The stories were mostly successors to those of
Brief Interviews
. They too concerned themselves mostly with middle-aged, middle-class white men in middle America.
6
Though the subjects share their antecedents’ condition of total self-absorption, their pride in themselves—whether in their sexual politics or just in their sexuality—has by now been replaced by a sullen silence. These men are aware of themselves as over-the-hill, culturally disempowered, on their way to nowhere, especially vis-à-vis women. It is no accident the first story is called “Mr. Squishy.” Even irony has lost its power to protect them. They seem able to see everything but what’s in front of their eyes and to talk about everything but what actually matters to them.
The stories in
Brief Interviews
are afraid of expansion, so unattractive or unstable are the interiors of their subjects; the stories in
Oblivion
seem afraid of compression, as if the title were a threat that could only be defended against by the relentlessly engaged consciousness. Words cover the stories, coating them in thick layers of verbiage, perspectives shift, and there are disorienting chronological jumps. “It’s interesting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing,” the narrator of “Good Old Neon” writes. There is only one way to halt the onrush of data, to slow it down so you can find its meaning: “Think for a second what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as
you
has died…?”
“Good Old Neon” is the most uncomfortable of the stories in an uncomfortable volume, a narrative about an advertising executive who deliberately
kills himself by crashing his car into a concrete bridge abutment. Neal is a familiar type in the Wallace world, a young man whose personality is built on the need to impress others. And the more he succeeds in impressing them, the more of a fraud he feels. Like Wallace, he feels frozen by the need to control how others see him, “condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue.” Suicide appears to him the only escape from this recursive nightmare. “Self-loathing isn’t the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death. If I was going to do it, I wanted it instant,” he assures us. Strangely, his is a death testified to by David Wallace, a year behind him at the same Aurora, Illinois, high school, leafing through their yearbook. It is a story where a ghost tells his remembered self about David Wallace’s imagining why the ghost’s remembered self killed himself.
7
“Good Old Neon” is the only story in
Oblivion
explicitly about a suicide, but many in the collection have a tamped-down sense of doom, of thoughts distorted by words and words constrained by personality and personality deformed by culture.
“The Suffering Channel” is about that culture and the cluster of editors and writers in New York who help create it. Much of the story takes place at
Style
, a lightweight celebrity magazine whose cheery denizens plan the next issue’s pabulum in offices on the sixteenth floor of 1 World Trade Center. “The Suffering Channel” can be read as a prequel to “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”; it re-creates the heyday of irony less than three months before the fatal attacks. But it is also a story about personal shame and the confused sources of an artist’s art. In the tale, the celebrated defecator, whom we first think so gifted he can just shit a classic, turns out to be beset by self-hatred. To go to the bathroom is to remember the childhood abuse and humiliation that led to his creativity. He is asked to give a performance on the Suffering Channel, a new station devoted entirely to “real life still and moving images of most intense available moments of human anguish.” Yet at story’s end it turns out to be impossible to broadcast his agony; his shame and his art both are to remain private:
There’s also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s
own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare—the artist in this case would see, not his own emergent
Victory
, but a searing and amorphous light.
Oblivion
, published in June 2004, met with what was by now a familiar duality. Wallace had a public that awaited his books—he filled bookstores, and an event at the Public Theatre in Manhattan where he was interviewed by George Saunders sold out. The book sold well—in all eighteen thousand hardcover copies in its first year—and was on several bestseller lists. Wallace found the author tour painless, he preferred having company onstage. The collection got the customary respectful reviews accorded an important writer in the daily press, but there was also an undercurrent of irritation, even anger, on the part of critics—Wallace was denying them the full enjoyment of his great talents. Why, for instance, did all the protagonists sound the same? Where had the Dickensian scope of
Infinite Jest
gone? What had happened to its comic genius? Reviewers remembered that Wallace had promised readers something different: a single-entendre writing that felt redemptive. That hardly seemed the achievement, let alone the aim, of
Oblivion
. Michiko Kakutani in the
New York Times
again brought up this gap, criticizing the collection for offering “only the tiniest tasting of [Wallace’s] smorgasbord of talents. Instead, he all too often settles for…[the] cheap brand of irony and ridicule that he once denounced.”
More sympathetic critics acknowledged that there was something interesting about using deadened language to convey deadened states, that the ironization of irony had merits, but they too wondered whether what Wallace was writing was of more than academic interest. “Another Pioneer,” contained the words “evection,” “canescent,” “protasis,” “epitatic,” “hemean,” “nigrescently,” “ptotic,” “intaglial,” “catastasis,” and “extrorse,” not to mention “thanatophilic” and “omphalic.” It had a single paragraph twenty-three pages long. The same thing might be said about the stories as is said in
Infinite Jest
about Jim Incandenza’s disdained experimental cartridges, that there was “no sort of engaging plot, no movement that sucked you in and drew you along.” Or maybe that they were less stories than forms for stories, much as one character in “The Suffering Channel” is
described as “not a body that occupied space but rather just a bodyshaped area of space itself.”
The eagerly awaited next novel was on reviewers’ minds as well. Where was it? The
Houston Chronicle
hypothesized, generously, that it was already written, imagining a “forest-killing manuscript à la the thousand-page
Infinite Jest”
that was at that very moment “devouring the time and energy and quite possibly the soul of a senior New York editor.” Wyatt Mason in the
London Review of Books
, after a skillful elucidation of the title story, wrote:
Wallace has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him. I flatter myself to think that I am one of them, but I haven’t any idea how to convince you that you should be, too; nor, clearly, does Wallace. And it might not be the worst thing in the world, next time out, when big novel number three thumps into the world, were he to dig deeper, search longer, and find a more generous way to make his feelings known.
