Wallace knew that he could not hide out in Bloomington forever. On publication day he would have to pack up and head east to face what he liked to call, referencing his old Tolkien reading, “Sauron’s great red eye.” But in fact Sauron was coming his way.
His first interview was with
Details
magazine. Wallace had never been interviewed by the mainstream media in depth before—the only feature magazine piece written on him had been by a friend of his agent for
Arrival
in 1987. So he left up the letters from Franzen, DeLillo, and others—“a whole wall of letters that help me or are important,” as he later wrote to DeLillo. The reporter, David Streitfeld, who was on staff with the
Washington Post
, told him he should take them down, because a journalist could see them and quote from them. He also told Wallace that rambling self-analysis might not be the ideal approach to conversations for publication; an interview was not the place for confidences. “I was wildly indiscreet about stuff like drug histories and M. Karr,” Wallace wrote DeLillo after, “and he stopped me in the middle and patiently explained certain rules about what to tell reporters.” About his time in substance abuse programs, he needed no coaching, since Karr had already warned him about it via her phone call to Pietsch. When
Newsweek
soon after asked him how he knew so much about recovery, he trickily replied:
I went with friends to an open AA meeting, and got addicted to them. It was completely riveting. I was never a member—I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.
By the time the
New York Times
Magazine
came to see Wallace in Bloomington on the eve of his book tour, he was cannier. All the same, some of his personality came through. The reporter, Frank Bruni, got to watch Jeeves eat a bologna sandwich from Wallace’s mouth. “They pretend they’re kissing you,” Wallace said, “but they’re really mining your mouth for food.” And he went along to a dinner at the home of a couple named Erin and Doug Poag. They ate Kentucky Fried Chicken and heroes on trays and watched
The X-Files
, a taste of Wallace unbuttoned. Wallace did not mention that his connection to the Poags was from his recovery circle—he claimed to have met them at a “Mennonite church.” And, understandably, without that information, Bruni was left with the impression that Wallace’s fondness for ordinary midwestern people might be a put-on. In all, Bruni’s article grappled with—and never quite decided—whether the author of
Infinite Jest
was more “shtick” or “soul” or a combination of both that was generationally unique.
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Next came the book tour, which began in Manhattan in mid-February. Erin Poag went with him to steady her friend while he was away from both his home and his recovery group. One reporter mistook her for either his mother “or the Illinois version of a publicist.” Walking up the rickety stairs to his first New York reading, Wallace tried to turn around and go back down. “I don’t think I can do this,” he told Poag. She answered, “If you get up and don’t like it, we don’t have to stay,” and, a solidly built woman in her fifties, she put her hand on his back and pushed him along. Wallace had the strange feeling as he walked into the room of the crowd parting. The
Times Magazine
noted the turnout:
The critics aren’t the only ones angling to prove that they get it. Wallace’s contemporaries have shown up at his public appearances in force. When he read at K.G.B., Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of “Prozac Nation,” claimed a spot near the front of the room.
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The following night, at another jam-packed reading, this time at Tower Books in the Village, Ethan Hawke lurked in the back.
Soon afterward, Gerry Howard recalls bumping into a long line of fans waiting to see Wallace read at a Rizzoli’s bookstore on West Broadway. He
was amazed that this writer, whom he had always thought destined for a small, essentially intellectual, literary public, had become a phenomenon. “There was this adoration,” Howard remembered. “He had reached people in this highly personal way.” The
Times Magazine
, trying to pin down this connection, dubbed
Infinite Jest
“The Grunge American Novel,” signaling the link between a fragmented novel of fragmented souls and a cultural movement led by singers like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana characterized by a similar affect. There was considerable truth to it; both proffered an awkward sincerity. They shared an allergy to façades, to disco-type slickness.
Infinite Jest
’s jagged multiple-conjunction-opening sentences held the same promise of authenticity as the primitive musical arrangement and bad amping of Seattle garage bands. Both music and novel implied that communication had gotten harder and harder, hitting walls of isolation too high to scale, reducing us to diminished gestures, preferences, grunts. As Wallace would tell an interviewer around this time, “there’s a way that it seems to me that reality’s fractured right now; at least the reality that I live in.” The chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” paralleled Wallace’s portrait of a generation addicted to media with its assertion that everyone was “stupid and contagious…. Here we are now, entertain us.”
