© 2000 by the Lannan Foundation. Reprinted by permission.
O’BRIEN: Most of the questions are about relationships, fortunately not personal ones. First is relationship to your readers. How much do you take your reader into account, how much do you think about your reader as you’re writing? How often are you afraid that you may be stepping over the boundary with readers, expecting too much from them or demanding too much? David, this is a subject you and I have discussed many times, actually.
WALLACE: One of many reasons for being terrified about this sort of venue is that a lot of the stuff, it sort of feels like it’s not in my interests to think about—think-think. I know that if stuff is going well, it feels like I’m talking to somebody, or like there’s somebody there, and I think it’s somebody rather suspiciously like me. And I know it’s a very charitable way to put it, “Are you making too high demands on stuff.” I know I run into problems with irritation thresholds, cost-benefit flux, and all kinds of stuff. I guess the deal I’ve made with myself is that I don’t think about it a whole lot when I’m working but I’ve gathered a little set of three or four readers—only one of whom is a relative—who have graciously been reading for me for fifteen years and are fairly blunt about when irritation thresholds or gratuitousness thresholds are being exceeded. I think I lean on them in the respect that it allows me not really to think about it very much when I’m doing it, which of course doesn’t yield a very interesting answer.
O’BRIEN: I’ll come back to our ongoing argument about this.
WALLACE: Hence embedding the thing about the outside readers, which is the only nugget I really have to offer.
O’BRIEN: Rick?
POWERS: This came up at breakfast. Michael Silverblatt had used a line with regard to another writer—that his books would have been much better had he completely discounted their effect, or ceased to think about their effect on his readership. It was such a strange and wonderful formulation that I’ve been turning it over in my head all day. I guess, finally, it seems to me almost inconceivable that you would not be gauging the effect of the work upon some receiver. The question is, who? It’s not a question of whether you’re writing without mindfulness, or creating a transmission without a reception, the question is: who is the ideal reader? Is this a stable configuration or is this perpetually reinvented in the light of the many, many needs that a novel will present? I think it’s a good exercise, at various points in the creative process, to reach out towards something antithetical to your own ideal reception. I mean, I agree with David, in some ways my ideal reader does look like me, at least during the first draft, the invention part of the process. I think, at different moments in revision, I will work hard to see what this would look like to someone who is very much not me.
O’BRIEN: If it’s pleasing you, do you assume it’s going to please others?
POWERS: That’s a horrible assumption! The assumption that pleasure can be calculated at all in advance is a very difficult one.
WALLACE: Although if it’s pleasing enough you just don’t care. Which is nice. And then if, by chance, people do like it, it seems like this wonderful bit of frosting.
POWERS: Can you do that? You can get to a level of personal pleasure where you essentially …
WALLACE: I thought implicitly we were talking early drafts and stuff here, then there’s the horrible dash of cold water when you realize someone else is going to see this.
O’BRIEN: So the next level of this, or maybe it’s pre-level: relationship with editors. To what degrees are they helps, hindrances, learning from …
POWERS: You know, I can honestly say that I do not think of my current editor as a reader at all. I don’t say that to be flip, because I know that his reading will have everything to do with what happens to the book as it attempts to make its way in the world. And I’m always surprised by what he has to say. I simply don’t conceive of him as an active presence in the making.
O’BRIEN: Does he have a lot to say and do you pay attention?
POWERS: You know, John told us in the van on the way here that one of his favorite pedagogical techniques when a student asks him a question that he doesn’t want to answer is to answer something else.
O’BRIEN: I mentioned that, huh?
POWERS: I think that’s varied quite a bit from book to book. I think it would be pretty rare in commercial publishing now to get a real hands-on Max-Perkins read from a literary editor.
