Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (52 page)

22
. In the letter to Larson, sent nearly two years after the incident, Wallace says that he kept his plan from Karr for fear she’d think he was “crazy and reject me.”

23
. He also went to various locksmiths in Boston and explained that he was a postmodern novelist doing research on how to disarm a burglar alarm system. “Finally,” remembers Mark Costello, “the fifth didn’t throw him out.”

24
. Wallace had an interest in his family’s Scottish origins. He went to see
Braveheart
, the story of William Wallace, the national hero, when it came out in 1995. And as he moved from city to city, among the few possessions he brought with him was a painting of a Scottish battle scene his father had given him.

25
. As Rick Vigorous comments in
Broom
, “It’s when people begin to fancy that they
actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or of any use to those who are.”

26
. “Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink” was a standard warning against self-pity in recovery, one that Wallace would cite in
Infinite Jest
.

27
. Wallace admired Raymond Carver, whom he distinguished from his minimalist acolytes (Wallace dismissed them as “crank turners”). He was a man who had outrun alcohol in moving from a deflected style to a more sincere one, and Wallace doubtless saw the relevance to his own story.

28
. Hints of effeminacy always brought out a bit of Wallace’s anxiety. When he moved to Illinois he placed a special order from a Bloomington store for T-shirts with dark squares on the front meant to hide what he saw as his flabby chest.

29
. As he explained in a later letter to the critic Sven Birkerts, he found writing directly onto a computer to be like “think[ing] out loud onto the screen,” adding, “Writing by hand and typewriter not only brings out the best in me—it brings out stuff I never would have dreamed was there…. It is this—not improvement, but transfiguration of the contents of my head that I am addicted to. It is astonishing when it happens—magical—and it simply doesn’t happen on a computer.”

30
. A hint as to Karr’s motive is to be found in
Infinite Jest
, where her stand-in, Joelle Van Dyne, comments, “Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it. She’s learned this through sheer experience.”

31
. The name was a source of some amusement to Wallace, viz this from
Infinite Jest
: “That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is Unit, which is why Ennet house residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital’s designations of its campus’s buildings.”

32
. Typically, Wallace met DeLillo through worries about plagiarism. He was concerned that DeLillo’s work was a too obvious source for the Eschaton scene in
Infinite Jest
, in which Ennet Academy students pretend to wage a nuclear war with computers and tennis balls. DeLillo, who admired Wallace’s writing, responded that it was not, a generous gesture given the scene’s overlap with his novel
Endzone
.

Chapter 6: “Unalone and Unstressed”

1
. In
Infinite Jest
the government sells naming rights to each year. The year in which the key action in the story takes place is the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which most Wallace researchers agree was 2009. There is, however, one bit of data that points to 2011, possibly an error, possibly a deliberately misleading clue on Wallace’s part.

2
. Marathe is an example of the pleasure Wallace takes in recursion: He is a quadruple agent whose Quebecois bosses think he is a triple agent. In other words, he pretends that he is only pretending to betray the people he is in fact betraying.

3
. In
Infinite Jest
, Wallace traces Americans’ neediness with a Freudian touch to the original mother-infant bond. The lethal “Infinite Jest” cartridge is said to consist of a baby looking up at a mother’s face, the mother intoning, “I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am.”

4
. “Ticket to the Fair” was not the first time Wallace had improved on reality. In “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” for instance, he says he was born in Philo, Illinois, a claim that later found its way onto websites and into books on the author. And who but an East
Coast reader would have believed that a tornado could blow up out of nowhere and suddenly sweep Wallace and his tennis opponent over the net, “blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet over to the fence one court over”? As Amy Wallace remembers, in the Wallace family, ”We quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for.”

5
. Wallace was aware that he had transgressed, and many times he hinted to journalists that their rules weren’t his, as in an interview he gave to a writer for the
Boston Phoenix
in 1998: “The thing is, really—between you and me and the
Boston Phoenix’s
understanding readers—you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there’s going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.”

6
. The problem of how to use an innovative writing style to carry out a conservative fictional purpose would become Wallace’s biggest artistic challenge and would prove insurmountable in
The Pale King
.

7
. One suspects the silver lamé outfit was borrowed from Wurtzel and the vomit, as at the Illinois State Fair, was invented, both being, in magazine fact-checking parlance, on author. A description of losing to a nine-year-old girl at chess in the ship’s library that only appears in the book version of the piece also has the sort of headlong specificity that characterized Wallace’s enhancements for effect, viz: “My first inkling of trouble is on the fourth move, when I fianchetto and Deirdre knows what I am doing is fianchettoing and uses the term correctly…. My second ominous clue is the way her little hand keeps flailing out to the side of the board after she moves, a sign that she is used to a speed clock. She swoops in with her developed QK and forks my queen on the twelfth move.”

8
. The news reports Wallace refers to were probably about Grant Medeiros, fourteen, of Saanich, British Columbia. On February 17, 1995, on the last night of a cruise aboard the
Royal Princess
, Medeiros vanished. His eyeglasses and shoes were found on the deck, and he left his necklace and a note in his parents’ cabin, but no one saw him jump, and his body was never found. The press ascribed his misery to fighting with his parents over having to join them on the cruise. The part about a “a ship-board romance” was likely Wallace’s invention.

9
. On the junior circuit, Wallace and his friends had run into a player with the name of the movie star; this spurred them to make lists of ordinary people with famous names.

10
. When Big Craig read the novel after it was published he remembers thinking, “Holy crap! The bastard was just looking for information.” For all that Wallace subscribed to the ethos of anonymity in recovery, his fiction always came first. “You didn’t get sober to fuck people over [but] it’s a hazard in writing,” he wrote a friend.