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There was a shared look between writer and singers too. The unwashed hair with bandana, unlaced work boots, and old plaid shirts that Wallace had been wearing since Arizona were also now practically a uniform for anyone who felt disenchanted with the post-Reagan American culture of buying and owning. Wallace’s “impulse to second-guess every thought and proposition” had become, as Howard notes, “something like a generational style.” “When I was younger,” Wallace told an interviewer for the
Boston Phoenix
, “I saw my relationship with the reader as sort of a sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.”
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The possibility that Wallace himself was going to become famous filled him with confusion, though of course he saw the irony of what was happening. He wanted his work to be fully experienced, not lightly absorbed with all the other noise of the culture. When a fellow English professor at ISU congratulated him on the cruise ship piece in
Harper’s
, Wallace pointed to his mouth with one hand and made a butt-wiping gesture with
the other. To anyone who praised his achievement, he would only repeat that he had “worked really really hard on”
Infinite Jest
, as if he were a child talking about his artwork. He posted a sign on his office door at ISU during his book tour: “D.F. Wallace is out of town on weird personal authorized emergencyish leave from 2/17/96 to 3/3/96 and from 3/5/96 to 3/10/96.”
The low point of Wallace’s rise was his publication party. Little, Brown wanted to mark the arrival of the book with a media gathering at the Limbo Lounge, a trendy East Village club. Nadell had not loved the idea.
Infinite Jest
was “not a hip downtown kind of book,” she wrote the publisher. “It is a major literary novel.” But Little, Brown believed that to ignite enthusiasm for the novel it had to establish the book’s of-the-moment credentials. The party wound up being held at the Tenth Street Lounge, if anything a more glamorous destination. A large crowd of editors and writers gathered there on February 21. The
New York Times Magazine
filed this report:
And at the official book party two nights later at an East Village club, M. G. Lord, the author of “Forever Barbie,” can be seen chatting up another novelist of the moment, A. M. Homes. Between puffs of their cigarettes, many people whisper what Wallace says he does not want to hear: he is the current “it” boy of contemporary fiction.
Wallace spent much of the time upstairs in a private room, watching the proceedings from a window that looked down on the main floor, with Charis Conn, his fiction editor from
Harper’s,
and Costello. His frequent trips to the bathroom led the uninformed to suspect cocaine use, though in fact he was pulling out chaws of tobacco. “I think I made it a project
not
to look in the mirror during that party,” he later told an interviewer, “because I knew that a whole lot of other people were looking at me, and if I thought about what I looked like, I was going to go crazy.” Wallace and Costello were sneaking out of the club together when a young blonde woman followed them from the party and presented herself to the author. “Do you want to meet my puppy?” she asked. Wallace went off, leaving his friend behind.
Afterward, Wallace wrote to DeLillo of how little he had enjoyed the gathering. The party, he told his
miglior fabbro
, had been “packed and scary…. It’s the only Pub Party I’ve ever been to, and if God’s in his heaven it will be my last.” The ensuing publicity tour had been the subject of careful negotiation with Little, Brown. Wallace had agreed to visit, as he wrote DeLillo, “some dozen cities” for readings and interviews. He had turned down the
Today
show, agreeing as compensation to a
Rolling Stone
interview, because, as he wrote DeLillo, “I argued (compellingly, I think) that Rolling Stone was essentially TV anyway.” The
Rolling Stone
reporter was the journalist David Lipsky. The two got along well, and Lipsky, also a novelist, took in what was left of the private Wallace in his home: chew toys on the floor, a copy of
Cosmopolitan
, which Wallace swore he subscribed to, claiming that “reading ‘I’ve Cheated—Should I Tell?’ a bunch of times a year is fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.” There was a Barney towel doubling as a window curtain, a postcard of Updike, and a Scottish battle scene painting. A large poster of Alanis Morissette, the intense, confessional female soloist, was on one wall. To someone who did not know Wallace, the décor might have looked like conventional professorial po-mo mockery of the middlebrow. But Wallace was serious—at least sort of—when he told Lipsky he liked to listen to Enya, the sugary Irish singer. He referred to Kymberly in the present tense as his girlfriend and said she had taught him to appreciate Ani DiFranco and P. J. Harvey, “and what’s her name? Tori Amos,” though he preferred Morissette. He was effectively underscoring to hipsters that he wasn’t one of them.