WALLACE: We’re very different in this respect. Again this is going to sound like real editorial sucking up. I’ve got an editor who has made the last four things that he’s worked on with me better, and he’s not part of the first screen of readers because he’s an authority figure and duh duh duh … it’s weird … I’ll spend nine months sending him letters begging him for editorial help, then by the time he gets the manuscript I’ll be done with it. It will have gone to other readers, I will have worked out my response to that. So what he gets I am so reptilianly attached to that the poor guy gets all these letters, which I’m sure he just throws away, and then we begin to fight about the manuscript. He hasn’t been my editor all through all the books but he’s been the editor on the last four. The last fiction book—Rick and I were just talking—Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the order of the things that I had sent him was utterly different than the order that’s in the book. He made the arrangement that’s in the book and it’s about 450 percent better—I’ve already convinced you?—than what it was. I’m just grateful, and I know that I’m unusual and the guy puts up with a lot of neuroses and mixed messages, but I’ve actually come to lean on him. Which I’m not supposed to say, because then if the editor knows he’s got you then …
O’BRIEN: Well this has been a semi-argument between us, and the first form of it was my insisting that the writer didn’t owe anything to the reader except to write as well as he or she could and forget about the reader. Then you convinced me of the opposite using, I think, a story from Michael Pietsch that nobody had an obligation to buy a book. [They might] pick it off a shelf in a bookstore, but they weren’t obligated to go on. So having convinced me of that, next time we talked about it you took the opposite position, and proceeded to convince me of the opposite …
WALLACE: And where do we stand now?
O’BRIEN: Well I’ve used your first argument many times with authors I’ve dealt with—that it’s much more like a conversation that you’re having and neither an editor nor a reader has any obligation to continue to listen unless you’re being interesting.
WALLACE: Obviously both obligation and interesting would take a lot of unpacking that I don’t think anybody here is interested in.
POWERS: I don’t get what that would mean—a writer owes nothing to the reader.
O’BRIEN: Do what he or she feels as though they want to do, and whatever group of readers there may be, small or large, they’re going to get it or they won’t get it.
WALLACE: This was my original position?
O’BRIEN: No—that was mine—and you argued against it.
WALLACE: Good for me.
POWERS: The way that I would try to reconcile those positions is to say, “do whatever you think you feel is necessary” means locate in this process a, or a series of, ideal readers.
WALLACE: Well, there’s even a more basic—and this is probably … who cares if it’s boring—Rick and I have been talking a lot about teaching and there’s this fundamental difference that comes up in freshman comp and haunts you all the way through teaching undergrads: there is a fundamental difference between expressive writing and communicative writing. One of the biggest problems in terms of learning to write, or teaching anybody to write, is getting it in your nerve endings that the reader cannot read your mind. That what you say isn’t interesting simply because you, yourself, say it. Whether that translates to a feeling of obligation to the reader I don’t know, but we’ve all probably sat next to people at dinner or on public transport who are producing communication signals but it’s not communicative expression. It’s expressive expression, right? And actually it’s in conversation that you can feel most vividly how alienating and unpleasant it is to feel as if someone is going through all the motions of communicating with you but in actual fact you don’t even need to be there at all. Could this be a third different point …
O’BRIEN: I’ll think about this one. What about relationship with reviewers? Most writers go through various stages—they pay attention, read them seriously at the beginning, grow to hate them, stop reading them or drive themselves crazy by continuing to read them. Do either of you read them? Do you read them all? Does somebody edit them for you?
POWERS: Does Michael do that for you?
WALLACE: No—it’s not that full service.
POWERS: I do read them. I don’t believe the good ones, I agonize over the bad ones. A review can say, “This is the most astonishing book I’ve read for years and years. I wish that it had had a few more peaks and not so many valleys,” and I’d be worried about the little cavil. But I think saying that, I would also say at the same time I am entirely indifferent to them. There are two paradoxical modes: one in which I really want a kind of return communication in the face of what I’ve just been doing for the last three years; and the second, which is somewhat indifferent to that and capable, rightly or wrongly, of convincing myself that there are other more satisfying conversations going on there, I’m just not hearing the return.
O’BRIEN: When they get to the part of the “however” are you more inclined to believe that?
POWERS: I don’t think my visceral belief in the moment of reading the review ever filters into the writing process. I simply don’t think you can write more than one novel in this country and not have managed to create a fundamental imperviousness to reception.
O’BRIEN: David?
