Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (13 page)

Achievement?

I have a more nebulous idea of achievement. I guess getting a really good review in
The New York Times
when I was twenty-five was what, what’d you say?—two and a quarter—would be when you were twenty-five. What’s interesting is that five years ago, I would have, I think I would have sneered at you and said, “Uh. How bourgeois.” When in fact, what I think I’ve realized now is that we’re basically exactly the same, we’ve all got our jungle gyms, you know? And because of the world you grew up in, it’s success. And the world I grew up in, my parents didn’t care that much about money, but they cared a whole lot about sort of professional prestige within their communities. If you write philosophy books, you’re basically worrying a whole lot about what other philosophers think, and that’s just about it.

My mom is a painter: a different code from the world she was in …

Did you admire her?

I did. And I still do admire her. The pain of it was hard to be a part of. You know, it was in my house, do you know what I mean? So it was hard to …

Sure. I bet she must have hurt real bad over it too.

[Strange, warm, small-town counselor sound]

She’s witty, and she reads Emerson and Nietzsche and all that, so I think she found something funny in it. But it was also really hard. To watch. I mean, you know …

(Soft voice) Yeah. No, I know what you mean. It’ll be interesting—I’ll bet, I mean, I don’t know you, but I’ll bet there’ll come a time when you realize you’re always gonna have about as much success as you need, and that’s fine. Where you’ll just feel like you can draw a free breath about it. And maybe not for all time—it’s just, that’s sort of, that’s the best thing about what’s going on right now. Is I feel like, “You know what? This doesn’t run me.” And it’s flattering
to have
Rolling Stone
send you out here. But it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean to me what it would have meant to me ten years ago. And I realize that that’s precious.

Why?

Because if it means that much to me, then I’m real fragile and real breakable. ’Cause what if you
don’t
come? Or what if you don’t like me? Or what if the next thing gets a bad review, you know what I mean? ’Cause then I’m like—what am I like? Well, then I’m like something made of glass, that has to be treated just a certain way or he breaks. Right? And I don’t mean, I mean, I’m not a guru, it’s not like I’m exempt from this stuff. I just remember real well how much it used to mean.

What would it have meant ten years ago?

I think it probably would have just hastened things. Because it would have been absolutely great, I would have tried
incredibly
hard to impress you, in about a thousand different ways. Would have put on a whole lot of faux stuff, you would have left, I would have waited on tenterhooks for the article, the article would have come out. And if it wasn’t savage, I would have had exactly an hour of a kind of
greasy thrill
about it. And then there would have been a feeling of utter emptiness. Which is the feeling of, “Now I’m back to being made of glass, what’s the next thing I’m going to find that’s gonna handle me just right?” You know what I mean?

And it’s not like that I’m not like that at all, anymore. But I’m just like, I know that when all this is over—I know that the biggest part of me is looking forward to all this
bein’
over, so I can get back to work. And that that’s the most important thing. And that that’s good because I can live that way. I can’t—if I depend on this, then I’m gonna be miserable except for once every five years? You know what I mean?

[Screwing up his face]

That’s well said
.

But it’s not just well said—I mean, it’s really truth, I mean I’m really telling you the truth.

It’d be like being a sort of veteran courtesan who didn’t need to get paid exactly anymore …

Yeah; that’s a good example. It’s being a really good whore but knowing that the clocks tickin’, and that various things are headin’ south.

I’m worried about you calling Holly
. [Holly, his publicist at Little, Brown, is set to issue a decision about our getting to Minneapolis.]

[“Welcome to Bloomington-Normal,” an airport sign says. “We’re sold on Bloomington-Normal—Armstrong Realty.”

We’re standing in the opening and shutting automatic door, talking about graduate school.]

