Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace (43 page)

And in September 2001,
The Corrections
was finally published, a novel Franzen had worked on—as Wallace noted with admiration to Pietsch a month later—for ten years, including “two periods when he threw [away] nearly-completed books he just knew in his gut weren’t right.” Wallace watched with amazement as the book became a bestseller. “I apologize in advance for the fact that I will never make you, me, or our joint employers,” Wallace wrote Pietsch, looking for reassurance, “anything even close to the amount of money he’s making FSG [Farrar, Straus & Giroux], by the way.” In truth he was happy for his friends—sort of—but knew (and cared and didn’t care) that his role as one of the founders of a new kind of writing was threatening to slip into the historical.
²¹
At the same time as he was being pushed aside as its leader, he was being held responsible for its flaws. For many years, critics had asked Wallace if he saw himself as part of a movement, and for as many years he had said no. Back in the early 1990s, he had written Morrow, half-jokingly, to suggest an issue of
Conjunctions
designed to show how he, Vollmann, and Franzen had nothing in common. When
Salon.com
inquired at the time of
Infinite Jest
what he and Franzen, as well as Donald Antrim, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, and Richard Powers shared, Wallace responded, “There’s the whole ‘great white male’ deal. I think there are about five of us under 40 who are white and over 6 feet and wear glasses.” Then, in August 2001, James Wood warned in a review of Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth
in the
New Republic
that there was a disturbing new trend in fiction: “A genre is hardening…. Familial resemblances are asserting themselves and a parent can be named.” Wood dubbed the new style “Hysterical Realism,” its principal characteristic being a desire

Wood believed this freneticism came at the price of intimacy and psychological acuity, the true gifts of the novel. Wallace wasn’t the father of this undesirable new movement in fiction—that was Dickens, in Wood’s conceit—but he was named as one of the louche uncles, corrupting literary youth. And the next year would bring two more additions to the family: Gary Shteyngart’s
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
and Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Everything Is Illuminated
, both debut novels that seemed to owe their exuberance—their commitment to “vitality at all costs”—to
Infinite Jest
. The irony was that Wallace had now spent half a decade trying to slow down not just literature’s pulse but his own.

Wallace was beginning to feel like time was passing him by. He read in the
New York Review of Books
about electronic publishing and wondered what it meant that he didn’t like the idea, was wed to the artifact—“the traditional galleys-and-proofs-and-pub-dates-and-real-books-with-covers-you-hate” approach, as he wrote to DeLillo. He used to welcome change, he remembered: “The whole thing makes me feel old, sort of like the way Heavy Metal music or cum-shots in mainstream movies make me feel.” When his high school class in Urbana had celebrated their twentieth reunion the year before, Wallace hadn’t been able to attend—he was at Marfa—but sent a check for a floral arrangement for classmates who had died and asked for someone to videotape the event. Shortly afterward, he came through Urbana and was absorbed by the images of his classmates celebrating, which he watched in the home of the class reunion chair. He apologized to her for not having been more sensitive to her depression when they were students, and when he found out she worked with the man whom as a boy he had tormented with snowballs, he wrote a letter apologizing to him too. He made amends wherever he could, sometimes to excess.
²²
He wrote to his Arizona sponsor that “I struggle a great deal, and am 99.8% real,” then crossed that
out and wrote in “98.8%,” noting in a parenthesis in the margin, “Got a bit carried away here.”

Wallace knew it was time to leave Illinois State. His writing was stuck and his relationships with women were falling into a pattern so predictable that even he saw the humor in them.
²³
The university had also begun to back away from “the Unit,” the oasis for experimental literature in the prairie. Wallace cared little by now for this kind of writing, but the people who had worked so hard to create it mattered to him.

