Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (35 page)

No time of calm is without its undertone of introspection and angst; affluence has its victims too. Wallace was by no means the only one nor the only one trying to give them voice. Certainly anyone as attuned to television as Wallace was could witness the damaged and the distressed telling their stories all day long.
¹⁷
And something similar was going on in writing by non-Anglo American writers, many of whom were presenting a vivid world of stories drawn from their own histories. But these were not authors to whom Wallace has a strong response; his remained the world of the 1970s novel, predominantly male, Caucasian, and highly erudite.
¹⁸
There a sense of anxiety was more muted, though not absent. Rick Moody was writing
Purple America
, a novel that deploys shifting consciousnesses to define a damaged and polluted America, and William Vollmann was pursuing the reportorial inquiry into the darker side of American life he had begun with
The Rainbow Stories
, an investigation similar to one that Denis Johnson was conducting in books like
Jesus’ Son
. These were a few of the authors who shared or even anticipated
Infinite Jest
’s sense that the focus on consumption and pleasure in modern American life would end badly. None of them, though, combined such a stance—the anti-hedonistic strain in American fiction—with the promise of redemption that lies at the center of
Infinite Jest
.

Indeed, earnest storytelling seemed to nearly everyone but Wallace antithetical to proving oneself worthy of taking on questions of societal unease; Don Gately is a character one can’t imagine any of the others creating. Literature—especially from the sorts of writers Wallace felt in conversation with—was about delving, extracting, and then layering a complicating layer of language on observed life; there was nothing evangelical about it. The literary gesture existed almost as an inverse to the narrative of recovery meetings, where as Wallace wrote in
Infinite Jest
, “an ironist…is a witch in church.…Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity.” In
Infinite Jest
, Wallace was proposing to wash Pynchonian excess
in the chilling waters of DeLillo’s prose and then heat it up again in Dostoevsky’s redemptive fire. “Look man,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in the
Review of Contemporary Fiction
interview,

Infinite Jest
then didn’t just diagnose a malaise. It proposed a treatment, answering a need that Wallace saw perhaps better than any other writer of his time. The book is at once a meditation on the pain of adolescence, the pleasures of intoxication, the perils of addiction, the price of isolation, and the precariousness of sanity. (Wallace never forgot David Lynch’s
Blue Velvet
and the skein that separates unremarkable from abnormal in America.) It spoke of the imminence of collapse and the possibility that one can emerge stronger from that collapse. It offered faith apart from religion. Its multiple voices jibed with an America that no longer spoke as one, an America in which, as in James Incandenza’s films, “you could bloody well hear every single performer’s voice, no matter how far out on the…narrative periphery they were.” It captured a new generation of young people—especially young ones, especially male—who in the midst of plenty felt misunderstood or ignored, who with each decade had less and less idea how to make their rich inner selves visible, who understood what Hal meant when he objected:

But the book also had the range to get beyond the much-trafficked literary realm of the misunderstood young. It captured another America, the millions felled by the “input too intense to bear” that Wallace had signaled in “Westward,” the Don Gatelys of the world, charismatic and full of fallow
potential, people “damaged or askew,” calling out to the reader from inside their broken lives, as they call out to Hal’s sensitive brother Mario as he visits Ennet House:

There was no need to decide which
Infinite Jest
you were reading, since, after all, these two main strands both emanated so clearly from the same concern: how to live meaningfully in the present. There is a generosity to the world created by this 1,079-page novel. A great intelligence hangs above it and seems not entirely uninterested in our survival. It watches from the walkway about the courts at the Enfield Academy and lurks in the communal rooms at Ennet House, explains the rise of O.N.A.N. and the fall of network advertising, the composition of tennis rackets, the Boston street names of controlled substances, and the history of videophony.
Infinite Jest
, for all its putative difficulty, cares about the reader, and if it denies him or her a conventional ending, it doesn’t do so out of malice; it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative than realistic storytelling can, because, just as in Ennet House, you have to work to get better. The book is redemptive, as modern novels rarely are (there is a reason Wallace had to reach back to Dostoevsky for a model). Gately abides, taking on, almost in a Christlike way, the sins of his flock, and Christ implies a God. Wallace never forgets his pledge, as he told McCaffery, that “all the attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for your benefit; it’s got to be for hers.”

All this makes it seem as if the critical success of
Infinite Jest
were predetermined. True, the book appeared at a moment in which critics were looking for big novels, for some way of summing up the world at the turn of the millennium, but
Infinite Jest
did not seem immediately what they wanted. It was too difficult, felt too headlong, its calculated casualness
confused. The prepublication notices straddled the fence between admiring and wondering whether the reviewer wasn’t being had.
Publishers Weekly
called the work a “brilliant but somewhat bloated dirigible of a second novel,” while
Kirkus
was slightly warmer, admiring what was “almost certainly the biggest and boldest novel we’ll see this year and, flaws and all, probably one of the best.” Predictably, most reviews emphasized the dimensions of the book, both literal and metaphorical. Sven Birkerts captured this amazement in the
Atlantic
, where he noted that
Infinite Jest
had “mov[ed] toward us like an ocean disturbance, pushing increasingly hyperbolic rumors before it: that the author could not stop writing; that the publisher was begging for cuts of hundreds of pages; that it was, qua novel, a very strange piece of business altogether.”
Library Journal
warned its readership that
Infinite Jest
was “not for the faint-hearted or the weak-wristed.”