Fights—the professors’d say, Don’t use pop references (a) because they’re banal and stupid, and (b) because they date your piece. And it’s just sort of like, I mean I think, I don’t know about you, what kind of stuff you do. Me and a lot of the other young writers I know, we use these references sort of the way the romantic poets use lakes and
trees
. I mean, they’re just part of the mental furniture. That you carry around.

Shakespeare used Greek myths the same way
.

Although I’m also aware—the culture has a whole weird, complicated relation to its pop self, or something like that. Because I know that, like, when I make that
Gilligan
reference in class, everybody laughs. And there’s a jagged edge to it. Because everybody’s a little
uncomfortable with how familiar it is. I mean, so there’s this whole, there’s this very neurotic relation to it. But a lot of that stuff I don’t much think about in the writing. A lot of that stuff to me is just kind of like … describing a landscape or something.

[I tell David I’m very interested in the married relationships question—how people maintain emotional and physical interest.]

Is that why you’re not married at thirty? Is that kind of a chilling …?

Why aren’t you married at thirty-four?

You first.

Um—I think it’s hard to fill that role … to cast it and to fill it when you know it’s for thirty or forty years … someone who, whatever mental landscape you’re in, they’re going to be in it too, you need someone who’ll fit any landscape you can imagine
.

I’m not that systematic about it. I’ve come close a few times, and each of those times that I came close involved, you know, a three- or four-year thing. And then when it didn’t work out—if a few of them don’t work out, then you’ve been sort of
at large
for nine or twelve years, and you haven’t gotten married. I think the larger thing is probably that I am … that I tend to be interested in women that I turn out not to get along very well with. And the ones that I get along very well with, I’m not interested in in a kind of romantic way. So that I’ve got a lot of really good women friends. But I tend to have a really hard time with girlfriends, because the ones I’m attracted to are a lot of fun you know for, in the standard ways, for like a couple of weeks. But in terms of the daily, let’s-go-shopping stuff, that we tend not to get along really well.

Why not?

I don’t know. And I have friends who say that this is something that would be worth looking into with someone that you pay. But a lot of it too is that—yeah, I don’t think of it, I can’t put it as well as you did about the mental landscapes, I just know I’m hard to be around. Because kind of when I want to be by myself, like to work, I really want to be myself. And I will just go away. And women don’t like that. Unless they themselves are writers, and then in which case I don’t want to watch
them
go away.

Is that—not our taxi
.

That’s not for us. You were incorrect …

[Car glazed over with ice. Like Batmobile. All contours smoothed. David gets the scraper out of the trunk, goes to work: windshield, chunks of spray, back window.]

This is an adventure. Don’t lose the scraper. This is my good-luck scraper. A good Midwestern boy develops a relationship with his scraper.

[We’re driving. Out from the tangle of the airport. David has brought a Savarin coffee can for his chewing tobacco.

Savarin can falls over on hard turn.]

You don’t want to do that after the spittoon is full.

[We’re on I-55—slushy and crowded—driving to Chicago.]

Why did movie idea, in Infinite Jest, attract you? I have a hard time turning off a TV
.

I would have a real hard time talking about it in any way that you would be able to get a paragraph—Jesus, what’s
wrong
with people today?

[Road conditions, swervers jumping into our lane.]

What the fuck is with him?

Did you get movie idea first, or come to you later?

How is it when you work?

[We talk about Philip Roth …]

Roth writes for two years, but mostly to get voice. Throws away all for eighteen months, writes book in last six
.

I think that’s sort of what happened to me. Except it was more like three years of doing other stuff that stank, that then sorta set me up to do this. This was a weird thing because this started on page one, and ended on the last page. I was working on it in order. It sort of …

Written in the order it has now, more or less?

Yeah—the changes are from Michael’s cuts, I had to move things around. It’s quite a bit shorter than it was.

Twice as long before?

No. It wasn’t that much longer. It was about five hundred pages longer. Of which four hundred unambiguously needed to go, and the other hundred was painful.

That’s like losing a whole novel
.

It’s not really a novel; it’s not supposed to
be
a novel.