Ever since
Infinite Jest
, various high-level writing departments had put out feelers to him in the hopes that this well-known author, so obviously wasted on a second-tier midwestern university, would be willing to move. In the fall of 2000 he received a letter from Pomona College, in Claremont, California, which had just created a chair in creative writing. Wallace responded to the English department chair with caution. The department head, Rena Fraden, reassured him that the post was designed for a full-time fiction writer. On a later call he joked that all his friends had gotten a letter too, including Franzen (who said he was not interested and recommended Wallace). He and Fraden agreed that he would visit the school in December and give a reading and teach a class to see what he thought of the school. When he came, the students at the class, as one remembered, sat “in a narcotic state of awe.” Wallace taught a workshop and said if he could leave them with one thing it was the difference between “nauseous” and “nauseated.” He gave a reading to a small group in Crookshank Hall and met the faculty and liked them. He went to a dinner at Fraden’s house, where the participants each talked about a book that had affected him or her deeply. One mentioned
Clarissa
; another Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
. Wallace surprised all by naming a popular page-turner (no one can remember quite which).

Wallace quickly bonded with Fraden. She was the sort of sympathetic, uncompetitive academic whom he could count on to provide the special conditions that helped him to work, a successor to Dale Peterson, Mary Carter, and Charlie Harris. Pomona began to look like a place where he could make a new start. He and Fraden discussed that evening what it
would take to get him to leave Bloomington. He asked for as little teaching as possible; Fraden agreed. The department voted to end the interview process and offer him the job. A month later, Wallace accepted. “The students actually appear to like to read and write, which will be a welcome change,” he wrote to Peterson. “I have gotten very tired (and sometimes impatient) with having to be a disciplinarian in order to get ISU students (the bulk of them, anyway) simply to do their homework.” He had promised ISU that he would teach a full year after his second leave, and he meant to keep that promise, but he was already looking forward to a new start. He pointed out to Morrow that he had been “home” for almost a decade and explained to Curtis White, his colleague in the department, that it was time for him to grow up.

In midsummer 2002, Wallace left Bloomington in the Volvo he’d bought with some of his MacArthur money, Werner and Jeeves in the back. It had been nine years since he’d last changed jobs. Francis B. and his mother raced him to his first stop, a hotel in Columbia, Missouri, so that when Wallace looked up at the front desk, he found his friend signing the registry. The joke fell flat, though: it turned out the forty-year-old author was traveling, not with professional dog movers hired by Pomona, as he had told them, but with Sarah Caudle, a young mother who had been a longtime friend and was now his girlfriend. It took the couple six days to drive west. During the trip they ate in their motel room so that the dogs were never alone. In St. George, Utah, Wallace wanted to go to a recovery meeting. He found a listing in the phone book, but by the time the sponsor called back it was too late.

When they got to Claremont, bleary-eyed and anxious, they drove up and down the streets. The Mission-style strip malls astonished Wallace—he wondered, as he always did when faced with something new, if he had made a mistake. Wallace told Caudle he was afraid that the bland weather would sap his “will to live.” “What kind of zip code starts with ‘9,’” he had written DeLillo plaintively just before leaving the Midwest. And, in the winter, he would write Morrow to claim he missed “yellow snow and flowing mucus.” But there was posturing in this homesickness: in reality Wallace’s sense of being uprooted passed quickly this time. The house the college had arranged for him was pretty, on the main street, Indian Hill Boulevard, and near the campus. It was fenced all in, with lemon trees in the back and a giant palm tree Wallace happily measured to be eleven and a half feet around.