Most reviewers who wrote about the book liked it, but there was an undertone of obedience to their writing, of being relieved they could answer in the affirmative the dare Little, Brown had laid down. “Challenging and provocative,” wrote the
Orlando Sentinel
. The
Chicago Tribune
called the novel “brashly funny and genuinely moving…worth the long haul.” The novelist Jonathan Dee in the
Voice Literary Supplement
praised Wallace as “the funniest writer of his generation.” All agreed
Infinite Jest
was significant—or, at least, a novel others would think was significant, so their readers should know about it. Walter Kirn, a mischievous novelist who reviewed it for
New York
, sped the plow: “Next year’s book awards have been decided. The plaques and citations can now be put in escrow. The competition,” he wrote, “has been obliterated. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on ‘Jeopardy!’ The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good.”
Esquire
praised the book but criticized the publicity campaign. (Wallace, who happened to be in New York when the piece came out, in a note to Markson called it “that sneery thing in
Esquire
about the so-called ‘Hype of the Huge.’”) All these developments were positive from the publisher’s point of view. “I’m very happy with the launch so far,” Michael Pietsch wrote to Bonnie Nadell, “all our drum beating seems to have been heard.”

The book began selling well, especially given its size, and the publisher quickly went back for several small reprints. Yet the novel was certainly
not sweeping everything away in its path. Jay McInerney reviewed the book for the
New York Times Book Review
with little enthusiasm. He missed the inventiveness of
Girl with Curious Hair
and found Wallace’s sentences more interesting than his plot. In the end he was not convinced that Wallace had successfully yoked two different kinds of books: “The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola,” he objected.

The most significant negative note came from Michiko Kakutani of the daily
Times
, who had expressed qualified affection for
Broom
. Faced with a behemoth in which narrative strands consume hundreds of pages and then fade away for several hundred more, in which the two principal plots of the story don’t clearly intertwine until more than six hundred pages into the book, in which the reader is consistently distracted by the need to thumb the back for endnotes that often offer information no reader seems to really need, in which digressions, playlets, urban legends, quasi-science, and pseudo-history break up the narrative, she found herself skeptical that she had read a masterpiece: “The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited),” she wrote, “on the principle that bigger is better, more means more important, and this results in a big psychedelic jumble of characters, anecdotes, jokes, soliloquies, reminiscences and footnotes, uproarious and mind-boggling, but also arbitrary and self-indulgent.” The end or non-end of the book particularly bothered her:

But such reviews did not dampen the impression, especially among the sort of critic interested in the dialogue among modernism, postmodernism, and whatever was coming after, that something new was being communicated. Birkerts in the
Atlantic,
who had welcomed
Girl with Curious Hair
as the first book truly to absorb the schizogenic vision of the writer writing in the media-saturated age, saw
Infinite Jest
as a brilliant extension of that preoccupation into the era of the Internet, with its manifold, overwhelming
sources of image and information. So what others considered incoherence or sloppiness was to him a sign of a talent struggling to absorb the news:

These comments came at just the moment when the importance of computer-based communication was exploding. Indeed, in the eight or nine years from the inception of
Infinite Jest
to its publication, the Internet had gone from a tool primarily for academics and the technologically adept to something approaching the limitless repository of information it is today. Few novelists or cultural critics had had time yet to think about what this transformation meant, least of all Wallace, and he was surprised to learn he had written a cybernovel. Asked by the
Chicago Tribune
whether his book was meant to reflect life as it was experienced in the computer age, he demurred. “This is sort of what it’s like to be alive…. You don’t have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way,” adding that he had never been. (He was wise enough to see a snare in it for an addict like himself. He felt, he told a friend, that he had already been exposed to enough ads for one lifetime and saw it as another insistent bleat creating the modern atmosphere of information overload, the state of affairs he would later call “Total Noise.”) Of course, “what it’s like to be alive” felt different for Wallace than it did for most people. Beset by anxiety and whipped by consciousness, his was a mind more drawn to the flat bright outlines of personhood than the nebulous contours of personality; it would be too simple to say that life for Wallace looked even more like the Internet than it did like television, but there is truth to it. In any event, the Internet Age was a gift that the post-millennial world gave to Wallace as a
writer in search of readers. Collage and pastiche were gaining currency, and caricature and portrait were drawing closer together in people’s minds. Wallace’s characters—modern in their very sketchiness—felt realer to many readers than what realists were writing. As the culture collapsed into the anecdote and sound bite,
Infinite Jest
was one of the few books that seemed to anticipate the change and even prepare the reader for it. It suggested that literary sense might emerge from the coming cultural shifts, possibly even meanings too diffused to see before.