WALLACE: Oh … well … I don’t read them as a matter of practice. I’m fairly disciplined as long as they’re in the organ. If somebody mails it to me very often I slip up and read them, and I’m not indifferent to them and they are extremely upsetting to me. It’s not that they shouldn’t exist—I have an analogy but it’s somewhat off-color: we got to go and listen to a research presentation at the Santa Fe Institute this afternoon, and afterwards there was a restroom break, and people were using the restroom. There I was in a stall and there are two guys out in the bathroom and one says “who were those guys?,” “I don’t know, a couple of writers…” And right away, I was in the position that I am in when I’m contemplating reading a review, which is that it’s incredibly tempting to want to listen to this, but it messes you up every time because it’s a special communication between the reviewer who is talking to potential book buyers or people who bought the book and want to get their own reactions checked and it is not a communication that includes the author, I don’t think.
POWERS: Oh, it can. There are good faith reviews and there are bad faith reviews.
WALLACE: For me, and could you poke holes in this?—yes—would I prefer that you didn’t?—yes—because this is a protection mechanism. I’ve just decided that this is like people talking about you somewhere and you’re in a position to eavesdrop, and if you do, by all means go ahead and do, but we all know what happens, right? Sitcom plots revolve around what happens. Is it a shaky idea? Yeah. Would I prefer to be impervious to them? Yeah—I’m not. It just helps me to pretend that they’re not going on. Though the Japanese lady haunts my dreams.
O’BRIEN: Neither of you has to answer this one—is there any sense of reviewers waiting in the bushes after your first few novels to suggest that you’re not as good as others have thought you’ve been? I can answer it for you?
POWERS: You mean the same reviewer who has received you well early on has decided …
O’BRIEN: Not the same ones, but others.
POWERS: Can I rephrase the question and say “does the reviewing process become a different thing at different stages in a career?” which, I guess, in some ways suggests that the act of reviewing isn’t a good-faith process because it’s reviewing a narrative about you rather than the words between the covers.
WALLACE: What are your thoughts on reviewers, John?
O’BRIEN: Generally? Dumb. Self-indulgent. More talking about themselves …
POWERS: Don’t pull any punches.
O’BRIEN: I don’t have to worry about the reviewers, so I can’t even identify the daily reviewer for the New York Times as the prime example of such things. What about scholarly articles? Now, given the state of academia there haven’t been a great number written on either of you—do you read them and how do they effect you? Do you take them seriously? The ones who are really attempting to do something more serious than what a 500-, 700-word book review can do.
WALLACE: God’s honest truth: sometimes people send them to me, I’ve read a few—don’t understand them. Can’t follow the argument. Cannot see in my version of the text any of the stuff they see—sometimes they’re very impressive in a kind of I-wonder-what-on-earth-he’s-talking-about way. So those I don’t have any problem with. And it’s not a joke—that is the cold truth—I do not understand them.
O’BRIEN: Richard—you’ve had some of these.
POWERS: Yeah, and I enjoy reading them in the way that I enjoy reading scholarly articles about other contemporary novels—they seem part of a conversation that daily reviewing can’t afford to be or doesn’t have the time or the energy to be—part of an ongoing conversation about what books do and what has come before.
O’BRIEN: Do they seem to be less about you than reviews might be?
POWERS: Clearly.
O’BRIEN: Why do you write? A lot of people don’t write. You two do write. A number of other people do write. Why? Why not stop?
WALLACE: Sounds good to me.
POWERS: Yeah, I never thought of that …
WALLACE: John, is there some way to rephrase it so it’s less cruel? That’s such a general question that it’s difficult not just to babble.
O’BRIEN: So, is it compulsive? There’s no choice?
POWERS: In a sense, any answer to that question is going to be a narrative overlay. It’s going to be a fabrication, and it’s going to be an attempt to add to the narrative explanation of self that the writing is anyway. I write out of pleasure, and every morning I can’t believe I’m getting away with this, and that sort of deep puritanical sense that this is a zero-sum game leads me to believe that I’ve got twenty lean years to come. But you write to enhance your pleasure in life and to increase your sense of where you are, where you’ve been dropped down.