11
. Another source for the name may have been the nickname he and Costello shared for junior lawyers, “compliance drones.”

12
. He wrote in a notebook a few years later, “My dog-emotions shifted when Drone came—there was sort of one to break my heart w/ goodness and one who was ‘trouble.’”

13
. Blue is a dominant color in
Infinite Jest
. One character is killed drinking Drano, “blue like glittershit”; another reveals “a blue string” behind an eyeball; Joelle vomits “blue smoke” into “the cool blue tub” when she hits bottom; the Charles is transformed to “robin-egg’s blue” by the Clean US Party; the skies of the novel range from “Dilaudid-colored” to “pilot-light blue”; one section begins simply, “The following things in the room were blue.”

14
. Wallace was becoming a brand of his own. “I think he will fulfill Nick’s request for a big-name writer,” an editor at
Tennis
wrote a colleague after approaching Wallace to write a piece on the U.S. Open for the magazine.

15
. The point of his style he omitted. Perhaps he thought it was self-evident, but in a
similar fax to
Harper’s
before the editing of a piece he published in 1998 on Kafka, he explained that his goal was to “preserve an oralish, out-loud feel” to his writing. That piece began as a talk, but it is also true of
Infinite Jest
. You are meant to think of it as a story being spoken rather than written—or even better, thought.

16
. As Amy Wallace remembers, when mother and son discussed
Infinite Jest
that winter, Wallace insisted to his mother that Avril Incandenza was not based on her. She was not persuaded, and the parts of the book about Avril left her deeply upset.

17
. Rock music was the cultural venue in which signs of disaffection and dis-ease first appeared with serious energy. In the early 1990s bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana sang of alienation and sophisticated frustration. Their music emphasized the personal rather than the political, much as Wallace’s fiction did.

18
. At a panel discussion on ethnicity and literature in 1998 held in Seattle, Wallace indicated that he understood his privileged status. When the moderator announced that the authors—the others were Sherman Alexie, Cristina García, and Gish Jen—would discuss their experience as members of marginalized minorities, Wallace picked up his chair and with comic exaggeration moved it to the side of the stage.

19
. Younger readers had an easier time with
Infinite Jest
’s structure. It was in fact an undergraduate who captured Wallace’s strategy best. In the fall of 1995, Christopher Hager, who was studying literature with Gilbert Sorrentino at Stanford University, wrote to the author to discuss
Girl with Curious Hair
. Wallace offered him a galley of his next work instead if Hager would get his friends to buy the book when it came out, joking that if they bought ten copies among them, it would increase Little, Brown’s net sales “by at least 25%.” In “On Speculation: Infinite Jest and American Fiction after Postmodernism,” his undergraduate thesis, Hager captured the novel’s “incomplete” ending with delicacy:

The resolution that reviewers complain the novel lacks isn’t
in
the text, but sits chronologically & spatially in front of the novel proper, which, as a satellite dish, serves to focus myriad rays of light, or voices, or information, on that central resolution without actually touching it.

Wallace was thrilled; battered by critics who said the novel just sort of stopped, he was waiting for just this type of reading. He offered a similar thought about the book in an online chat room for the e-zine
WORD
in May, saying that “there is an ending as far as I’m concerned. Certain kind of parallel lines are supposed to start converging in such a way that an ‘end’ can be projected by the reader somewhere beyond the right frame. If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you.”

20
. Journalists in general were unsure what to make of the sincerity Wallace had worked so hard to earn. Interviewing him for
Infinite Jest
, Laura Miller of
Salon.com
described him as having the manner of “a recovering smart aleck.” Wallace, though, was clear in his own mind that the change from who he had been was real. When an interviewer asked him what the old Wallace would have thought of his new writing, he answered, “I don’t think he would have hated it—I just don’t think he woulda
read
it. I think he would’ve looked at the first two pages and gone, ‘Huh! Wonder who likes this kind of stuff?’ And then looked for something else.”

21
. “Using skills…only Elizabeth has,” as Wallace would comment in a later interview.

22
. Perhaps more apropos to Wallace’s own struggle was Nirvana’s mournful ballad “All Apologies,” whose last chorus, repeated over and over, is often quoted as “All alone is all we are.” (The official version on the liner notes reads: “All in all is all we are.”)

23
. The grunge references probably irritated Wallace, who told friends he’d never heard of Nirvana until after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the band’s lead singer, in April 1994. “A grad student lent me some tapes,” he remembered in a letter to a friend written
in the late 1990s, “and I came rushing in the next day saying I thought these guys were kind of brilliant and had anybody ever heard of them…the students were too embarrassed for me even to laugh. (That’s a true story, by the way.)” Which most friends doubt it is.

24
. Similar assurances allowed Wallace to give Nadell free rein to do with his film rights as she saw fit throughout his career.

Chapter 7: “Roars and Hisses”

1
. When he went over his 1993 piece on television, “E Unibus Pluram,” he added—or more likely, restored from the draft of the article—another dig at Mark Leyner, changing his identification from “writer” to “New Jersey medical ad copywriter,” in fact one of the jobs Leyner had held before he became a novelist.

2
. Wallace told one young mother he was dating he was jealous that her breasts were “no longer public property,” but in less petulant moods he acknowledged a worthy competitor. “Babies,” he told Mark Costello, “are famous to themselves.”

3
. Wallace was an extraordinary listener, with “a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment.” (The description is of Lyle, the weight room guru in
Infinite Jest.
)