Painful, painful, painful. Biographies of writers inevitably fall into two categories. First, the adventurer, the traveler, the inspired, whose lives are as interesting as their works – think Twain, London, Vollmann. Their life stories make for exciting reads. Second, the boring, dull, working or academic life hardly worth writing about, and here I’m thinking of Carver and Borges. The life of David Foster Wallace definitely falls into the latter. Champaign, Amherst, Arizona, East Coast, Bloomington, California. That’s about it. No high seas or war reportage here. In between these locales we read in D.T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story of the depression, the angst, the valiant struggle for sobriety, the many loves and many loves lost, the writing, the elusive man himself, a literary powerhouse of his generation (and mine). It is heart-wrenching to follow knowing where it all leads. Infinite Jest, for many strange reasons, has come to be known as the seminal book of its time. The novel eventually brought him unexpected celebrity with which he struggled. Too premature to be a masterpiece, it’s difficult to eclipse a master-type work. He set the mark high from the start and struggled to live up to what he perceived to be would be expected from him. That’s why The Pale King, unfinished and published posthumously, took so long to write. Claiming to have deposited page after written page directly into the trash for quite some time, he was unsure of himself. This kind of uncertainty is the worst kind of debilitation for a writer. It’s crippling. When we read up on exactly what Wallace was trying to accomplish with King, however, we see that he was well on his way to a mature masterpiece.
Celebrity took a weird toll on him. It’s uncomfortable watching him (on YouTube) squirm under the spotlight with Charlie Rose, as the interviewer reaches, suggests, infers and makes fun. Paralyzed perhaps a bit by a strange intellectuality and over-seriousness, Wallace can’t ever seem to explain himself properly. He was conflicted about the appearance to begin with (we read that he tried to get out of it). Wallace had a love-hate with television and media, the way even something as simple as an interview could be broken down and subject to unreality. He wrote quite a bit about television’s impact on culture.
He was on the show to promote A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a non-fiction collection and one of the first things I read by him. Jest was already picking up serious momentum, and I distinctly remember a few writer friends mentioning him by name around this time. Someone mentioned to me an unusual ending to one of his stories where Wallace never specifically wrote the ending but left it in outline form so the reader knew what would happen but could also perceive the inner-working of the story, a unique post-modern spin. Another trademark of his, the footnote, also led to a number of conversations about innovations and unconventionality. With style, intelligence and grace Wallace was able to drag us out of Writer’s Workshop phony dramatic realist nonsense.
With regards to non-fiction, nothing can be more interesting to a writer than the real writer. The non-fiction gives us a glimpse into the real working of the mind, something which we’re distanced from with the art. And here I’m thinking of Carver and his autobiographical “Fires” and Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Although most of it was journalism-type reportage, Wallace opened many doors with his.
Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story constantly goes back to how frustrated Wallace was about his fiction. Either it wasn’t good enough or there wasn’t enough of it. Wallace cared deeply about the message and worked hard to provide solutions for our unhealthy addictions, narcissism, neuroticism, and meaninglessness. It was not for art’s sake with Wallace. It was, Yeah? So now what? Which brings us to the question, What is the function of contemporary novels?
When it came time to apply to grad schools in the late 90's there were really only a few options for me. East Coast, West Coast, Iowa… A professor, who happened to be my adviser, brought in a new issue of Harper’s with an excerpt of the newly published Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, another fascinating venture in storytelling I could see. Later, I told the adviser where I had applied. He asked if I had tried ISU. No, why? You know David Foster Wallace teaches there, don’t you? No. Dalkey Archive Press published experimental fiction there. It was happening, so I applied and that’s where I eventually went. I soon learned Wallace was impossible to get to, even at an opening gala of some sort, where they led him out like a prized stallion. He was totally inaccessible, and faculty made you feel awkward for even asking about him. To get a class with him was next to impossible, so I didn’t bother. Still I read him. I remember being particularly impressed with “Lyndon,” another impressive feat. And recently, I came across Everything and More by chance and was absolutely floored by his take on modern mathematics. A fascinating read, it was like running into an old friend.
Still, what is the function of the contemporary novel? What is its purpose?
Parts of Infinite Jest have been compared to The Brothers Karamazov (the moral arc of the story is comparatively similar), and Hamlet is never too far away. Wouldn’t it be better to read The Brothers Karamazov and Hamlet? The answer is definitely yes, it’d be better to read these masterworks. So the inherent challenge of today’s fiction is to create something comparatively useful, not necessarily superior to the canon. It seems Wallace wasn’t able to work his way out of the hole he dug for himself.
There is an overwhelming sense of failure on behalf of his illness and his recovery. All that work! Early on at Amherst he said he wanted to write books that will be read 100 years from now. His will be read 1,000 years from now. He accomplished that much. An invaluable loss. What tragedy. Painful, painful.
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