The first few days brought two visitors. Fraden came with one of her daughters, and fruit and baba ghanoush. And Karen Green also dropped by. When Wallace was still in Bloomington, Green, a visual artist, had asked him for permission to turn “The Depressed Person” into a grid of illustrated panels. Now she brought the finished artwork, along with a housewarming gift of Ikea ice trays. The story, Wallace’s act of anger against Elizabeth Wurtzel, ends without hope: the depressed person cannot break out of the cage of solipsism that her “terrible and unceasing emotional pain” has placed her in. Green had reimagined the story, so that in the last panel of her painting she is cured. When Wallace saw what Green had done, he was pleased. He told her that she had turned it into a story that people would want to read. That day in Claremont he offered to make lunch for her. There were lamps scattered everywhere—she counted fourteen—and towels stretched out to dry on the furniture: the place looked to Green “like an office with a laundry.” His fridge turned out to contain only hot dogs and goldfish crackers. When Green asked if Wallace had mustard, he told her, “I’m not that into condiments.” They went to a park and Werner jumped on her and tore out her belly-button ring. She came back a few weeks later, the day before her birthday, with a mutual friend, and Wallace prepared her hot dogs and put them in the frilly paper cuffs that usually attire lamb chops.

On the car ride west Wallace had invited Caudle and her daughter to move in with him. But soon he called her in Illinois and said he wanted to end their contact. And when Karen Green’s own marriage ended in November, Wallace offered to help. “I’ll be your hideous man expert,” he said. Expecting that they were going to begin a relationship and determined to start on an honest footing this time, he wrote her a series of letters—Grim Letter I, Grim Letter II, he called them—where he laid out his psychiatric history and his history with women.
¹
“I don’t want to be Satan,” he explained. She drew a picture of Satan on him with a Sharpie and at his insistence added the words, “But I mean well.”

Soon Green invited him to spend Christmas with her in Hawaii. He was sad—Jeeves had just died (“the closest thing to a child that I had,” he wrote Morrow). To make sure they could get along when they got there, he had first visited her for a day in Marin County, where she lived. They had fun, and he amazed her afterward by writing a letter describing every detail
of her house, down to the paint-splattered shoes in the hallway. He told her the depressed person was really him. Wallace wanted to go slow, so to encourage him in Hawaii, Green sent him a sheet with a hole already cut out. In December they left, surprising Wallace’s friends, who knew how little he liked to travel. In Hawaii, they watched movies and walked on the beach and talked constantly. Green swam, while Wallace avoided the water. He found the islands, he wrote Morrow afterward, “much less touristy or vulgar than I’d thought, and haunted and sad in a good way.” He also liked that there were no bugs. Before they returned home, he asked Green if she would marry him. But Green had a teenage son, Stirling, who danced, and she wanted to be near a good ballet program. On his return Wallace told Morrow that he was “pretty much hopelessly in love with a female in Marin County who’s a showing painter.”

Wallace settled in to Claremont. He found a recovery group he liked and, touched by California culture, drank his “breakfast vomit,” lifted weights, ran with Werner, and even bought a new tennis racket. He festooned his walls with shark attack clippings and pages of the Long Thing. When school began, he found he liked teaching at Pomona more than he had expected. For one thing, there were no graduate students (and thus no budding literary theorists), and the undergraduates were more capable than at Illinois State—he was in the “land of 1600 SAT scores, apparently” as he described Pomona to Morrow. He found Fraden, the department head, exactly how he hoped she’d be. They soon had a standing date to watch
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
every Tuesday night at her house. As ever, Wallace tried to tamp down any sense that he was special; when the students in his fiction class had a “Dress Like DFW Day,” he let it be known that it was only sort of funny.

Best of all, he only had to teach one course each semester and never had to sit on a committee. “We’re hiring you to write—you have to keep writing,” Fraden had told him. “I have a lottery-prize-type gig at Pomona,” Wallace bragged to the
Believer
in 2003. “I get to do more or less what I want.” Any grumblings among the faculty, for whom undergraduate education was a calling, were soon laid to rest as word of Wallace’s unmistakable dedication to teaching emerged—for example, the eleven impromptu mini-papers he required from students in “Literary Interpretation,” or the comments in different-colored inks for each reading that he scrawled in
the margins of students’ stories. He took teaching seriously and made sure his students did so too. Once, when the school registrar wanted to audit Wallace’s course, on the literary essay, Wallace turned her down because she would have had to miss too many classes for faculty meetings.