From Book, July–August 1999. © 1999 by Patrick Arden. Reprinted by permission.
In which a (not too) brief interview with the author leads to his requesting a shrimp from a previously barred photographer.
After all the attention David Foster Wallace received following the surprising success of his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, he’s dedicated to protecting his privacy. Responses to the 1,079-page social satire and human tragedy—which famously included 388 endnotes—were overwhelmingly positive. He was described as “brilliant” (Kirkus Reviews), “a genius” (Chicago Tribune), and “the funniest writer of his generation” (Village Voice). Wallace followed his celebrated epic with a 1997 collection of nonfiction “essays and arguments,” A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and for the next two years he continued to show up regularly in magazines as mainstream as Elle and Spin. Journalists even waxed rhapsodic about his publicity photo, as if it were the very picture of his age—an unshaven young man lost in thought, a bandanna wrapped around his long hair like a bandage protecting a head wound.
Now, the thirty-seven-year-old Wallace, a professor at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal, has warned me that his unlisted telephone number will be good for only another month, when he’ll have it changed. “My number has a shelf life of one year,” he says. “Then some weird thing happens where I end up getting calls from people that I don’t want to get calls from. So you draw the circle in again.” His girlfriend has just moved into his house, but they’ve made a pact not to discuss each other’s work. He defends that bargain as a necessary measure to guard their intimacy.
When I first call, he picks up the phone as I’m leaving a message on his machine, and immediately starts laying down ground rules for the interview. First, no photos. “Little, Brown has like twelve different shots of me—can’t you use one of those?” he pleads. “I’m tired of having my picture taken.” And he doesn’t want to meet at his house; instead he directs me to a Cracker Barrel restaurant just off the I-55 interchange in Bloomington. His instructions are painstakingly detailed.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the book we’re to discuss, is a collection of Wallace’s short fiction. The title is taken from a series of one-sided conversations in which men discuss their problems with the opposite sex. The questions of the female interrogator are deleted.
The men’s troubles range from the comic to the frightening. One can’t stop shouting “Victory for the forces of democratic freedom!” while ejaculating during sex. An abuser seeks counseling for the sake of his own self-esteem. Another makes the case that a woman can actually benefit from rape or incest (“Her idea of herself and what she can live through and survive is bigger now.”). A man with a disfigured arm relates how he uses his deformity to persuade women to sleep with him. He preys on their guilt (“Sometimes they get me crying too”), and he refers to his shriveled appendage as the Asset.”
Wallace says he’s uneasy discussing the book. “I said I’d be happy to talk to you, but I have no idea what to say, simply because there isn’t really an agenda with this book, except for a certain amount of technical, formal stuff that I don’t know if I want to talk about and I don’t think people really want to hear about.”
By the time of our conversation, Wallace had relented on his prohibition against photos. So when I pull up to the Cracker Barrel, I have a photographer in tow. Wallace is immediately recognizable: A husky, unshaven fellow in a leather jacket and a University of Iowa jersey sits in a rocking chair on the restaurant’s front porch. Wallace frets that the restaurant’s manager will object to our taking pictures inside and refuses to pose near an antique Coke machine. “No one will believe that,” he says. After the photographer snaps a few shots, Wallace relaxes.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever enjoyed Cracker Barrel before,” he says, leading the way inside. The restaurant is fronted by a gift shop, with shelves full of ceramic figurines and jars of jams and sauces. The air is thick with the smell of soap and potpourri. A variety of farm implements hang from the ceiling. A mechanical toy pig grunts, “Let me out of here.”
“It’s easy to make fun of,” he says, “but the food is really pretty good.”
Our table is in the middle of a teeming dining room, halfway between the kitchen and the toilet. Wallace, whose new book includes an acknowledgment to “the staff and management of Denny’s 24-Hour Family Restaurant,” feels at home in such places. He opens a tiny cardboard box and places a pile of toothpicks on the table. He explains that he’s trying to stop smoking, and chewing toothpicks beats his previous solution—chewing tobacco.
“We’re attempting a new regime here,” he says. “You guys get in a toothpick mood, please feel free to partake. I think it’s easy to stop smoking; it’s just hard not to commit a felony after you stop. I have like one-tenth the temper speed that I used to. I have road rage, phone rage. If I was snappish with you, I apologize. My girlfriend said I was, and then I snapped at her for telling me that I was.”
As we peruse the menu, Wallace advises, “Get something nice and generic—there’s no way you can go wrong.” He says he’s ordering the meatloaf dinner, though he objects when I attempt to follow suit. “If you get the meat-loaf and don’t like it, you could blame me.”
