Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (42 page)

Wallace had explored this state briefly in
Infinite Jest
, partly through Lyle, the levitating guru in the weight room, and partly through John “No Relation” Wayne, the top player at the tennis academy, whose skill comes not from Wallace- or Hal-like cunning but from “frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.”
¹⁸
With the help of researchers, Wallace assembled hundreds of pages of research on boredom, trying to understand it at an almost neurological level. He pulled down his
Oxford English Dictionary
and was intrigued to find that “bore” appeared in English in 1766, two years before “interesting” came to mean “absorbing.”

Wallace had four offices to write his novel in: his black room at home, a university office (rarely visited), a room put aside for him in Francis B.’s mother’s house, and a rented space in town.
¹⁹
He was usually flummoxed by his lack of progress. DeLillo, to whom he wrote in worry, reassured him that a novel was “a long march to the mountains.” He took a second yearlong leave in 2000 and spent the first half of it trying to work and seeing a lot of movies. (Movies, he liked to say, were an addict’s recreation of choice.) Then he wrote letters about the movies. DeLillo was his chosen correspondent and his opinions were anti-elitist and mildly contrarian. For instance, he saw and loved the cyberthriller
The Matrix
—“visually raw and kinetic and riveting in a way that only something like Bochco’s Hill Street Blues was in ’81,” he wrote his friend—and hated the acclaimed
Magnolia
, which he found pretentious and hollow, “100% gradschoolish in a bad way.” That summer he went to a retreat run by the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas. There Wallace spent a pleasant month. He borrowed a nearby rancher’s two golden retriever puppies to walk and turned the books by the retreat’s alumni to the wall. This was his moment to approach the novel head-on, but the writing didn’t go particularly well, at least in retrospect. To Franzen, on his return, he wrote, “Almost everything
I did there will have to be thrown away, but that, too, is good, in a way.” To Rich C., he was more downbeat: “I’m scared I can’t do good work anymore.”

Wallace was ever more in demand for his nonfiction. In the fall of 1999,
Rolling Stone
asked him if he wanted to write about a candidate in the upcoming presidential elections and he chose John McCain, the independent-minded Republican who was opposing George W. Bush for the presidential nomination. Wallace was politically fairly conservative; he’d voted for Ronald Reagan and supported Ross Perot in 1992, telling his friend Corey Washington, “You need someone really insane to fix the economy.” He came to combine midwestern conventionality with girlfriend-pleasing campus liberalism. In 2000 he voted for Bill Bradley in the Illinois primary. In truth politics did not generally matter much to him. He did not think who won an election could change what was broken. But in McCain Wallace saw another chance to explore the hollowing out of the American character. McCain’s campaign, which prided itself on openness and truthfulness, raised two intriguingly recursive questions in his mind. Was McCain genuinely honest or just portraying himself as genuine? If the former, were Americans so steeped in the complex double-talk of advertising they could not see genuineness when it appeared? And if the latter, were they so used to being tricked that it was now its own source of pleasure?

Wallace spent a week on the campaign trail in early February 2000 and, as was his style, ignored the top-level operatives to focus on the techies and hacks in the bus that followed McCain’s bus, the Straight Talk Express, dubbed (probably by Wallace) the Bullshit 1. He exaggerated on the way to make his point. He painted the major newspaper reporters—he called them “the twelve monkeys”—as haughtier and more alike one another than they even were and pretended the McCain campaign strategist was so afraid of him he would duck around the corner to avoid encounters (in fact they got along well; the gesture was playful, as the campaign strategist told a reporter for
Salon
in 2010.) And did two separate reporters really mistake Wallace for a bellboy and tell him to carry their suitcases? It seemed unlikely, but all this falsity contributed to creating a portrait of
Wallace as an outsider, someone who could convey a truth readers weren’t getting elsewhere, real straight talk. In the end, what Wallace wanted to capture was what

McCain’s campaign was fast folding. After he lost the primary elections of early March to Bush,
Rolling Stone
needed the article in a hurry. Wallace took only three weeks to write twenty-seven thousand words. The piece—cut by more than half in three days of frantic editing by phone—was in print by mid-April, a speed that Wallace found both liberating and upsetting. In the end Wallace used his unaccustomed ringside seat at American history to further preoccupations that dated back to his “E Unibus Pluram” essay. His conclusion was that McCain was America looking in the mirror. “Whether he’s truly For Real,” he ended, “depends now less on what’s in his heart than on what might be in yours.”

The article would win a National Magazine Award, but Wallace always felt his take on the “three months that tickled the prostate of the American Century,” as he called the campaign in a letter to DeLillo, was just a vacation from the novel he was supposed to be working on. “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do,” he added as “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub” was about to appear, “but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket, and taking half-hours off to write letters like this and still calling it Writing Time.”

