Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (11 page)

Part of what ended the lovers’ relationship—we learn—was Bruce’s desire to be “the first really great poet of technology.” To which the therapist (who seems to have something of Lelchuk or Penner in him) chimes in:

Bruce, unrepentant, answers, “This kind of fiction doesn’t interest me,” and lays out his manifesto for a different sort of writing (and a new sort of relationship):

As the miles roll by, Bruce struggles to hold on to his vision of a fiction whose “meaning will be clean” between the harangues of his ex and his writing teacher. The story finishes in a more traditional mode, when Bruce tries to rewire his relatives’ broken stove, only to discover that, despite his degree in engineering from MIT, he has no idea how the device works. But at this point the reader suspects another parody, a subversion of the MFA-perfect trope of the stove as symbol of hearth and family, of the tidy ending.

When Wallace presented “Here and There” for comment in Penner’s workshop, the students were impressed. They were struggling to fit themselves within the boundaries of the well-made story; he was struggling to get out of them. But Penner considered the story “talky, slow and boring.”
¹²
Wallace next presented “Love,” a story within a story from
Broom
, about a conversation between characters named Donald and Evelyn Slotnik and their neighbor Fieldbinder about another neighbor who may have been stalking the Slotniks’ son. The third story was “Solomon Silverfish,” the tale of a lawyer whose wife is dying of cancer. For most of its nearly thirty pages, the story adheres closely—even mockingly—to the rules of narrative. Points of view alternate obediently among the characters; each one speaks in an identifiable voice: “Sophie is Solomon’s life and vice-versa, Mrs. Solomon thinks, Thirty-two years of such luck and happiness she did not even know how to begin thanking God on her knees.” But the last scene erupts into a Malamud-like moment of magic, a rapturous lovemaking in a cemetery as witnessed by Too Pretty, a pimp, high on heroin, who happens to drive by:

“There’s a fine and moving story here, David,” Penner wrote his student in response. “It’s about half this long.”
¹³
A conservative Jew himself, Penner found Wallace’s idea of Jews as targets of comedy “mildly offensive” and remembers wondering why Wallace kept submitting stories about people of his own religion to him. Other students assumed it was Wallace’s attempt to get under the skin of a professor who was not giving him the praise he expected. If so, it may have worked. Penner saw the talent that Wallace possessed and felt he was misusing it. At one point, he took Wallace aside and told him that if he continued to write the way he was writing “we’d hate to lose you.”
¹⁴

Penner thought he was giving Wallace just the sort of help he had come to Arizona for, but Wallace was flabbergasted and furious, and also excited. As often when goaded, he fought back with humor. He liked to sit around with friends, imitating Penner’s mannerisms; the hemorrhoid pillow the teacher brought to class was fair game. He joined Penner’s Sunday basketball games. Wallace no longer threw a timid hook shot. He enjoyed battling his professor in the pebbleless paint. (Penner was famous for scrupulously sweeping the court before a game.)

In December, when a small studio opened in a row of bungalows on East Adams Street where several of the other writing students lived, Wallace moved. He brought his books and towels to the “casita.” The rent was cheap and Walden’s new puppy, Jonson, could spend the night with them there. (The North Cherry Avenue apartment building had prohibited pets.) The bungalow had only a swamp cooler, and Wallace, who sweated heavily even when he wasn’t in the grip of anxiety, took to wearing his tennis bandana off the court. As the months passed at Arizona, he let his hair grow; the bandana became useful to hold it back. The look felt right—part of his rejection of midwestern conformity, a light shock to the bourgeoisie that also kept the sweat off his face—and he began trying out various headscarves to see others’ reaction. Sometimes he borrowed Walden’s.
One day he poached a turquoise sash from Heather Aronson and wore it around his head. Her sister Jaci, who also lived in town, told him he looked like a member of Kajagoogoo.

Wallace thought he was doing new and stimulating work at Arizona.
The Broom of the System
belonged to his creative past, but he understood the importance of getting it into print. He did not want to wait any longer to make his mark. He asked around for a teacher who would be willing to read it and make some suggestions for how to improve it, but no one offered. The prospect of spending time on a large undergraduate project of postmodernist tendencies did not appeal to the faculty. So, soon after arriving, Wallace asked Boswell to help. Boswell, who had been a star student in the program, made suggestions for the novel and also told Wallace he should get an agent. He suggested his friend send fifteen pages of the work to fifteen different literary agencies and see who responded first. A little more than a month after getting to Tucson, Wallace had a draft of the novel ready to submit. His cover note was coy:

He enclosed a chapter from the middle of the book, explaining that to send the beginning would only confuse the reader, “since the novel itself isn’t really constructed in an entirely linear, diachronic way.” Perhaps he had also learned from his experience with Penner that certain chapters might not prepare readers for the medley of parody, philosophy, and Wittgensteinian teases that followed. One of the agencies the package went to was Frederick Hill Associates in San Francisco, where Bonnie Nadell, a new associate who had worked in the subsidiary rights department at Simon & Schuster when
Less Than Zero
was published, opened it. Nadell liked the cocky tone of the letter and was impressed by the term “diachronic,”
which she did not know. She read the chapter and responded to its energetic comic voice. It reminded her of Pynchon, whom she had studied in college. Nadell asked for more pages. Wallace sent her the balance, and soon afterward she took the novel on. When the two first spoke by phone, Wallace called her “Ms. Nadell,” until he found out she was only a year older than he. He had so little cash he asked her to make a copy of the manuscript for him. “I defy you to picture a boy living on Ritz crackers and grape Kool-Aid…and be unmoved.” Nadell had no money either and instead got a friend at a publisher to photocopy it.

