The New York Review of Books

Bob Mahoney

David Foster Wallace, Syracuse, New York, 1995

“What I would love to do is a profile of one of you guys who’s doin’ a profile of me,” David Foster Wallace told the journalist David Lipsky in 1996 during a series of conversations now collected as Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace. “It would be a way,” Wallace continued, “for me to get some of the control back”:

You can’t tell outright lies that I’ll then deny to the fact checker. But…you’re gonna be able to shape this essentially how you want. And that to me is extremely disturbing…. I want to be able to try and shape and manage the impression of me that’s coming across.

As Lipsky tells us in his introduction, he loved Wallace’s idea of profiling the profilers:

It would have been one of the deluxe internal surveys he specialized in—the unedited camera, the feed before the director in the van starts making cuts and choices…. That’s what this book would like to be. It’s the one way of writing about him I don’t think David would have hated.

Given that 310 pages of Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself are devoted to transcripts of conversations with Wallace, Lipsky’s suggestion that he is “writing about” Wallace seems somewhat overstated. What writing Lipsky does do is annotative. Consider an interesting section where Wallace and Lipsky are discussing fictional modes. Lipsky expresses a preference for realism; Wallace, for avant-guardism: “experimental and avant-garde stuff can capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings,” Wallace says, “in a way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.” Lipsky suggests that “Tolstoy’s books come closer to the way life feels than anybody, and those books couldn’t be more conventional.” Wallace holds that “life now is completely different than the way it was then. Does your life approach anything like a linear narrative?” As Wallace continues, note that the bracketed comments are Lipsky’s, after the fact:

Life seems to strobe on and off for me, and to barrage me with input. And that so much of my job is to impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense of it. In a way that—maybe I’m very naive—I imagine Leo getting up in the morning, pulling on his homemade boots, going out to chat with the serfs whom he’s freed [Making clear he knows something about the texture and subject], you know. Sitting down in his silent room, overlooking some very well-tended gardens, pulling out his quill and…in deep tranquility, recollecting emotion.

And I don’t know about you. I just—stuff that’s like that, I enjoy reading, but it doesn’t feel true at all. I read it as a relief from what’s true. I read it as a relief from the fact that, I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those out, you know?

And yet you made a linear narrative, easily, out of both our days, just now. Off the top of your head. I think our brain is structured to make linear narratives, to condense and focus and separate what’s important.
You, if this is an argument, you will win. This is an argument you will win. [Strange: competition] I am attempting to describe for you what I mean in response to your, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The overall effect of Lipsky’s constant interruptions of Wallace’s routinely thoughtful replies is not to give the reader useful information but to show how little Lipsky seems to understand Wallace—both the man who preferred to avoid doing journalism of the variety that Lipsky has produced and the artist whose method Lipsky claims he was attempting to ape: “the deluxe internal surveys [Wallace] specialized in—the unedited camera, the feed.”

1.

Lipsky’s characterization of what Wallace “specialized in” is, however, useful: it perfectly miscasts what made Wallace a writer we have a duty to understand. The troublesome word is “unedited,” and though Lipsky would use it approvingly to suggest a breadth of vision, the word also suggests a lack of proportion that has been the most consistent, lingering, and wrongheaded criticism of Wallace’s work throughout his career. Caryn James’s approving review of Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, nonetheless classed the book in “the excessive tradition.” Michiko Kakutani’s mixed notice of Infinite Jest, Wallace’s second novel, called it a

compendium of whatever seems to have crossed Mr. Wallace’s mind. It’s Thomas Wolfe without Maxwell Perkins… The book seems to have been written and edited (or not edited) on the principle that bigger is better…[but is] arbitrary and self-indulgent.

Of Wallace’s second story collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Adam Goodheart asked:

You know the old story about how if you set a billion monkeys to work on a billion typewriters, one of them would eventually compose the complete works of Shakespeare? David Foster Wallace often writes the way I imagine that billionth monkey would: in mad cadenzas of simian gibberish that break suddenly into glorious soliloquies, then plunge again into nonsense.

