From Buffalo News, 10 September 2000. © 2000 by Mark Shechner and the Buffalo News. Reprinted by permission.
From a certain point of view, that of raw Mozartian virtuosity, Wallace might honestly be called the best young writer in America. For pungent phrase, performative strategy, unpredictability, hurricane force, risk-for-risk’s-sake bravado, and back-of-the-envelope improvisation, he stands out among his contemporaries. Young as novelists go, thirty-eight, Wallace has published five books: The Broom of the System (novel, 1987), Girl with Curious Hair (stories, 1989) a massive novel Infinite Jest (1996), a collection of essays and commissioned travel pieces, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), and a grab bag of stories and psychiatric interviews, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). Reviewing Infinite Jest in 1996, I described it as “a Godzilla of a novel, 1079 pages of drug and rehab lore, high-tech razzle-dazzle, social comedy, hallucination, millenarian prophecy, terrorist hugger mugger, paramilitary simulation, psychic dysfunction and neural calamity, and tennis.” Interviews is a mixture of strange short stories and apparently transcribed interviews, surveillance reports on romantically challenged men who may be under a therapist’s care or under police custody or under lock and key.
Born in Ithaca, New York, and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Wallace is the son of academic parents, his father being a professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois. He has called his childhood uneventful, and he writes of having been a youthful tennis prodigy. But there have been lost years, about which Wallace does not speak, though they pop up in his writing through his fascination with the worlds of mortal pain, powerful obsession, neural trauma, and addiction.
To have read any of Wallace’s work is to encounter a feverish and Joyce-like grapple with language, a deep psychological penetration into extreme mental states, a doctor’s knowledge of arcane pharmacology, a finely tuned awareness of elaborate maneuver, a theoretical sophistication about film, television, and video, and an outrageous sense of humor. (When the father of the main character of the novel Infinite Jest commits suicide by poaching his head in the family microwave, his older son comes into the house saying, “Something smells delicious.”)
I spoke to Wallace by telephone on August 15 and explained my rule that we talk only about writing, not personal matters, and that he was free to direct the interview as he liked.
WALLACE: My rule is that no really interesting question can be broached and answered in a forum this fast, and so after a whole lot of head clutching about these things what I do is rant in response to questions and then offer the questioner the freedom he wants anyway, which is to edit my answers any way he wants. Concision is not my strength.
SHECHNER: One thing I admire in your writing is point-blank observation, the watching and the listening. You write in “E Unibus Plurum” essay (about television and its creation of reality, in Fun Thing): “Fiction writers tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.”
WALLACE: This is not particularly new. There is the anecdote about all Jane Austen’s friends being terrified to talk around her because they knew they would end up in a book. I’m not sure how fiction and poetry work, but part of it is that really we notice a lot more than we notice we notice. A particular job of fiction is not so much to note things for people but rather to wake readers up to how observant they already are, and that’s why for me as a reader the descriptions or just toss offs that I like the most are not the ones that seem utterly new but the ones that have that eerie “good Lord I’ve noticed that too but have never even taken a moment to articulate to myself.”
SHECHNER: That puts me in mind of a character in E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, who refers to himself as a “criminal of perception,” as though watching people is an act of cruelty. You remind me of the great literary lurkers, like Vladimir Nabokov or Saul Bellow. Do you think of your observing as cruel?
WALLACE: It depends on whether it is based on something real and what the purpose is. The culture since the mid-’70s and early ’80s has become much more conscious of the phenomenon of watching and the arrangements between performers and audiences. While there is nothing different in the act of watching, I think public behavior now is much more conscious of being watched, and there is an element of display that changes the equation between the watcher and the watched, eliminating the last bits of voyeurism that used to be attached to aesthetic watching.
SHECHNER: In a number of places, particularly in Hideous Men, you’ve got characters involved in erotic situations who are also at the same time acting out scenes from books or films. There’s a young woman in a piece called “Think.” It is a bedroom situation, and the man imagines that her expression is from the Victoria’s Secret catalog. “She is, he thinks, the sort of woman who’d keep her heels on if he asked her to. Even if she’d never kept heels on before she’d give him a knowing, smoky smile, Page 18. … The languid half-turn and push of the door are tumid with some kind of significance; he realizes she’s replaying a scene from some movie she loves.”
WALLACE: That’s complicated, because that’s the guy watching her and interpreting, more or less guessing, that she is putting on a performance, so there is an extra element of creepiness. The whole watching/being watched, display/reception of display stuff gets complicated and probably creepier when you are in a sexual situation. Brief Interviews is the only book in which I’ve explored that kind of sexuality.
SHECHNER: In Brief Interviews and elsewhere, you show a fascination with the symptomatic life, the involuntary life, such as the vignette in Brief Interviews in which a character, at the moment of orgasm, cries out, “Victory for the forces of Democratic Freedom,” or the man who abandons a woman, claiming that he wants to put to rest her fear that he will abandon her. So much of this sounds like excerpts from a therapist’s notebook, or as if a fly on the wall of an analyst’s office heard it all and was reporting it back as a comedy of neurosis. How did these scenarios get developed in your mind?
