Anxiously, he went into his year off. “I am getting some writing done,” he wrote Moore in September 1997, after a summer on his own, “though not of course as much or as well as I like.” He wrote in the margins of a notebook around the same time, “I am a McArthur [
sic
] Fellow. Boy am I scared. I feel like throwing up. Why? String-free award—nothing but an avowal of their belief that I am a ‘Genius.’ I don’t feel like a Genius.” He spent a lot of time writing letters in procrastination, many of them about procrastination, as he cast around for what was keeping him from feeling he could write anything bigger or braver than his “microstories.” He came to blame the fame that adhered to him since
Infinite Jest
. He came back to an image of celebrity that had absorbed him since he’d worked on that book. In those pages, an assistant coach lectures a reporter about why he feels the need to protect his players from the media:
For you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade.
Now Wallace was wondering whether he hadn’t become a literary statue, “the version of myself” as he wrote a friend at the time, “that I want others to mistake for the real me.” The statue was “a Mask, a Public Self, False Self or Object-Cathect.” What made the statue especially deadly to Wallace was that it depended for its subsistence on the complicated interplay between writer and public. Not just: You are loved. But also: You love being loved. You are addicted to being loved.
Wallace had known for some time what he wanted to write, he continued in the letter, but he was “paralyzed” by fear of failure. He worried that whatever “magic” or “genius” people said they’d seen in his last two books would not be in evidence. He would, he worried, be “obliterated or something (I say ‘obliterated’ because the fear most closely resembles some kind of fear of death or annihilation, the kind of fear that strikes one on the High Dive or if one has to walk a high tightrope or something).” He was now frozen by his own need to be the person others saw him as. They could let go of it more easily than he could. And since the success of
Infinite Jest
the problem had gotten worse, so that he feared the “slightest mistake or miscue” would knock the statue down. The prospect terrified him. He concluded that since the publication of
Broom
—“the date of the erection/unveiling of the statue of DFW as Author”—he had only been able to do “truly good work” on “rare” occasions.
He was being too hard on himself. For Wallace, self-examination and self-flagellation often overlapped—and were also often a spur to possible literary inquiry. What turned an author into a statue? And wasn’t even inquiring in this way an attempt to polish it up, clever custodial work? As he’d written to Wurtzel, “I think I’m very honest and candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am—so where does that put me.”
Comparable examples of recursion beset him all the time; they were his default mental setting. He was working on another of his “Porousness of Certain Borders” pieces, which began:
As in those other dreams, I’m with somebody I know but don’t know how I know them, and this person suddenly points out to me that I’m blind. Or else it’s in the presence of this person that I suddenly realize I’m blind. What happens when I realize this is I get sad. It makes me incredibly sad that I’m blind. The person somehow knows how sad I am and warns me that crying will hurt my eyes somehow and make them even worse, but I can’t help it—
He was appalled at how much time it took to yield such vignettes. The exception were two stories that came out of his own experience more directly. The first was “The Depressed Person.” The story, published by
Harper’s
in 1998, was a genre Wallace hadn’t tried since “Westward,” revenge fiction. It was his way of getting even with Wurtzel for treating him as a statue (or, she would say, refusing to have sex with him). Freed from desire, he now saw that her love of the spotlight was just ordinary self-absorption. “The Depressed Person” of the title is a spoiled young woman, who repulses the reader with her obsessive neediness, much as she repulses her friends in the story. “The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain,” the story begins, “and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.” Through the course of story, the unlovable protagonist shuttles fruitlessly between friends and therapists, looking for a sympathetic ear—the same ear the narrator denies her—as her clinical symptoms are revealed to be nothing more than narcissism.
5
The second story, “Self-Harm as a Sort of Offering” (collected later as “Suicide as a Sort of Present”), was a meditation on his difficult relationship with his mother. Wallace was always looking for some sort of catharsis in their connection. In the story—as, he believed, in his own life—a mother’s intense love for and disappointment in her son is the root of his neurosis. The need she holds for him to excel is itself the result of the belief her own parents inculcated in her that she needs to be perfect. The destructive cycle then gets passed to the next generation:
The child appeared in a sense to be the mother’s own reflection in a diminishing and deeply flawed mirror. Thus every time the child was rude, greedy, foul, dense, selfish, cruel, disobedient, lazy, foolish,
willful, or childish, the mother’s deepest and most natural inclination was to loathe it. But she could not loathe it. No good mother can loathe her child or judge it or abuse it or wish it harm in any way. The mother knew this. And her standards for herself as a mother were, as one would expect, extremely high…. Hence the mother was at war. Her expectations were in fundamental conflict. It was a conflict in which she felt her very life was at stake: to fail to overcome her instinctive dissatisfaction with her child would result in a terrible, shattering punishment which she knew she herself would administer, inside. She was determined—desperate—to succeed, to satisfy her expectations of herself as a mother, no matter what it cost.
The story ends ambiguously—it is not clear who gives the present of suicide to whom—but in its intense distancing sentences one feels Wallace examining the shards of his childhood again and again, trying to construct a whole without bringing it so close it will hurt him again.