And Walter Kirn, weighing in on Wallace’s final collection, Oblivion, heaped opprobrium on Wallace’s “unedited” feed:

When Wallace’s superbrain walks into a room, it notices everything, measuring, inventorying and classifying the furniture, the brand names on the shelves, the microtextures of walls and clothes and carpets, the tone and timbre of people’s voices—everything. When he’s off on one of these hyperfocused sprees, there’s no such thing as an unimportant detail; his intensity spreads out in all directions, throwing every feature of the scene into equally high relief. By the end of the story there’s no such thing as an important detail, either…. Much of it probably partakes of genius, at least in the chess-grandmaster, Bronx High School of Science sense…. Yet too often he sounds like a hyperarticulate Tin Man…. Maybe the Wizard should give the guy a heart.

“Excessive,” “not edited,” “arbitrary,” “self-indulgent,” “mad,” “gibberish,” “nonsense”—it has been frequently said that Wallace’s fiction, its virtues notwithstanding, displayed its author’s inability to restrain himself; that, however smart he was, he wasn’t smart enough to write fiction that didn’t distract the reader with yieldless shows of virtuosity; that the net result was work that, in its excess, was often boring and lacked heart.¹

Given that some of Wallace’s books are long (the longest is 1,079 pages), and some of his stories are long (the longest is 140 pages), and some of his sentences are long (some run to several pages), to have to read such novels, stories, and sentences on deadline is bound not merely to baffle but to bully a reader without adequate time (the same can be said of novels by Norman Rush or Thomas Pynchon). Many reviewers had to digest Wallace’s work too quickly to get a clear sense of what he was doing, and certainly to be able to take pleasure in it.

That’s why even reviews of Wallace’s books by more characteristically perceptive critics often included errors of reading comprehension of the who-what-where variety. To take just one: in the review quoted above, Kirn gets the name of the narrator wrong when discussing the story “Good Old Neon,” from Oblivion. Kirn says it’s “David Wallace,” but the story says it’s “Neal.” The correct answer is not that it’s one or the other but that it could ultimately be either, a fundamental ambiguity to which the story deliberately builds. Kirn’s mistake isn’t unreasonable, if one reads the story quickly, carelessly, only once, or all three. But when the rudiments of a Wallace story are muffed, one can be sure that larger matters than those of basic comprehension are being misconstrued.

2.

Wallace was an avant-garde writer. He believed that one of fiction’s main jobs was to challenge readers, and to find new ways of doing so. In dozens of interviews and not a few essays, Wallace voiced a consistent cultural critique that offers a philosophical basis for his aesthetic. His earliest published essay, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” which appeared after the publication of The Broom of the System, argues that the nature of the accelerating changes in modern life, the “five hundred thousand discrete bits of information” by which he felt daily barraged, had made writing fiction that reached readers unprecedentedly hard:

Human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it’s a built-in thing…. The narrative patterns to which literate Americans are most regularly exposed are televised. And, even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It’s a narrative art that strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient—not necessarily even to “entertain”—but merely and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end—openly acknowledged—is to ensure continued watching. And (I claim) the metastatic efficiency with which it’s done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the level of people’s tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of which narrative art is art.

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding.²

Whereas it was Wallace’s intention to be engaging by being demanding. As he tells Lipsky, there was a remedial aspect to his ambition:

You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us…that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it…is serious engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart.

One sees Wallace’s commitment to that kind of engagement in even his first published work, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing.” The eight-thousand-word story appeared in his undergraduate literary magazine when he was a college junior.³ To an unusual degree, it already possessed many characteristics of his later fiction. A first-person account by a young man who goes on antidepressants after a suicide attempt, the story has a spoken casualness that would become a characteristic quality of Wallace’s prose. Here, the narrator—whose euphemism for his depression is “the Bad Thing”—describes his state of mind when, prior to going on medication, he was on a bus during an accident where he witnessed the driver get seriously injured:

I felt unbelievably sorry for him and of course the Bad Thing very kindly filtered this sadness for me and made it a lot worse. It was weird and irrational but all of a sudden I felt really strongly as though the bus driver were really me. I really felt that way. So I felt just like he must have felt, and it was awful. I wasn’t just sorry for him, I was sorry as him, or something like that.