Form Wall Street Journal, 24 April 1987. © 1987 by the Estate of Helen Dudar Goldman. Reprinted by permission.
In his final year at Amherst College, David Foster Wallace faced a difficult career decision. He had to decide whether his future lay with graduate studies in philosophy or in what academia labels “creative writing.” Few of us could have solved the problem as neatly: Mr. Wallace produced two senior honors theses that brought him a double summa cum laude. The philosophy paper, a highly technical mathematical affair, was, he reports, the more successful effort. But the fiction—which turned out to be a wild, funny, somewhat disheveled novel—really blissed him out.
He would sit down around lunch time to invent a few scenes, Mr. Wallace remembered the other day, and when he looked up, dinner time would have come and gone. “I don’t know where I had been but I hadn’t been on earth for a few hours. I have approached nothing like that in any kind of emotional and intellectual endeavor before.”
Mr. Wallace’s writing honors thesis, The Broom of the System (Viking/Penguin), completed in 1985 when he was twenty-three and revised during his summer vacation, was published this year to a good deal of critical attention, a lot of it favorable.
By the time it appeared, Mr. Wallace was in his final year in the graduate writers’ program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. You would think that a brilliant young man who had produced his first novel before commencement would forgo more classes, but this one is not only well-educated, he is smart.
As he said on a recent trip east from Tucson, Mr. Wallace knew he was still “very raw” and needed to develop his powers of self-criticism. He had only begun working in fiction in his junior year, responding in part to professorial observations that his papers, while unscholarly, were certainly imaginative.
Through a friend, Mr. Wallace acquired an agent, Fred Hill of San Francisco. When the novel came on the market in late 1985, at least five houses wanted it. Gerald Howard, who runs Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction line, says he took care of the competition by “reading it very quickly and going nuts for it.” His $20,000 floor, a nice figure for a first effort by an unknown, won the day. Mr. Wallace, shaggy-haired, slender, boyish, quietly droll and wonderfully vague about business matters, mutters there has been movie interest in an outline. Mr. Howard reports that Alliance Entertainment has paid a $10,000 option toward a $200,000 purchase if it likes the script treatment.
The CAF line is the eight-year-old reprint house for such sturdy modern masters as Donald Barthelme, William Kennedy, and Laurie Colwin. The Broom is the first novel it has published as an original and the first to appear simultaneously with the Viking hardcover, a nervous experiment, according to Mr. Howard. “If it hadn’t worked, we would have fouled the marketplace for another effort of this sort.”
Mr. Howard’s apprehension is a reminder of how vital to writers and readers trade paperback editions have become. In the economics of modern mass-market paperback publishing, a serious literary novel that sells steadily but modestly is nearly impossible to keep in print. Nowadays, it is an outfit like CAF, as well as Random House’s Vintage line and a clutch of small presses, that offers the possibility of a long life for much serious fiction.
It could be said that the Wallace novel is a seriously funny book about a collection of off-the-wall characters. It is—well, sort of—the 463-page odyssey of young Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, who works on a deranged switchboard and owns a talkative cockatiel that becomes a star of television evangelical broadcasting and is searching for her missing great-grandmother, a Wittgenstein authority. It is about Lenore’s boss, Rick Vigorous, who makes up for sexual incapacity by telling wonderfully sick stories. It is also Amherst as Animal House. Mr. Wallace, who was not happy there, has taken this revenge.
But then you can’t be sure. In several of the book’s psychiatric sessions, Mr. Wallace seems to impale modern psychotherapy. When you ask him about that, he confides, “I tend only to be able to have people say stuff that I think is serious if I’m simultaneously making fun of the character. I think that’s a weakness. It comes from being really self-conscious.” The novel’s main setting is Cleveland, which, of course, Mr. Wallace has never seen. A middle-westerner—he grew up in Champaign, Illinois, where his father is a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois—he wanted a heartland city that he could imagine instead of describe.
The book is also, sort of, about the way in which language sustains us and fails us. His title would seem to come from a Wittgensteinian model that proposes that what is fundamental to the broom—bristles or stick—depends on whether you want to sweep the floor or break windows. But the author wants you to know that The Broom of the System is also what his mother, a community-college teacher, calls roughage or dietary fiber.
Because of the crazy names and the absurdist comic edge to his narratives, reviewers often mention him in the same sentence with Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Mr. Wallace wishes they wouldn’t: “These are writers I admire but the five-year-old in me pushes out its lower lip and says, ‘Well, no, I’m a person, too. I do my own work.’” Besides, one of his heaviest influences has gone totally unnoticed. The Broom has entire virtuoso chapters of uninterrupted dialogue that, its author says, are indebted to Manuel Puig.
In his work habits, Mr. Wallace turns out to be nearly as eccentric as his characters. He seems to be able to write early drafts only in busy public places.
Museums and restaurants are preferred; when he reaches a late stage of composition, he will settle for a heavily trafficked library. Maybe, he speculates, he needs to be engaged in writing as a “secret” activity. Conceivably, his imagination is even fueled by a vaguely “illicit” setting. “It’s totally neurotic,” he says good-naturedly.
This summer, Mr. Wallace gets to spend half the season at Yaddo, an upstate New York writer’s colony, where he plans to complete his first collection of short stories. It’s not too early to worry about how he’s going to do that in a woodland setting known and sought for the absolute isolation and privacy with which it succors the average creative spirit.