In 1996, my college roommate Grant and I drove down to Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal. I was on assignment with the Daily Iowan, the student newspaper of the University of Iowa, to interview David Foster Wallace about his forthcoming book, Infinite Jest. For many preceding months in those zygotic internet days I had been hearing the lumbering, steam-fuelled buzz growing up around the book, which promised, at 1,079 pages, to be something astonishing, preternatural, and permanently game-changing.
I did not doubt it. I had read The Broom of the System, Wallace's first novel, published when he was only 24 and serving, initially, as one of his undergraduate theses (the other was in philosophy), and quickly on the heels of that, Girl with Curious Hair, his collection of nine stories and a novella so manic with ventriloquism and curiosity as to seem written by 10 different writers being informed and guided, day and night, by a legion of obsessive-compulsive assistants. Taken together with the novel, which had managed to assimilate the arch, self-referential preoccupations of the metafictionalists of an earlier generation without sacrificing emotional availability or outlandish comedy, the stories had made Wallace the byword, among my college friends, for the Future of American Fiction.
Using my credentials as journalist for the Daily Iowan, I called Little, Brown, publisher of Infinite Jest, and asked to speak to whomever I needed to speak to in order to speak to David Foster Wallace. I was nervous. I was transferred. I was, after a few queries regarding my intentions, vetted. Inexplicably, astoundingly, I was given Wallace's home phone number which, exponentially more nervously, I dialled. Wallace answered.
The writers most frequently checklisted in association with Wallace's name - James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo - come now to a young writer's attention with a round thick penumbra of myth and aura, properly setting them apart not only from their contemporaries but from mere mortals as well. Their auras are never so imposing and impenetrable as when one is in college, and when one worships, with all one's wide-eyed heart and overeager soul, at the altar of the novel. When I was in college, I knew well enough that when DeLillo's new novel came out, he was not likely to have a conversation with a sometime-contributor to the Daily Iowan. Even less likely Pynchon. And Joyce was of course dead. In my affection and enthusiasm, I did not distinguish a difference between these three writers and Wallace, except to say that Wallace was about my age, wrote characters of about my age, and seemed to know more about My Age than his elder-statesmen counterparts. So I was shocked that he would be so accessible, and so game. 'Would you like to just come to my office?' he asked.
I didn't have a car, so Grant offered to drive. The three-hour ride from Iowa City to Bloomington-Normal was full of excitement and disbelief. I was about to come face-to-face with DFW! DFW the comic genius; DFW the word-wizard; DFW the valiant defender of the vernacular; DFW the torch-bearer of the novel's endless possibilities; DFW the chronicler of all that was wild, absurd, hypocritical, humane, thrilling, vapid and sad about being young and lost in shimmering shallow America.
We arrived early. I waited for 45 minutes in the university bookstore, growing increasingly tongue-tied. I worried that DFW would find my sweaty handshake gross and my inarticulateness annoying. I wanted to go home. The last thing on my mind was the fact - really the only pertinent fact - that I was there on official Daily Iowan business, that I had an interview to conduct, that I was given the man's home phone number not to genuflect, no matter how sincerely, but to contribute to the publicity of his novel, and that he was giving up his time not to entertain that pure and naive genuflection, but because he was promoting a book he'd spent many years writing and which many people considered proof positive that he was natural heir to earlier practitioners of American maximalism, heir to Pynchon and DeLillo and Gaddis and Barth.
Wallace received huge praise for his first two books of fiction, which eschewed the reigning minimalism of Raymond Carver as well as the spare anomie best exemplified by Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero. His voice was a shock to the literary system - a youthful, confident, headlong tour de force that came increasingly to sound, with Infinite Jest, his third book, like the hot neural transactions of consciousness itself, with its digressions and elaborations and quick-change emotions. Formally he relied upon the footnote, which became his trademark - and which, with an unapologetic bravura, he managed to make sexy. His vision was more often than not unmoored from the strictures of reality, causing many people to identify him as avant-garde, metafictional, or postmodern - sometimes 'post-postmodern'. But whatever the matter at hand - the creation of the Great Ohio Desert (GOD) in Broom, or the packs of feral hamsters menacing Infinite Jest - he always grounded the outlandish with adroit writing and penetrating observation. He came closer to describing current 'reality,' with its information overload and hyperkinetic absurdities, than anyone else.
Yet these pigeonholes - avant-gardist, postmodernist - could not contain Wallace once he expanded into non-fiction. In addition to two more books of short stories, Wallace wrote two collections of essays and a weirdly wonderful meditation on infinity. He reported on matters ranging from Roger Federer's physical genius, to the irresistible excesses of a luxury cruise, to the debatable, vexing question of John McCain's authenticity. Wallace's inimitable and revelatory insight into culture, politics, sports, and the media catalogued our obsessions and lifted the veil on our hypocrisies. The message under the enormous weight of his prose was: where is the meaning?
Some recollections from my interview: he shared his office with another teacher; he drove a beat-to-hell Volkswagen; we ate pizza by the slice at a place on campus. To my inquiry, smug and innocent, on why he still lived in the midwest and not in New York City, where all the Great Writers lived, he said, equally innocently, 'I love the midwest.' When we stepped into his VW, he apologised for its state of disarray and its bad muffler. On my offer to pay for his pizza, he said, 'No, no, save your money. You're still a student.' On my journalistic method, he remarked, 'I've never known a reporter who didn't use a tape recorder.' I have little doubt that by then he knew what sort of 'journalist' I was, and yet, as we ate and talked and I took down notes (on Infinite Jest: 'I wrote it between episodes of cleaning out my refrigerator'), he treated me as if I were Edmund Wilson.
Wallace was 33 at the time, he knew that he possessed talent and that his new book was likely to make a big impact, and he was more adept than the vast majority of thinkers and writers to spot a fraud. Yet he treated me, the nervous imposter, with graciousness and seriousness. His conversation was animated, thoughtful, witty and generous. He was full of qualifications as he attempted to excavate deeper layers of meaning from his words and better formulations of his thinking. He didn't care about the absence of a tape recorder or, for that matter, the absence of a decent journalist. He was concerned about being understood. He was in it for an honest exchange.
My interview ran in the Daily Iowan a few days before Wallace came to Iowa City to give a reading as part of his book tour. He had taken a liking to the notebook I used during our conversation, and I told him that I would have one waiting for him, along with a copy of the interview, when he arrived. His reading was one of the best I've ever heard. But when I went up to him afterwards, he was noticeably upset. The media escort who had driven him from the airport to the book store had shown him an unfavourrable review of Infinite Jest that had just come out in a prominent newspaper. He didn't know anyone in the room but me, and, despite the excellent reading, had a lot of worry to get off his chest. Almost boyish with hurt, he spoke passionately of the escort's thoughtlessness and his own wounded uncertainties. I didn't comprehend, of course. He was DFW! But he was also simply a writer whose big book and personal vision had just been exposed to the world.
He recovered, and I proudly gave him a copy of our interview and the notebook. He thanked me for both, but the notebook in particular, and quickly took out his wallet to reimburse me. But this time, unlike the pizza, I insisted. I had bought it for him as a gift, to thank him for the interview. A disingenuous move: I wanted to buy it for him because I liked the idea that I would be providing the paper upon which DFW might put down the words of his future novels. I was very excited about his future novels. I would have happily bought him notebooks for future novels the rest of my life.
David Foster Wallace: A life
Born 21 February, 1962 in Ithaca, New York. Died 12 September, 2008.
Educated Amherst College and the University of Arizona.
Career 1987 The Broom of the System; 1989 Girl With Curious Hair; 1996 Infinite Jest; 1997 Awarded MacArthur Foundation 'genius' grant; 2001 Chair of Creative Writing at Pomona College; 2004 Oblivion: Stories; 2005 Consider the Lobster.
He said 'I wanted to do something about what it's like to live in America around the millennium ... There's something particularly sad about it, that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's more like a stomach-level sadness. Whether it's unique to our generation I really don't know.'
They say 'He was a huge talent, our strongest writer.' Jonathan Franzen
'A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian and as serious as it is possible to be without writing a religious text. He's so modern he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us.' Zadie Smith