WALLACE: You really get up every morning and you feel just incredibly lucky?
POWERS: What other career affords you that advantage?
WALLACE: Oh, I’m not arguing. I’m just in awe. I would like to be that healthy between my ears. And this isn’t a set-up or anything. Sometimes yeah, and sometimes, my god, it’s like the back of my hand is stapled to my forehead.
POWERS: You’re not saying that I’d rather be piling boxes up?
WALLACE: No. I mean Jon Franzen’s got a real good one about this, because he gets asked this a lot. He says “yeah, there’s the bullshit narrative overlay, and then the truth is: because there’s nothing else I want to do.” My own narrative overlay is just something that I’ve always liked that’s in—except this is going to make it sound nobler and more compulsive than it is—but there’s this thing in Oliver Sacks. It might be in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, about, I think, it’s a bag lady who was tourettic, and I bet other people remember this. She’d stand on a street corner in maybe New York, LA, or something, you know thousands of passers-by, and she’d just stand there and wouldn’t do anything. But then after maybe five or ten minutes, after a certain number of passers-by had gone by, she would go back into an alley and express somehow every face and—according to Sacks—it was eerie. It wasn’t just the faces it was the people who go by, and then she would go back out there and stand. And I resonate with something about that, though I wouldn’t claim that it was some Romantic “some are just driven, and born, and compelled to do it.” But there is a kind of …
POWERS: As a sort of footnote to that, and as a response to Franzen’s formulation, for me there are plenty of other things that I would love to spend time doing. Writing is the only place where you can do them all.
O’BRIEN: Are you coming down on the side—and I’ve heard a lot of writers say this, David—that they wish they didn’t have to do it? That it’s a painful process.
WALLACE: Half the time, yeah; but then the other half of the time you’re like “how could I ever, ever have stopped thanking the ceiling for being able to do this.” I want, and again—narrative overlay, whatever—I was in a restaurant, this was years ago, and overheard two guys talking about how hard their jobs were and how they felt like their creativity was one thing, but then there was the constant pressure. The industry was always changing, and they couldn’t rely on their sense of what the person they were making their stuff for was going to think, and they were terrified that they were going to get fired but also praying they were going to get fired because they just couldn’t take this. And, I don’t do this often, but I eventually, because I figured they were part of the few, the proud—they were upholsterers. Furniture upholsterers. And I swear to God, word-for-word, the conversation was, I don’t know. So I guess I sort of think that there’s not anything within a certain kind of broad genus of certain kinds of jobs—we were talking about this with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute—I don’t think it’s substantively different, at least for me, than most other jobs would be. If you are the sort of person who could be grateful in any sort of job, then I wish I were you.
POWERS: I’ve heard that on this question of agony that it genders strongly. That women novelists tend to be filled with religious gratitude, and men like to bitch and moan.
O’BRIEN: What’s the pleasure of writing? What pleasure do you derive?
WALLACE: Except the weird thing is it’s both at the same time, and the weird thing for me, having done it for a while, is that I almost can’t imagine one without the other.
POWERS: Getting in touch with your inner-feminine side …
WALLACE: I don’t think that I’ve had any problem getting in touch with my inner-feminine side.
O’BRIEN: So tell me your pleasure.
POWERS: For me it’s connection—the pleasure of an expansive, long-ranging dinner conversation with people who do all sorts of things and being able to come back to that, night after night, and pick up threads and follow them. There’s a voyeuristic pleasure, there’s a synthetic pleasure, but primarily it’s the pleasure of being able to live in a frame of time that the rest of life conspires to annihilate.
O’BRIEN: So it’s the time that you’re writing?
POWERS: Ideally, and on the very best days, it’s no time at all, it’s simply breaking the constraints of time and physical constraint.
WALLACE: That’s a beautiful way to put it. My experience of it is just that the good days are when you look up and it’s just way later than you thought it could be.
POWERS: Way later by the clock and in some sort of inner …
WALLACE: When it goes well, there’s a way that you’re tired that’s just a really good way. Just a really good kind of tired.