Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (12 page)

This was pushing too hard. Accusations that he was careless or meandered set Wallace on edge. It mattered enormously to him that the power of his mind be acknowledged. The membrane theory was one of his favorite moments of the book. It was the unbalanced Dr. Jay’s assertion that human relations could be entirely understood with regard to the struggle over the boundary between the self and the other. Physical limits were mental limits too: “Hygiene anxiety,” the therapist points out, “is
identity anxiety.” The membrane around us kept us safe and clean but also carried the risk of isolating us. It sounded Freudian, came out of Wallace’s reading of literary theory, and struck a chord with the hygiene-obsessed Wallace. It played off of Vigorous’s sexual problems with Lenore as well—her own boundaries frustrate his small penis. In response to Howard’s letter, Wallace gave his editor a bit of the razzle-dazzle methodology he was riddling his Arizona writing teachers with. The membrane theory, he wrote,

This long sentence was Howard’s first glimpse of how thoroughly his young author had worked out the philosophical thinking behind the book—or perhaps of the rigid will behind a hyperverbal façade—and he backed off. Howard’s more concrete problem was with the ending: the book didn’t have one. In the last pages, Lenore appears to be closing in on her great-grandmother, but we never find out for sure. Nadell had raised the issue even before she sold the book to Viking Penguin. The story, she felt, just seemed to stop. She suggested Wallace think about a more traditional last scene. Wallace had dug in—
The Crying of Lot 49
famously ends in mid-scene.

Howard too thought the text called for some sort of resolution. He urged his author to keep in mind “the physics of reading.” The physics of reading were, as Wallace came to understand the phrase, “a whole set of readers’ values and tolerances and capacities and patience-levels to take into account when the gritty business of writing stuff for others to read is undertaken.” In other words, a reader who got through a long novel like
Broom
deserved to know what had happened. “You cheat yourself as well of the opportunity to write a brilliantly theatrical close to the book,” the editor chided his young author.

Phrases like “the physics of reading” were seductive to the theoretician in Wallace. His clumsiness in the world of emotions also led to odd mixtures of gratitude and indifference. Over the years many editors would wonder whether Wallace was making fun of them with his excessive-seeming deference. The answer is he both was and wasn’t. To Wallace’s mind now, Howard had hazarded everything on his youthful work and no amount of gratitude could repay the gesture. At the same time he was not without diffuse cunning. He already had in mind to publish a follow-up volume of short stories; it would not be prudent to alienate his editor—or his readers, before he even had any.
¹⁶
So, sincerely or not—or sort of—he wrote Howard that the idea of the physics of reading had “made an enormous, haunting impression on me.” He assured him that he didn’t want his novel to be like “Kafka’s ‘Investigations of a Dog’…Ayn Rand or late Günter Grass, or Pynchon at his rare worst.” To him these were writings that gave pleasure only to their authors. All the same, he simply could not rewrite the ending. To do so would risk turning the book into a realist novel and betray his deepest belief about the relationship between reader and character (and by extension between life and reader):

He’d tried, he said, to write a proper conclusion, in which, he told Howard, “geriatrics emerge, revelations revelationize, things are cleared up.” But the scene, never sent (if it ever existed), felt too pat to him. The issue was a serious one for him. “I am young and confused and obsessed with certain problems that I think right now distill the experience of being human in a
human community,” he begged Howard. “Can you help me with this?” What he meant was he knew reality to be fragmented, oblique, unbalanced, and his book had to capture that fragmentation if that experience was to count for anything—that was
why
he wrote the way he did. In the end, he insisted on keeping the ending he had written, breaking the novel off in midsentence, with Rick Vigorous, Lenore’s ex-boyfriend, attempting to pierce the physical boundaries of Mindy Metalman, assuring her, “I’m a man of my”—the missing word being, elegantly and self-referentially, the word “word.”
¹⁷

Howard was satisfied; he had tried. He was still in awe of the book he held in his hands and felt, with or without a conventional ending, it was, as he remembered, full of “the sheer joy of a talent realizing itself.” He wrote to Nadell, even before he had finished editing Wallace’s book, “It is a great joy to be in at the start of his brilliant career.”
¹⁸
The title of the book was open to discussion. It had begun, at Amherst, as The
Great Ohio Desert,
a reference to a fictive human-engineered pile of sand near Cleveland with its suggestive acronym that figures in the story; to
Three Deserts
(“Rick, Lenore, and the G.O.D.,” Wallace noted to Howard); to
The Broom of the System,
the name it was submitted to Howard under. Amy Wallace now suggested
Family Theater,
a reference to the therapy that the Wallaces had undergone as a group in summer 1982, but in the end
Broom
won out.

Wallace’s life began to go on two tracks. His book was soon to be the first original novel in a fiction line from an important New York publishing house, but he was still a first-year MFA student, facing a faculty less than enchanted by his success. Personal dislike, professional jealousy, and opposition to postmodernism made anything good that happened to Wallace dubious in the eyes of his teachers—at least that was how he read the situation.

Wallace had grown close to a fellow student named JT. “Jate”—no one knew what the initials stood for—was a former marine, who wore a hat and leather bomber jacket in the heat of Tucson. He called his apartment on 9th Street “the lair.” It featured a Soloflex machine in the living room and a stack of Diet Coke cases reaching almost to the ceiling in the kitchen.
For Wallace 9th Street became a replacement for the lost “womb” at Amherst. He would go there to relax, hide out from Gale Walden, get high, discuss their fiction, and engage in what he called in a story he wrote of the time “macrocosmic speculations.” JT was the sort of friend Wallace was increasingly drawn to, the sort to whom he could be at once a pal and still somewhat mysterious to. They had a routine together. “How’d you get to be so smart?” JT would ask. “’Cause I did the reading,” Wallace would respond. They called first novels “big shits” because everything you knew got poured out into them. Together with an undergraduate friend they put out a parody issue of the writing program newsletter, a publication of the “University of Aridzona Piety Center”:

How many Jonathan Penners does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

One. Having more than one Jonathan Penner violates basic point-of-view considerations.

How Many Robert Boswells does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Two: One to screw in the bulb, and one to accept the award.

JT created a joke for Wallace, but the latter cut the entry when he sat at the printing shop alone with the manuscript. The parody offended many of its targets, not entirely a surprise to Wallace, who as they finished up the issue began to downplay his involvement.

JT helped Wallace in crucial ways. Wallace was a child of academia with little knowledge of the larger world. That world frightened him easily and often overwhelmed him, but he saw that without broader experience he was going to have a hard time growing as a writer. Fantasizing about his future biography, Wallace joked with JT one day, “‘Dave sat in the smoking lounge of the library, pensively taking a drag from a cigarette and trying to think of the next line.’” He added, “Who wants to read
that
?” JT’s stories held a partial solution. He told him he had been in a severe accident involving an International Harvester truck in the 1970s that had left him in a coma; Wallace put the accident in a story. Another day, early in the semester, as JT remembers, Wallace put on a recording by Keith Jarrett. While they listened to the improvisation, JT told Wallace, who was high, a story about a road trip he took to see the Grateful Dead with his
brother, a bouncer nicknamed Big. Just before, Wallace had been flipping through a collection of records put out by Placebo Records, a punk rock label. Many of the Placebo musicians and their associates were friends of JT, and two of their names came up in the road trip story too: Big and Mr. Wonderful. Wallace ran off to his bungalow and a few days later came back with a story narrated by a rampaging young Republican named Sick Puppy who delights in burning women while they fellate him.
¹⁹
The story starts:

The story, “Girl with Curious Hair,” was in the same key as
Less Than Zero
. Wallace felt that employing bored, vapid characters to capture boredom was poor writing, but as a natural mimic he admired the strong voice Ellis had found; he saw its potential. So he pushed the voice past where Ellis had taken it, moving it from the stylish into the gothic or repulsive.
²⁰
When Costello came to visit, Wallace recited the opening of
A Clockwork Orange
, and Costello realized that the Anthony Burgess novel had also been a model for the story his friend had just written. Wallace told his friend that Burgess’s novel showed how to use hyperbolic language to convey deadened emotional states. (The debt to Bret Easton Ellis was one Wallace would never acknowledge. When Howard asked after reading the story whether Wallace had read
Less Than Zero,
Wallace told him no.)

When Wallace was not with JT, he was with Walden. During the return from Christmas 1985 break, they each had car trouble, so they agreed that it would be romantic to join up and drive in a convoy back to Tucson, Wallace from Urbana, Walden from the South Side of Chicago. The only problem was that Wallace had already agreed to make the trip back to Tucson with his sister, Amy, who was coming to visit him, and his friends Heather from Iowa and Forrest from St. Louis. So when Wallace, Amy, Heather, and Forrest, traveling in two cars, got to Oklahoma, he called Walden, to discover she needed his company while she waited for a mechanic to fix her car. Then he drove off with barely another word, his
change of plans pulled off so quickly that his sister’s suitcase was still in his trunk. When he and Gale finally got to Tucson—“two broken cars limping across the desert,” as Walden would remember it in a later poem—they found Amy hurt and bewildered, her feet bleeding from Heather’s borrowed shoes.

On the trip, Wallace listened to the southwestern accents. He had long wanted to write a variation on William Gass’s novel
Omensetter’s Luck
. The laconic hillbilly voice of the story appealed to him. As a “weird kind of forger,” imitating it would be a fun challenge. “He started to talk out ‘John Billy’ at rest stops,” Walden remembers. “He was trying to get the cadence of the dialogue down.” When he got home, he wrote a draft. “Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed,” the eponymous narrator states. There was, as ever, an element of parody in the homage. The goal was to push the original author out of sight. That the story was not easy to read mattered not at all to Wallace; all he cared about was the sentences.

Back at school for the spring 1986 semester, Wallace decided to try to finish his MFA more quickly. From his original boast to Washington that he would stay for “the next three years at least,” he now wanted to try to wrap up his graduate work in two. He may have wanted to be done at the same time as Walden, who was planning to graduate the next June, or to save tuition. He signed up for a workshop with program director Mary Carter, in which he would write extra stories for double credit, as well as a seminar on literary theory and an independent study on the theory and practice of poetry. In the last, when another participant called Derrida a waste of time, Wallace got so mad that everyone thought there would be a fight. He was still convinced that theory was what separated the serious novelist from the others, that without it writers were just entertainers. His interest in theory, like his fondness for stories with strong voices, also had a compensatory element. It served to satisfy energies that would have been frustrated had they gone into aspects of fiction writing he did not naturally excel at, like character development. It was a handy refuge for a writer who was still an odd combination of a mimic and engineer.