clever epigraph for this rebirth: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”

His research in pornography over the years was still on his mind. Wallace’s original conceit for the novel may have involved not just tedium but pleasure. He made notes for a plot in which a group of rich businessmen run a video porn operation. They go into business with Drinion, an IRS immersive so talented that he sometimes floats above his seat while he works. Drinion had helped seize the business on behalf of the service for unpaid taxes. He comes now to double as their male lead in the movies. His great virtue is that he is so pale that he can be digitally erased and the porn viewer can have his own image replace it.
¹⁵
It was the “Infinite Jest” videocartridge one iteration further along: what could be more addictive than watching yourself act out an addiction?
¹⁶

The Bidart poem neatly connected to Wallace’s core interest in the IRS: how does it change a person’s internal life to work at something as dull as monitoring tax returns? The agents’ jobs were tedious, but dullness, in Wallace’s conceit, was what ultimately set them free. The lack of stimulation gave them a chance to open themselves up to experience in the largest sense of the word. The idea connected to Buddhism—Eastern religious practices had been a growing interest of Wallace’s for many years. (He liked to practice sitting meditation, he wrote Rich C., with “weird cultish Sikh and Buddhist groups, most of whom are very crazy in a very attractive way.”) The goal of the discipline was crucial to him—the inability to slow down his whirring mind was part of what he felt made his life so hard. As a character notes in the story “Good Old Neon,” which Wallace wrote around 2000, “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.” In the process of writing the novel he came to call
The Pale King
,
¹⁷
he laid out its central tenet in one of his notebooks: