March 20–27, 1997

book quarterly|interview

The Wallace Touch

Infinite Jest-er David Foster Wallace politely raps and scraps.

By a.d. amorosi

David Foster Wallace's vision is a dignified cross between Foucault and Charles Osgood, with the epic humor of Burroughs and the lingo of Edwin Newman. Yet he's probably best-known because his amazingly inventive novel Infinite Jest was just so BIG. Now out in paperback from Little, Brown — all 1,080 pages of it, with footnotes — Jest was a massive undertaking.

"Oh, gosh," says Wallace from his Bloomington, IN, home as two mastiffs bark at a passerby holding an umbrella. "My biggest concern was that Little, Brown were taking such a big risk. I was worried that my editor would get in trouble if the book bombed."

Luckily, the bomb exploded into a maelstrom of praise and hype.

"Most of my memories of Jest involve rooms I wrote in or stomachaches I had writing a particular scene," he says. "While there's a certain amount of addiction in the book, the addiction is a subsidiary of giving yourself away to something. People our age — who are altogether unprecedentedly well-off — are all very sad. In that regard, Jest is more about the relationship between the self and some larger system of urges, values and beliefs you give yourself over to in America around the millennium." He trails off, hums, then apologizes. "It's interesting, amusing, appalling and all the 'ing' words to see how people reacted to it... This is why I'm not a critic. A critic would've summed all this up with one pithy sentence."

Wallace's new book, a collection of journalistic essays called A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (Little, Brown), is full of pithy sentences (and only 356 pages). He cuts through American idiosyncrasies — state fairs, cruise lines, television, David Lynch filming Lost Highway — with rapt attention, a sharp eye and mannered aplomb.

"The hazards of these pieces were 'hyper-educated intellectual goes and sneers at the seamy underbelly of American mass culture.' So I went to great lengths to find stuff that was genuinely, rivetingly cool. Deep and attractive in a communitarian sense. It's easy to make fun of vapid stupid Midwestern culture. What made it great for me was that it was hard work. You scurry like a rat taking notes. Everything has frantic energy, but there isn't a lot of pure unalloyed delight."

While he confesses now to be a clogging junkie, the secret weapon of this erudite fiction writer-turned-reluctant essayist is his odd optimism. When I ask him if he grew up in a very polite family, he is taken aback.

"It's true. I grew up in Urbana, Illinois. Very Midwestern, very academic. My parents are both academics from the East Coast. My best friends were shitkickers, real rural trailer-park kids. Real double duty here. My family is compulsively polite. There are friends who won't come over because the etiquette rituals for dinner are so exhausting." In a world where chilly cynicism and offbeat everything-irony rules, Wallace's passion is the opposite. "I dislike the parts of myself that are cynical. I dislike the parts that are dark. It's too easy. It's braver to find the good. But it's very hard to want to be too good. You have to bandy around all these clichs. It can very easily become goo." Though way-too-smart, nothing sounds beneath him. He calls it a curse. He says he has a hard time figuring what not to pay attention to. "It makes for a wonderfully rich fleshed-out essay but makes things go on far too long. I operate on the hope the reader is as interested in something as I am."

Whether you like it or not, Wallace has the ability to draw you in — even into tennis, a sport I've never given a fuck about. As he talks about interviewing near-innocents and viciously competitive swatters, their physicality and endurance come alive. "I was extra conscious and worked extra hard to be clear and articulate. I think any sport or artistic endeavor would end up being interesting and full of neat universal stuff if enough attention were paid to it."

His take on subjects more my speed — film and television — also burst with new clarity and energy. When he interviewed the mordantly ticklish Lynch and crew for Premiere, their voices all become one talking disembodied head in, well, Lynchian fashion. When he talks about the tedium of TV, every pixel comes alive with nervous newness.

"I'm not sure what puzzled me more about television criticism. All you ever hear from critics is how vapid and stupid it is, yet no one ever says, 'Hey, this culture is enormously informed by, the citizens of the culture are watching six hours a day of, and we're dismissing it with one wave of a hand. Rather than be overwhelmed by complexity, you have to do a certain amount of pigeonholing. So the only thing I learned from non-fiction is that if I describe something as trite — or if anything appears in my work as trite — the real deficiency is mine. Anything looked at with sufficient attention and detail ceases to be trite. Instead, it becomes incredibly complex. When people portray something as trite, alarm bells go off. It betrays far more about the critic than it does the subject."

Betraying himself is one thing Wallace will never have to worry about. As he quakingly and humorously combs the decks of cruise ships, rubs elbows with farmers across picket-fenced farm lines and chats loquaciously with porta-phoned film techs, he is a forlorn footnoting fool who, though referring to himself as "an asshole and a snob" (p. 228), Wallace bears down on everything with vinegary vigor.

"Being a fiction writer, I feel like I'm moonlighting. I find everything so overwhelming. I would wind up with hundreds of pages of notes. It's just so much. The labor comes in deciding. In fiction it's sort of the stuff that bubbles up that you use; almost like a valve or a control mechanism."

"Imagine if this whole thing involved eating. The analogy in non-fiction would be like being one of those pt-stuffed gooses. You know, having a funnel put down your throat and stuff is just poured in until [you] burst."

Such a lovely allusion.