Wallace grew up in downstate Illinois, the son of schoolteachers. His father is a philosophy professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; his mother teaches English. He says he has a younger sister but hesitates when it comes to discussing his background in detail: “It was a very kind of quiet, semi-nerdy life in a mid-sized academic town in Illinois. I don’t mind telling you about it. I’m just highly aware that it’s not very interesting or dramatic.”
He graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1985, having studied philosophy, his father’s subject. He turned to fiction writing in his senior year, when he helped published a humor magazine and earned money doing term papers for hire. “It was really good training for writing in different voices and styles—you’ll get kicked out if you get caught,” he says.
Wallace ended up getting his master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Arizona. “Then I sort of drifted for a while,” he says. “I lived in Boston and New York for like five years before I moved back.” He came to Bloomington-Normal to take a part-time job at Dalkey Archive Press, which had made its reputation resurrecting out-of-print works by early-modern writers, including Gertrude Stein and Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
“I don’t do well in big cities,” Wallace says. “It’s not the cities’ fault—it’s mine. I can’t stand noise, and I like to choose how many people are within a hundred feet of me at any given time. A lot of my college friends are in New York, and when they come here, they can’t stay more than a few days. It creeps them out—it’s very boring. But I’m alarmingly happy. I just want to be left alone to eat my meatloaf.
“I have a lot of advantages. I live in small town. If anybody wants to talk to me, they have to drive a long way and come to shitty restaurants.”
By the time he moved back to Illinois, Wallace had already published two well-received books: the 1987 novel The Broom of the System and the 1989 short-story collection Girl with Curious Hair. But for better or for worse, his reputation may now rest on his big book—Infinite Jest. Fans found his digressive method perfectly captured a world saturated by data, while his detractors claimed he was reckless in his plotting and loquacious to a fault. Yet his verbosity came as part and parcel of a potent world view—the new realities of media hype and information overload have not exactly made people happier.
Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown, Michael Pietsch, has said he was initially intimidated by the sheer size of the novel. “I had no clue how the characters connected, except they were either doing drugs or playing tennis,” he admitted in one interview. Eventually Pietsch decided to turn the book’s length into a dare: “Have you finished David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan masterpiece?” A Little, Brown sales representative told me, “We put more effort and money behind marketing that book than we ever had before …and it paid off.”
“It’s a good book,” Wallace says, a little defensively. “But it’s a difficult long book and there’s no reason why it should have gotten that kind of attention. Much of the attention was hype attention rather than literary attention, and so it didn’t get to me all that much. The book is partly about hype and sort of the spiritual consequences of hype, and then the book itself became an object of hype. For a while I was amused by the irony, and then it just kind of made me feel empty.”
He doesn’t expect to receive the same attention for Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. “I kind of hope that this will just be a normal mid-list book,” he says. “Maybe you, a couple other people will want to talk about it, and that will be it. I don’t know that I’m quite up for another circus.
In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men Wallace was obviously concerned with form. The book’s architecture may come off as somewhat precious and picky: titles recur, characters carefully dissect their own emotions, every idea or feeling is fastidiously annotated. (“I’ve got to keep myself amused,” he says. “It’s late at night when I’m typing.”)
One story is split in half: “Adult World I” concerns a young, sexually naïve newlywed; “Adult World II” continues her story, but the narrative breaks down into a diagram as the main character becomes more sophisticated and alienated from her passions and Wallace allows the reader a glimpse into the very mechanics of storytelling. “There’s a certain amount of formal stunt pilotry in the book,” he explains. “I as a reader don’t like stunt pilotry if it doesn’t have much of a reason. The big reason to have ‘Adult World II’ in outline form is that for myself as a reader I don’t buy epiphanies done dramatically anymore. You know: ‘She gazed out the window. Suddenly, the revelation hit her face.’ I begin wincing when I’m reading shit like that. I don’t think readers can buy epiphanies anymore …I like stuff that’s moving, but I don’t want to be perceived as manipulative, and I don’t like to be manipulative. So some of the stories that look the weirdest at least were designed to try to access emotional stuff in a different way. It’s maybe easier to swallow. Or, to be more honest, it’s easier for me to write about, where I don’t feel like I’m being that, you know, Bridges of Madison County guy.
“We’re real good at recognizing when somebody’s fumbling at our emotions like they were a bra,” he says, pulling his hands to his chest, his fingers clenched in an arthritic grip. The diners at the next table sing “Happy Birthday.”
The waiter sets down our plates—slabs of meat and mashed potatoes smothered in brown gravy. Wallace eagerly picks up a fork and inquires about the photographer’s breaded shrimp. “I’ve never had it,” he says. “I’ve come close a couple times.”