In June 2000, an editor from Atlas Books approached Wallace with the idea of writing a volume on mathematics for its Great Discoveries series, which it was copublishing with Norton. Jesse Cohen suggested as subjects either Georg Cantor, a pioneer in set theory, or Kurt Gödel, who authored the incompleteness theorems, which state that no matter how much one knows about a system there is yet more to know. That knowledge has limits that are themselves the product of our knowledge was the sort of thing
that Wallace never stopped thinking about. “Obvious fact,” he would later write in the book, “never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is.” Cantor, though, held the prospect of something even more appealing: an inquiry into a man who took on a puzzle of the sort that had always fascinated and worried Wallace—in this case, the nature of infinity. Most investigations into thinking of this sort, Wallace knew, led to paralysis, the a.p.-s’s (adolescent pot smoker’s) solipsism he always feared. Cantor though had broken through to the other side by showing that there are different sized infinities and that they can be thought about almost like ordinary numbers. He had turned a fearsome unknown into a quantity that mathematicians could manipulate. Cantor also presented the more achievable challenge. “I know [enough] about Gödel’s proof to know that the math and notations alone would take me years to get proficient at,” Wallace wrote Cohen. He added in a stern fax he sent shortly after from Marfa that if he did undertake the book it would be “on the side as a diversion from other contracted stuff.” All the same, he couldn’t resist thinking how rewarding such an effort would be:

When Cohen wrote back that the book was meant to be a book of ideas, the thrust being on “Cantor and the sheer mindbending quality of his theories,” Wallace was hooked. This was the part of him he had left by the side of the road when he became a fiction writer, the part he had tried to breathe life back into when he went to Harvard, the part that made him the smartest guy in the room. He had slid into lightweight magazine work, offering insights on porn and tennis. The information that the advance might be as high as $100,000 did not hurt either. That was a bigger advance than he had gotten for
Infinite Jest
. He said yes.

It was now the fall and Wallace was more than halfway through the second leave that was supposed to be devoted to his fiction. He started research on the infinity book. His efforts on what he had taken to calling “the Long Thing” did not go well. “Most of my own stuff I’ve been delivering to the wastebasket,” he wrote Markson in November. “It looks good in there.” All the same he was so glad not to be teaching that when he found out that the university was accidentally still paying him, he wrote his department head to say he wouldn’t cash the checks in case they tried to make him pay them back with classes later. But in the spring of 2001, he was back in the classroom, trying to balance his nonfiction, his fiction, and his fears. The article on American usage he had begun when he was with Juliana finally appeared in
Harper’s
. The magazine ran less than half of what he had originally written but he acknowledged in a note to DeLillo that Colin Harrison, his longtime nonfiction editor there, “did a pretty good cut.”

That summer he went with friends to a two-week meditation retreat at Plum Village near Bordeaux, France, under the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. The retreat required abstention from both coffee and smoking. Wallace wanted to understand more deeply what it was he was proposing in
The Pale King
. What did the bliss that followed great boredom actually
feel
like? He found that writing about mindlessness and achieving it for oneself were two different things; he left early, blaming the food, and was home as soon as he could be. He wrote to DeLillo on his return, “Highlights: 1) Went AWOL from Viet-Buddhist monast[e]ry’s retreat….2) watched 2 of 4 drunk Peruvians drown in Dordogne off St. Foy La Grande. 3) Ate a snail on purpose.” He mentioned that Franzen, whose third novel,
The Corrections,
was coming out in mid-September, was “gearing up for his turn at having Sauron’s great red eye upon him.”

The morning of September 11 found Wallace at his usual activities, going to his meeting, running errands, planning to write. At the actual moment of the attacks, he was showering, “trying to listen to a Bears post-mortem on WSCR Sports Radio in Chicago,” as he remembered. He did not know whether he had feelings about the attacks beyond the ordinary, but when
Rolling Stone
approached him for a piece on his response, he felt drawn to try. In three days, he wrote a short, delicate essay—“Caveat. Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock,” he appended to
the draft. “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” is a piece of oblique social analysis, a tribute both to the heartland and recovery. (It was first punningly called “A View from the Interior.”) He once more disguised his recovery group circle as friends from church. Thus Mrs. Thompson, his pseudonym for the mother of Francis B., became “a long-time church member and leader in our congregation.” He captured the essence of her and her friends’ diffuse, gentle articulations as they viewed the awful events, their worries about family in or near Manhattan, and their tears as they watched the towers collapse on television. “What the Bloomington ladies are,” Wallace wrote,

He contrasted the sincerity of the women with the attitude of a young man named Duane, also present, whose “main contribution was to keep iterating how much like a movie it is.” Wallace ended, “I’m trying to explain the way part of the horror of the Horror was knowing that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my own—mine…and poor old loathsome Duane’s—than these ladies’.” Did a certain part of America then deserve what it got? This was a point Wallace of course had to sidestep, but for anyone who had absorbed the lessons of
Infinite Jest
it was present all the same.

“It’s been a couple of very humbling years,” Wallace wrote Michael Pietsch soon after, admitting the novel was not going forward but insisting he had the maturity now to withstand fallow times: “When there’s sufficient humility and non-seriousness-about-self, it’s not all that bad, more like when the two guys are laughing existentially…at the end of
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
.” It did hurt, though, that the turn of the millennium had brought with it an abundance of large literary efforts that threatened to
push
Infinite Jest
to the edge of the stage. Dave Eggers’s memoir,
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
, had appeared in 2000, with a quote from Wallace on the jacket praising this “merciless book.” The work sought that characteristic honesty beyond honesty of Wallace’s essays.
²⁰
Eggers was also the editor of a new magazine,
McSweeney’s
. With its self-conscious sense of pleasure and wariness of hype,
McSweeney’s
shared Wallace’s goal of recording real life in a media-saturated age. (He in fact contributed three stories.) The admiration was mutual: Wallace proposed Eggers to Little, Brown to design
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
.