Wallace always wrote in the midst of busyness. There were classes, and even without classes there were recovery meetings, errands for friends and friends of friends, and demands from his dogs. He himself now sponsored many participants in recovery and made it a point to always be available. Charis Conn was amazed to see that whenever Wallace had a few free minutes, he would sit down, cross his legs, and work on a story (one explanation for the shortness of so much of his work during this time). He sent a few of his “1-pagers” to the more innovative magazines with which he had connections, where, despite his reputation, the result was tepid. Most found his efforts obscure. How had a marquee maximalist become a jotter of haikus? Wallace wrote to Steven Moore in late 1996 that he had recently sent out four little stories and they’d all been rejected, a situation that felt familiar and that, combined with his failure to be nominated for the National Book Award for
Infinite Jest,
led him to believe that his “15 minutes are over and things are back to normal.”
When Wallace was not happy with his fiction, nonfiction grew in appeal. There were always offers. The
New York Observer
now asked him to review
Updike’s
Toward the End of Time
, a story, like Wallace’s two novels, set in the near future, and he agreed. Wallace’s one-sided conversation with Updike was long-running. Admiration and dislike were always in competition, usually mixed together. Updike was an extraordinary writer, Wallace acknowledged, but there was something too insistent about the way he always declared his genius. The self-conscious beauty and elegance of his prose, Wallace wrote to DeLillo in January 1997, “paw…at the reader’s ear like a sophomore at some poor girl’s bra.” Now faced with the master’s new book, Wallace felt only disdain and a whiff of pity. How, he asked the
Observer
readers, could so gifted a writer write a book as bad as
Toward the End of Time
?
Toward the End of Time
concerns an incredibly erudite, articulate, successful, narcissistic and sex-obsessed retired guy who’s keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. It is, of the total 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.
Wallace evinced a particular dislike for the protagonist’s “bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair,” a line of thought no doubt well known to Wallace.
He received much congratulations when the piece ran in October 1997, and the remark that he attributed to “a friend” in the article, that Updike was “just a thesaurus with a penis,” was widely circulated. Wallace did not like overly personal literary criticism, but he felt within his rights in this case because of his sense that Updike’s flaws had gone beyond the literary to the moral. His characters—well, the author himself—were forgetting that literature was not about showing off; it had to be a service to the inner life of the reader. How then to justify creating characters
who are also always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone. They never belong to any sort of larger unit or
community or cause. Though usually family men, they never really love anybody—and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women. The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.
After the review ran, Wallace was sorry. He knew that
Toward the End of Time
was hardly representative of Updike’s best work, his attack seeming after the fact like another brain-fart. “It makes me look like a punk taking easy shots at a big target,” he wrote an admirer who praised the review. “Never again, ami, a book review of a titan.” (On the other hand, he included it in his next essay collection,
Consider the Lobster
, published in 2005.)
As he was finishing the Updike piece,
Premiere
asked Wallace to cover the awards ceremony the adult entertainment industry held every year in Las Vegas. Wallace loved the idea—pornography was a subject that never stopped interesting him. It was where the false pleasures and relentless marketing of America met, a metonym for what was toxic in the nation. “My opinions are only that the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love,” lectures Marathe in
Infinite Jest
. The piece was also a way to intellectualize an appetite a less guilt-ridden man might have just enjoyed. Rather than look for the movies locally, Wallace asked
Premiere
to rent them in New York and send them to his home. There he watched them in preparation and quickly shipped them back.
In January 1998 he went to the convention. He met the “gonzo porn” producer Max Hardcore and Jasmin St. Claire, known in the industry as “the gang-bang queen.” He was able to compare his penis size to those of male porn stars in the men’s room and take in a spectacle tackier than he had ever seen before. What always amazed Wallace about real life was the overload of information. He did not see how anyone could really capture what went on in a single moment. He wrote to a friend in frustration, “Writing about real-life stuff is next to impossible, simply because there’s
so much
!” He spent a great deal of time in the hallway of the convention, propped against a wall, scribbling in his notebook. (He was as interested in recording his reaction to what he was seeing as in what he was in fact
seeing.) At night he would lie awake in his bed looking at himself in the ceiling mirror.
6
Where Wallace didn’t find the remarkable, he invented or borrowed. He made use of interviews from his long-ago unpublished
Playboy
research.
Premiere
had asked a writer from
Hustler
, Evan Wright, to help out, and, with his permission, Wallace mined his research as avidly as his own. Wright told Wallace of a scene from two years before in which a porn star, angry at something he had written, put him in a headlock. For his article Wallace moved it to the present and improved the moment by giving Wright a pair of “special autotint trifocals” that the headlock sent “in an arc across the room and into the forbidding décolletage of Christy Canyon never to be recovered.” Wright had written in the
LA Weekly
about a woman at an industry charity bowling event who had valves under her arms through which she was slowly augmenting her bust size with silicone. Wallace turned them into air valves that would allow her to grow or shrink her breasts at whim, a character out of Philip K. Dick. In all, the convention left him with much the same feeling as the Caribbean cruise had: how sad the world was when you opened your eyes, how much pain it contained. “Some of the starlets are so heavily made up,” he wrote in the article, “they look embalmed. They have complexly coiffed hair that tends to look really good from twenty feet away but on closer inspection is totally dry and dead.” When he got back to Bloomington, he was relieved. He described his trip to DeLillo as “three days in Bosch’s hell-panel.” “I don’t think I’ll have an erection again for a year,” was his comment to Franzen.