Remember the first time you tried to read V, by Thomas Pynchon? Let’s compare. Me
first. I thought to myself, “What sort of drug-addled mind would want to read
this on purpose?” Pretend I wasn’t surrounding myself with just that sort of
mind at the time.
Still, Pynchon never worked for me, on any level. Gravity’s Rainbow was lost on me; I’m
more of a Crossing to Safety girl. Books
like Mark Helprin’s Memoir from Antproof
Case give me shingles. I just never had the need to rake through a writer’s
brain with a toothpick the way these kinds of books ordered me to do.
The kind of writing some people call postmodernism has
always felt like its authors are mocking me for thinking I’m worthy of understanding
their points. It’s an odd sort of self-abuse for me to even try to read it.
And now, after slogging my way through the latest biography
of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story
is a Ghost Story, by D.T. Max, I’m here to say I’m done trying. I read this
book in an attempt to see what it was I wasn’t getting.
No one can make me read this kind of stuff, ever again. No
matter what you say, I won’t believe you.
If you aren’t familiar with David Foster Wallace, I’ll give
it to you straight. He was crippled by depression. He sometimes struggled with drugs and alcohol. He obsessively toyed with writing and people. He joked with his wife about ways to irritate his readers. Many people categorize him as a genius.
One book in particular, Infinite Jest, was proclaimed before publication to be smarter than you. Lots of people
said they read it so they could seem smarter than you too. People said things
about the book, in all seriousness, like “Once you get past the first 300
pages, it’s a breeze.” He’s revered by the ilk that swoons over McSweeney’s.
I’m not being disparaging here; it’s a fact.
Infinite Jest is
written in three parts: one that makes no sense at all really, one that kind of
does, and one that is almost a word-for-word account of Wallace’s own time in
rehab passed off as fiction. One large chunk of the book details a tennis camp
in such menacing detail there are footnotes sprinkled throughout descriptions
of the hedges and such.
The whole enterprise of trying to read it exhausted me and
made me wonder if I knew anything at all about anything.
Who is this me I
keep referring to?
Oh, I’m a graduate of the University of Iowa who majored in
elementary education and minored in literature, in the late 70s. I read stuff.
I’ve taught literature classes successfully and unsuccessfully to kids of all
ages.
I learned much of what I know about literature from a high
school humanities teacher in Iowa named Mr. Knott.
He had us read Fitzgerald, Arthur Miller, Tennessee
Williams, Camus, Beckett, Capote and Faulkner. Some kids in the class had to
get up real early in the morning to write their essays about The Glass
Menagerie before they milked the cows. He loved the kids who’d challenge him,
and of course that was I. I never knew when to stop talking and listen, just
like today. I’d start in about something, and he’d walk over to my desk and
bellow, “Stifle!” I did.
Once I faked my way through a paper about a book I didn’t
read. He made no comments on my writing, until the end, where he wrote, “Baby,
the rain must fall. C+”
When Breakfast of Champions came out in 1973, he walked into
the room one afternoon with a box of books, one for each of us. He walked up
and down the rows, tossing us our copies. “It ain’t about Wheaties, children.
And after you read it, you won’t ever forget it.” I never did. I still have my
copy, marked to pieces.
His teaching prepared me to be fine with sitting in college literature
classes in Iowa City, home of the sacred Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I whizzed
through several rounds of poetry, comp, creative writing, etc. When I
encountered some of the tougher stuff, I forged on without fear. I wasn’t yet
trying to learn how to write, I just wanted to read. Mr. Knott had taught us
how to be good readers.
I loved every second of every class. I audited classes when Jorie
Graham and Donald Justice’s assistants deemed me worthy to share airspace. Again,
I don’t mean this disparagingly; it’s just the way it was. I didn’t have the
balls to apply; they didn’t need to acknowledge me. I was passing people like
Joe Haldeman and Jane Smiley in the halls. I wasn’t a student in the workshop,
but most of my teachers were, as were some of my friends. It bled onto
everything around me. Seriously, if you’re curious about this era, you can read
Eric Olsen and Glenn Schaeffer’s
We
Wanted to be Writers: Life, Love, and Literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
But hold it. What does this have to do with David Foster
Wallace? Or as the kids in Greenpoint call him, DFW. I’m just telling you from
whence I came before I tell you how I feel about DFW. I think the one may
affect the other.
In Max’s new book, he refers to Wallace’s Midwestern
sensibility. A lot. He frames it different ways. Sometimes it means a kind of
earnestness. Sometimes it’s kindness. Maybe a certain ability to talk to all
sorts of people. I got tired of seeing it in the book after a while. Because I
don’t think being from the Midwest informs DFW’s writing at all.
I think what most informs his writing, and those of his
peers, whoever they may be, is insecurity. And in the case of Wallace, mental
illness. To read this new bio is to wade through page after page of Wallace’s
theories about writing fiction, many of them culled from authors he admired,
the most prominent being Pynchon.
In college, Wallace was known for doing things like asking
his roommate to show him his paper on a topic, reading it, putting it down,
then leaving the room and writing a self-proclaimed better paper. How douchey.
Several times, he wheedles along the cliff of plagiarism.
He’s called out for it a couple times. He’s constantly creating character names
that are sardonic remakes of other author’s character names. He pseudo-cleverly
turns other people’s stories on end to write his own. He repeatedly tells us
how stupid we are for doing things, and then does them himself. He’s very big
on the circular. In fact, Max uses the word recursive in the book so many times
it made my head spin.
Finally, Wallace begins to realize the real problem with
society and literature is that we all started using irony too much. At last,
something Wallace-y makes sense to me.
Wallace spent much of the time he was supposed to
be working on books writing letters to other writers and friends. He seemed to
know they would someday be mined for material about what he was thinking. They come
across as calculated as every other paragraph he ever wrote. But some of them are
interesting.
On the subject of irony, he wrote to a friend,
This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost
exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a groundclearing…
Well, yes. Much like a lot of Wallace’s writing, oddly
enough. When he claimed to reject irony, he also began to dream of a “new” kind
of fiction, written by these kinds of thinkers:
The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as
some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare somehow to back away
from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse
single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and
emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness
and hip fatigue.
Whew. Now that I can get behind. (Except I can't explain that "of" in there.) If only something akin to
this had transpired in Wallace’s writing. But to me, it never did. And I kept
looking. And I know this stuff he’s talking about when I find it. It’s what I
learned to read in high school. It’s what was being written around me in
college. It’s all I understand. And I’m good with that.
His titles shall forever remain more entertaining and
descriptive to me than his actual books. As in, reading his books is A
Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.
Like that. And Brief Interviews With Hideous Men could actually be describing…you get the
idea.
And as a final DFWesque
irony, this new book about a man who obsessed over every ellipse and bracket
contains typos. More than one; more than two. One’s in the numbering of
footnotes, a tool Wallace binged on every time he wrote.
I’m a little bit
floored by this. But the more I think about it, the more I see poetic justice. A kind of infinite jest, if you will.