Wallace says he’s been surprised by the reaction the new book has received so far. “Some friends who’ve read the thing have come back and said, ‘Man, there has got to be a part of you that’s a pretty serious misogynist because you do misogyny pretty well.’ I don’t know what to tell them. If you do a convincing thing about a serial killer, does that mean you have murder in your heart? Well, maybe, I guess …More than the average person? I don’t know.”
He sighs and shakes his head. “There’s no denying it—this is pretty sad. One of my friends said, ‘Everyone is so completely fucking doomed in this,’ because they are. They have a reasonable sense of what’s going on and they’re very self-aware. God knows they’re self-conscious. And yet they’re trapped.”
He rejects criticism that his work is unnecessarily complicated: “I don’t have any strong feelings about that, unless if somebody says, ‘You know, Dave, I read your book and it seems like it required all this hard work just basically for the sake of saying, “Hey fuck you, reader, I can make you work hard.”’ Then I know with that reader I have failed. Then I really feel that they think I’m a putz. And I hate books where, you know, those books where you get halfway through and you get the sense that the author is so stupid that he thinks he can fool you into thinking that the book is really sophisticated and profound just because it’s difficult. It’s an epidemic in academic writing. And it happens about half the time in avant-garde writing. And it’s the thing I most fear as a writer because it’s the thing I most hate as a reader. And I’m sure I’m guilty of it sometimes.”
Wallace says he continues teaching part-time not for the money—he only makes seventeen thousand dollars a year doing it—but because “it is real good for my work. If I am by myself for like a week, I get weird. Teaching forces me to talk to other people.” He glances at the photographer’s shrimp. “Is that all right? Not a little heavy on the breading?”
The 1991 edition of Contemporary Authors shows a twentysomething Wallace, looking earnest, or at least clean shaven. Under “Religion,” it says “Catholic,” and after “Politics” it lists the “Communist Party of the United States.” Seven years later, his entry lists no religion or political persuasion.
Wallace explains that he tried to join the Catholic Church twice, once in the mid-’80s and again in the early ’90s. “I’ve gone through RCIA (Right of Christian Initiation for Adults) a couple of times, but I always flunk the period of inquiry. They don’t really want inquiries. They really just want you to learn responses,” he says. “My parents are atheists of the ’60s brand. You know, religion for them equals central suppression from authority. But their parents—so my grandparents—were very, very religious. My grandmother was basically raised in a convent. … I think religion kind of skips a generation. Most of my best friends are religious in a way that’s cool, where you don’t even know it for several years. They’re not the type to show up at your door with a pamphlet under their arms. You know, I enjoy church and I enjoy being part of a larger thing. I think it’s just not in my destiny to be part of an institutional religion, because it’s not in my nature to take certain things on faith.”
He peers once again at the photographer’s dinner. “Could I just have one shrimp?” he asks.
“America is one big experiment in what happens when you’re a wealthy, privileged culture that’s pretty much lost religion or spirituality as a real informing presence. It’s still a verbal presence—it’s part of the etiquette that our leaders use, but it’s not inside us anymore, which in one way makes us very liberal and moderate and we’re not fanatics and we don’t tend to go around blowing things up. But on the other hand, it’s very difficult to think that the point of life is to double your salary so that you can go to the mall more often. Even when you’re making fun and sneering at it, there’s a real dark emptiness about it.”
Wallace sits up straight in his chair and pushes his plate away. “That’s simply my opinion as a private citizen—I don’t know that it has all that much to do with the stuff that I write about.”
Wallace turns to the photographer. “This has got to be boring for you,” he says. “Try this game.” He picks up a triangular piece of wood with pegs jammed into several holes. It’s been provided by the restaurant, right next to the salt and pepper shakers. “I want to see if somebody else can do this. It’s sort of like checkers. You try to jump one thing over another thing. Whatever you jump, you can take out. The object is to be left with only one.
“I am not good at this. All I’ve figured out is that you have got to keep the fuckers close together, or else things get very dicey.” He notices our reluctance. “It will be fun.”
Instead, we order dessert.
“Should we talk about you guys’ jobs now?” Wallace asks.
Finally, the check comes.
“Well, this hasn’t hurt at all,” he says. “It was easy.”
Back in the gift shop, Wallace says, “The thing to realize is how fast this will move across everybody’s brain but yours and mine. You’ll care about the story, and I’ll care about the story. Everybody else, like people in dentist offices…” He shakes his head but then thinks better of it. “That doesn’t mean you don’t have an obligation to the truth.” I thank him for the advice. The piece is supposed to be short.
“How long?”
A couple thousand words.
“Oh, Christmas! Just take out all the articles.”
We walk out into the parking lot, and Wallace puts his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll be interested to see what you do with it.” He smiles. “Compression has never been my forte.”