There was already a well-known nature writer named David Rains Wallace, so Fred Hill, Nadell’s boss, who had once worked for Sierra Club Books, suggested he use his full name. Wallace was to claim in later years that the change in his byline to David Foster Wallace had been against his will—“I would have called myself Seymour Butts if he’d told me to,” he wrote to Don DeLillo nearly two decades later—but Nadell remembers Wallace as happy with his new triple-barreled moniker. He had been experimenting with various names since he was a little boy and the homage to his literary mother was fitting.

After Thanksgiving, Nadell sent the novel out to a group of editors, including one at Viking Penguin, Gerry Howard, who responded at once. Howard had an affection for postmodernism and nostalgia for the literary culture it came out of. He loved words and word games and writing that exposed the artificiality of narrative. He was steeped in the works of Pynchon and had edited an anthology of prose from the 1960s as well. But he also thought
Broom
was different, that it used postmodernism in new ways. He remembers reading the manuscript and thinking he was reading something truly new, “a portent for the future of American fiction,” as he remembered it: “It wasn’t just a style but a feeling he was expressing, one of playful exuberance…tinged with a self-conscious self-consciousness.” For him—and for many others who would read the book—Wallace held the hope of an alternative to minimalism and to Ellis-type fiction, a way out of the etiolated mind-set of the moment. There was optimism in
Broom
’s despair, elation in its loneliness. Words tumbling over words might, it suggested, overwhelm the depressing anomie of American life. Howard offered a $20,000 advance to Nadell, quite large under the circumstances, as a minimum bid in return for the right to top any other
publisher’s subsequent offer. As it turned out, no one else bid on the book. Howard decided he would publish the book primarily as a paperback original.
¹⁵
This strategy had worked for
Bright Lights, Big City
, the publication of which was the industry’s model for how to reach younger fiction readers.

Wallace was thrilled. Finding a publisher had happened so fast it seemed unreal. He waited two hours on Walden’s stoop to tell her the news. Soon he flew to New York, where Nadell had found him an apartment to borrow on the Upper West Side. He met Howard and, separately, Nadell, who had grown up in the city. At the Hungarian Pastry Shop near Columbia University, they hung out with some of her college friends. They talked about favorite authors, including Pynchon, but they worried, one of her friends remembers, that the discussion was making Wallace uncomfortable so they changed the subject. The same friend said that his favorite word was “moist” and that it gave him particular pleasure to hear it used in conjunction with “loincloth.” (The phrase would turn up in a later story of Wallace’s out of the mouth of
Jeopardy!
host Alex Trebek.)

At the Viking Penguin offices on 23rd Street, Wallace, wearing a U2 T-shirt, sat down with his editor, who was amazed at how young he looked. Howard worried that Wallace would trip over the untied laces of his huge sneakers and found it funny that his new author insisted on calling him—he was only in his mid-thirties—“Mr. Howard.” He wondered at his diffidence and what seemed to him his tenuous connection to the larger world, thinking of the twenty-three-year-old Wallace, he would later tell an interviewer, “as a newly-hatched chick.”

Wallace went home intoxicated with excitement, so much so that he was carried away, reporting back to Costello that Howard had been the editor for
Gravity’s Rainbow
(not quite true, though Howard had gotten Pynchon to write an introduction to a reissue of Pynchon’s friend Richard Fariña’s novel). Once back in Urbana, he joined Walden in Chicago to see
Fool for Love
, the movie version of Sam Shephard’s play about battling lovers, and ate at a restaurant called Printers Row. Wallace, the ambitious part of his psyche coming to the fore, asked Washington to plant the good news with their class agent for the Amherst newsletter, “not, of course, letting her know that I requested or even endorsed your doing so.”

Howard felt he had a prodigy of a novel on his hands, a book that was brilliant, intuitive, obeying no rules. He settled down to edit the long
manuscript, accompanied by a reference book on Wittgenstein. Early in the New Year he sent Wallace a note with four pages of suggestions, focusing on passages he found self-indulgent and on problems of chronology. He thought his edit quite light, given the length of the manuscript.

Wallace was just now settling in for the spring semester. Howard’s letter knocked him off stride. Fragile in his confidence, even mild criticism hurt him, and since negative comments could plunge him into effulgences of self-doubt, he responded immediately, hitting the ball right back over the net. “If this seems fast,” he assured his editor, “be aware that I have done nothing ELSE besides eat and smoke since I got your letter and suggestions,” adding sneakily, “Don’t think because I’ve sent this back to you so quickly I’m not ready and willing to go over it again if you decide it’s necessary…I’ll just pull another all-weeker.”

Wallace had promised Howard he would find him reasonable when it came to editing, “neurotic and obsessive” but “not too intransigent or defensive about my stuff.” Generally, he was true to his word. If Howard adduced publishing wisdom or reader response, Wallace stepped quickly out of the way. Wallace had made a pun on the names of Raymond Carver and Max Apple, a comic novelist. “This Carver/Apple joke is too cute and you’ll be picked on for it. Drop it,” Howard wrote; Wallace did. Howard thought Wallace overdid the use of ellipses in quotes in dialogue as a way of indicating a lack of verbal response, dead air. Wallace trimmed them back. Howard found Dr. Jay, the bizarre psychiatrist whom both Rick Vigorous and Lenore see, tedious. “The more you condense or even eliminate his palaver, the better for the book,” he insisted. Specifically, he found Dr. Jay’s “membrane theory” of personal relations “disgusting and far too strange for the book’s good—and it is
very
tenuously related (I think) to whatever Lenore’s plans for Lenore B might be.”