WALLACE: That cycle of interviews is hard to talk about briefly, although for the purposes of your questions I would say that these are not events taking place but events that are being related to an interlocutor, and in fact a hostile one, so that there is a blur between how much of the stuff is involuntary and how much is the rhetoric of the presentation, because as far as I can see the one thing that most of these men have in common is an unconscious genius for self-presentation and self-defense. They try to anticipate how they are going to be interpreted and head it off, which seems to me to be not all the different from ordinary discourse between the sexes.
SHECHNER: Many people have remarked on the grim authenticity of the story, “The Depressed Person,” who bores her therapist into suicide, but the story—actually it is an interview—that stands out in my mind is with the man in Peoria Heights, Illinois, whose father was a washroom attendant in a fancy hotel, who, for six days a week, stood there amid the “rococo fixtures and scalloped basins” and the horrible sounds and odors, dutifully and politely handing out towels.
WALLACE: I don’t know where that came from, but I do know that I tried to read that out loud once and will never do it again.
[We shift momentarily to the novel Infinite Jest, and I mention to Wallace that what I appreciate is its reports back from a recognizable world: meetings of the Boston AA, for example, various psychologically profiled characters, who, however they may have been invented, had also to be observed. I mention Kate Gompert, a catatonic, and Tony Kraus, an epileptic who suffers a visionary seizure in the book.]
WALLACE: You don’t mind weird stuff. So long as there is a neural event going on that placates your realism fears, you’ll take it, because that seizure scene is extremely weird and consists mostly of hallucinations. I get very different responses from readers. Some people are neurologically disposed to like very pomo, avant-gardie—let’s-just-play-games-here-stuff—and some people are disposed to need stuff that is grounded and plausible, and once you can persuade them of your ability to do that, you can more or less do what you want.
SHECHNER: On the subject of pomo and the fictional avant garde of the ’70s, in some interviews you’ve indicated a double relationship to it. On the one hand, it seems to be a source of influence, while on the other hand you want to place some distance between yourself and writers like Barth, Pynchon, Barthelme, Burroughs.
WALLACE: I don’t know about distance. I do know that my parents read a lot and I read a lot when I was growing up, and what we liked was probably not all that different from what you liked. We like to be moved, and yet, for someone who is trying to be a fiction writer in the year 2000, the conventions of what was called Realism don’t seem all that real anymore, or are more difficult to swallow. Some things in the writers you’ve mentioned seem to me more “real” than Dickens or Anne Tyler or pick your realist. On the other hand, some of what gets called pomo can get so occluded and conscious of itself as text or hall of mirrors, that its only appeal is intellectual and cerebral. I don’t dismiss the idea that there is something of value in that; it just isn’t what turns me on. I don’t particularly consider myself a member of either camp, though it is interesting to watch members of different camps who talk about you contort things so that you end up being a friendly force.
SHECHNER: Whom do you read these days with pleasure? Who among your contemporaries is something that you would want the rest of us to read?
WALLACE: The answer, first of all, depends on how long you have, but to take a broad swipe, the three people who are at the top of the food chain just now are Don DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, and Cormac McCarthy, all of whom are either in their fifties or their sixties. People around my age whom I’m a big fan of include George Saunders, who writes for the New Yorker a lot, and Richard Powers—the way he can combine and transfigure data is just incredible—Joanna Scott [whom I remind Wallace lives nearby in Rochester], Denis Johnson, though more of his earlier work in poetry than the later work that is getting so much attention now. There is a San Francisco writer named William T. Vollmann, who is very prolific. He has a book of stories called The Rainbow Stories that will raise hair on parts of your body that don’t have hair.
SHECHNER: I had read before that you were a fan of Cynthia Ozick’s. That is surprising to me; you seem so different.
WALLACE: We’re both politically active Jewish females. I don’t see the problem. [Laughter on both sides.] When I was in high school I read a lot of Malamud, because that is what my parents had around, and afterward I read Ozick, including some Ozick that is written in the margins of Malamud, and it blew the top of my skull off. I think Ozick is an immortally good pure prose writer, but I think it is also the fact that I’m about the goyist gentile anybody’s ever met, and I can feel in my nerve endings the kind of stuff she is writing about. In reading her I feel an utter erasure of difference, which does not happen to me with a lot of other writers from different cultural backgrounds. I can appreciate the peering across the chasm at another culture, but with Ozick that chasm just vanishes. Her Bloodshed and Three Novellas, if you haven’t read it, is fine.
SHECHNER: Do you want to say anything about work in progress? And are you going to read from anything new when you are here?
WALLACE: I’m going to read from whatever they tell me.
[I mention to Wallace that I respond to his verbal density, and that I get from his work a rare sentence-by-sentence pleasure that normally I get only from music. He responds:]
WALLACE: I think people write the way their brain voices sound to them.
SHECHNER: I’ve always thought of writing as a kind of artificial discipline, in which you write a sentence ten times before it sounds like your natural voice.
WALLACE: But very often that ten times is meant to serve a kind of mimesis. I don’t find that fiction is meant to be read out loud. Fiction is meant to be read inwardly, to march along with people’s mental circuitry, and the voice we hear in our heads is very different from our larynx sound.
We agree to call the interview to a close, though I’m brimming to ask over and over the question that I’ve already ruled out of bounds: “Where does all this stuff come from?” But invention and the portion of life it comes from are the writer’s secrets. We readers have to content ourselves with the product, which in the case of David Foster Wallace, is spectacular.