The definition of novel is … I never thought of this as a novel, I thought of it as a long story.

The whole time you were working on it?

No actually—the original title was
A Failed Entertainment
. The idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work. Because what entertainment ultimately leads to, I think, is the movie
Infinite Jest
. I mean, that’s the star it’s steering by. Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise. And the tension of the book is try to make it at once extremely entertaining—and also sort of warped, and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment.

Like what?

Oh, Jesus.

[Long pause: Clicking of turn signal, swabbing of wipers]

Y’like candy?

Yeah. Of course
.

What if you ate it all the time? What would be wrong with that?

Bad for teeth and very fat very quick
.

Real pleasurable, but it dudn’t have any calories in it. There’s somethin’ really vital about food that candy’s missing, although to make up for what it’s missing, the pleasure of masticating and swallowing goes way up. There seems to me to be some analogy to what—I’m talking about very seductive commercial entertainment. There’s nothing sinister, the thing that’s sinister about it is that the pleasure that it gives you to make up for what it’s missing is a kind of … addictive,
self-consuming pleasure. And what saves us is that most entertainment isn’t very good. (Laughs)

Addictive how? Like Die Hard—the best action, probably
.

The first
Die Hard?
I think it’s a great film.

Brilliant, right? Sharp script, smarter than most art movies
.

But also very formulaic, and rather cynically reusing a lot of formulas.

Terrence Rafferty’s line: “a formula action picture, but the extra-strength formula …” That film is about as good as an action film can get … consequences keep mounting up as they don’t usually in that sort of movie
.

Uh-huh.

That kind of movie then? Or MTV? Or TV?

I guess entertainment would describe a continuum—I guess what I’m talkin’ about is entertainment versus art, where the main job of entertainment is to separate you from your cash somehow. I mean that’s really what it is … And I’m not, there’s nothin’ per se wrong with that. And the compensation for that is it delivers value for the cash. It gives you a certain kind of pleasure that I would argue is fairly
passive
. There’s not a whole lot of thought involved, the thought is often fantasy, like “I am this guy, I’m having this adventure.” And it’s a way to take a vacation from myself for a while. And that’s fine—I think sort of the same way
candy
is fine.

[Of course, one interesting thing is he buys Pop-Tarts and stuff to eat; lots of candy.]

The problem for me is in entertainment, it’s, at least in the book—God, if the book comes off as some kind of indictment of entertainment,
then it fails. It’s sort of about our relationship to it. The book isn’t supposed to be about
drugs
, getting off drugs. Except as the fact that drugs are kind of a metaphor for the sort of addictive continuum that I think has to do with how we as a culture relate to things that are alive.

[David talking, and the wipers going, and the other cars sort of leaving wakes ahead of us, as visuals for serious thoughts about entertainment. His point about five hundred thousand bits of information.]

So I think it’s got something to do with, that we’re just—we’re absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something. To run, to escape, somehow. And there’s some kinds of escape—in a sort of Flannery O’Connorish way—that end up, in a twist, making you confront yourself even more. And then there are
other
kinds that say, “Give me seven dollars, and in return I will make you forget your name is David Wallace, that you have a pimple on your cheek, and that your gas bill is due.”

And that that’s fine, in low doses. But that there’s something about the machinery of our relationship to it that makes low doses—we don’t
stop
at low doses.

You were talking about passion, with regard to Hal and others giving themselves away to a discipline, as opposed to entertainment
.

[Hal is the lead character in the tennis academy sections. Meanwhile, I want to pull over to the shoulder and knock ice off the noisy loud rubbery wipers.]

I’m not saying there’s something sinister or horrible or wrong with entertainment. I’m saying it’s—I’m saying it’s a continuum. And if the book’s about anything, it’s about the question of why am I watching so much shit? It’s not about the shit; it’s about me. Why am I doing it? And what is so American about what I’m doing?