Infinite Jest
wasn’t just an assertion of anomie, the way grunge was. It was also supposed to be an answer to despair, a corrective to the misery of youth, a recipe for personal growth. Wallace could observe grunge and note its impact, but its undemanding hopelessness flew in the face of his recovery theology; it was too self-pitying. If you were as stupid as “Teen Spirit” asserted, there was only one person who could make you smarter.
Rolling Stone
did not in the end save Wallace from TV. The public-TV talk show host Charlie Rose also wanted him on. Wallace asked the people he trusted whether he should do it. Franzen told him he had to, because, as Wallace wrote in summary to DeLillo, to whom he next appealed, “you
guys made your bones in a different time, when the author’s own personal person wasn’t as necessary a part of a PR machine that itself wasn’t necessary to sell books.” He told DeLillo his inclination to avoid TV was “not out of integrity so much as an awareness that I do a fair amount of writing about TV and spectation and that I wanted to stay on my side of the screen and that I’d fuck up future work if I didn’t.”
Wallace wrote the letter in March, during a break between the two parts of his publicity tour. He had been to eleven cities by then, to Seattle, to read at Elliott Bay, an important independent bookstore, then to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, where he couldn’t sleep, and Iowa City, where he ran out of petty cash and a member of the audience stood up and accused him of being insensitive to those with disabilities, because in the mini-essay that Little, Brown had asked him for he had quoted an observation by Bill Gray, the blocked novelist in DeLillo’s
Mao II,
that writing a book was like having a “hideously deformed infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer.”
Wallace was accumulating regrets as he went. In Los Angeles, he and Nadell got into an argument with a dealer when he refused to sign hundreds of books, magazines, and memorabilia. And at the Tower Books reading in New York, the one Ethan Hawke had attended, Wallace, flying high on what must have felt like a toxic gust of celebrity, had added the name of the director Richard Linklater to the list of directors of the sorts of projects second-tier actors who were hired to be stand-ins for video phone conversations might be involved in. The ad lib got a knowing laugh from the crowd, but later Wallace heard that his “brain fart,” as he described it later, had offended Hawke, who had just starred in a Linklater film. Wallace’s sense of having been “a
serious
asshole” had a self-referential cast: “This poor guy can’t even go in the back. He didn’t want to be acknowledged. He just wanted to listen to a reading.”
Wallace was learning that all sorts of relationships that had been simpler—if never quite simple—when he was more or less unknown were tricky now. In Seattle, he had told Corey Washington he could not hang out because he was too exhausted to see even an old friend. Costello was furious at having been abandoned at the Tenth Street Lounge party. Elizabeth Wurtzel had continued during the past year to entrance Wallace.
One time he had called Franzen from a payphone at 3 a.m. when they were out together to say, “I’m with a girl who has heroin in her possession. This is not good.” Then after the KGB reading, she brought him back to her apartment and took him up to her loft bed, but at the last minute changed her mind about sex. Wallace, suspicious that she had only brought him home in the first place because of his rising fame, grew furious. “You’re going to make me drink again!” he shouted at her. He threw on his clothes and stomped out, ending the friendship.
Even before Wallace’s tour was over, Little, Brown had reprinted the book six times for a total of forty-five thousand copies. Pietsch wrote Wallace that readers were calling him at the office to try out theories about the ending. “It reminds me of the exhilaration I felt finishing
Gravity’s Rainbow
for the first time and finding someone else who’d read it to knock brains with,” he wrote his author. There was even movie interest in the book. The director Gus Van Sant wanted to option
Infinite Jest
. Wallace worried it seemed whorish—he knew that serious writers did not sell their work to the movies—but a friend in the business told him he had nothing to worry about; no one could ever make a movie from that novel.
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