Chiding notices were harder for Wallace than the pans, which he expected by now—he could ignore critics calling for more salt in the soup—because for him, too, all roads led back to his “more generous” Long Thing,
The Pale King
. He had hoped at times while he was writing them that the stories in
Oblivion
would show a way out of the dead end
Infinite Jest
seemed to have left him in. He boasted to Costello that in writing it he had “looked straight into the camera.” He meant that he had finally surmounted the need to have readers love him. The mania was gone; only a studied and mature sadness remained. But to his disappointment he didn’t find that the story work suggested how to write a novel of similar honesty. The problem may have been that Wallace’s approach to
Oblivion
—the trick-free prose, the Pynchon-free plots, the insistence that the reader work for his or her satisfaction—was simply too pitiless to carry a reader through a novel. And while
Oblivion
was descriptive,
The Pale King
was supposed to be prescriptive. It had to convince the reader that there was a way out of the bind. It had to have a commitment to a solution that
Oblivion
lacked.
8
Wallace had settled on his thesis long before. As he wrote in a notebook:
Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
The problem came up when he tried to dramatize this idea. How do you write about dullness without being dull? The obvious solution, if you had Wallace’s predilections, was to overwhelm this seemingly inert subject with the full movement of your thought. Your characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the rippling tactility of your writing would keep them from appearing static. But this strategy presented its own problem: Wallace could make the characters vibrant, but only at the risk of sacrificing what made their situation worth narrating—the stillness at the center of their lives. How could you preach mindful calmness if you couldn’t replicate it in prose? A failed entertainment that succeeded was just an entertainment. Yet Wallace had never really found a verbal strategy to replace his inborn one. In more ways than he cared to acknowledge he remained the author of
The Broom of the System
. He wrote to Franzen around this time:
Karen is killing herself rehabbing the house. I sit in the garage with the AC blasting and work very poorly and haltingly and with (some days) great reluctance and ambivalence and pain. I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic.
Usually when Wallace found work frustrating, his relationships suffered. But this time his love for Green flourished. He had found something as important to him as his fiction. “It’s a dark time workwise,” he wrote Franzen, “and yet a very light and lovely time in all other respects. So overall I feel I’m ahead and am pretty happy.” His fit with Green worked in ways no other ever had. She was herself creative but not a writer. She didn’t have his intense competitiveness; she created to create, unshadowed by any statue. When she teased him it was with love. “We
used to have this joke about how much can you irritate the reader,” Green recalls.
Time was on the relationship’s side too. Wallace no longer thought of himself as young. “No more nymphs for me,” he had written Steven Moore as he was about to turn forty in early 2002. Wallace had a strikeout drawn through the fading word “Mary” on his tattoo and placed an asterisk under the heart symbol; farther down he added another asterisk and “Karen,” turning his arm into a living footnote. He knew he could not sustain the emotional availability of a parent and he was worried about passing on his mental instability, so he did not want to have children anymore, but he enjoyed being with Stirling. They would often play chess, which Green’s son usually won. Wallace’s whirring mind made him an inconsistent competitor.
As Stirling began his final year of high school, Green and Wallace made plans for her to move to Claremont. They began house hunting. Wallace first asked the university if he could buy his house on Indian Hill Boulevard and was surprised to be told it wasn’t for sale. So he and Green looked elsewhere. When he tired of the search, she went alone, eventually choosing a ranch home in a newly developed area at the very northern limit of the town. Like the house in Bloomington, it was far enough from the university to allow for privacy, and from their street they could see the mountains.
Wallace at this point considered Green his fiancée, but other women had had that title before. He emailed Franzen in February 2004, “I hear Kath[y] gaffed and landed you”—Franzen had moved in with Kathryn Chetkovich, a writer from Santa Cruz whom he had been dating. Ever competitive, Wallace saw his own girlfriend as a counterpart to Franzen’s, another K from California. A week later he emailed, “I am more and more sure KG and I will get married. Now it’s a matter of getting her to be more and more sure.”
At the end of 2004, Wallace and Green flew to Urbana for Christmas, staying at the Jumers Castle Lodge, “a sad place with trophies on the walls,” as Wallace’s sister, Amy, remembers. She and her two daughters had the job of luring his parents to the courthouse, where they discovered their son in a suit, with his companion in a dress. The forty-two-year-old Wallace and Green were married, his nieces as the witnesses. After lunch,
the newlyweds walked down a path and Wallace gave a hop and clicked his heels together. Amy photographed the moment, and this became their wedding announcement. They spent the evening watching a
Law & Order
marathon in their “shitty motel,” as Wallace reported to DeLillo, assuring him that “my ass is not as big as it looks in the photo.”
Six months later, Green moved to Claremont. Wallace had already been living in the house for a while, and by the time his new wife got there, he had taken it over. A jockstrap hung from a lamp, and the town had earlier posted a notice on his door ordering him to remove the weeds on his lawn. Green painted the garage bright red and furnished it with his recliner, a comfortable desk, and Wallace’s lamps, his accounting books, the old Scottish battle scene, a poster of Klimt’s
The Kiss
, and other miscellanea he had brought from Bloomington. She tore out the wall-to-wall carpeting in the house. He had developed a personality for social interactions that he had never had before. Whenever anyone came over and complimented the décor, Wallace would quickly say it was Green’s doing. But Green would see another side at night, when he would beg her not to get sick or die.