The infinite jester: Author David Foster Wallace's unique brand of
humor a
mixed blessing
By Mitch Pugh
Copley News Service
David Foster Wallace doesn't do Budding Literary Icon as well as one
might think,
considering the praise heaped on the 37-year-old downstate Illinois
writer.
He stammers and stumbles painfully through some sentences while
others,
which include words
like loquacious and belletristic, sound as if they have been memorized
from
some collegiate
text. Eventually, he reverts back to crude expletives as the doorbell
of the
posh San
Francisco hotel suite (which "smells faintly of urine," he confides)
Little,
Brown Co. has
booked him in rings annoyingly for the second time in 20 minutes.
But if anyone is capable of thrusting what we generally consider
"literary fiction" kicking
and screaming into the popular culture spotlight, it is the hugely
imaginative and infinitely
talented Wallace.
His two novels, "Infinite Jest" and "The Broom of the System," and
the
collections "A
Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and "Girl with Curious Hair"
have
earned him such
high praise as "the funniest writer of his generation" and "a writer of
virtuosic talents who
can seemingly do anything." He is the recipient of what is commonly
referred
to as a "Genius
Grant" (the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship), the Lannan Award for
Fiction,
The Paris
Review's Aga Kahn Prize and the O. Henry Award.
His sixth book, a collection of short fiction entitled "Brief
Interviews
With Hideous Men,"
hit bookstands in May and while his work has yet to make any kinds of
serious dent on the New
York Times best seller list, there's a growing subculture of followers
who
ferociously devour
anything Wallace. In fact, fan Web site "The Howling Fantods,"
according to
site creator Nick
Maniatis, received 5,347 hits in the month of May alone.
But Wallace, while acknowledging his small but loyal fan base, is
quick
to disassociate
with the attention generated by his newest novel as well as his seminal
work, 1996's
1,079-page magnum opus "Infinite Jest."
"Writers who do kind of weird stuff ... I don't think there's lots
of
readers who enjoy
that and the ones who do tend to be fanatical about it," says Wallace,
an
instructor at
Illinois State University. "There are at least a dozen writers about my
age
who do the sort of
stuff I do. I'm just lucky enough to get a major publishing house to
pick up
the stuff I do
and plug it mercilessly."
Those fanatics (who Wallace describes as "almost all nerdy white
males
between 30 and 45")
would tend to disagree.
"The way (he) comes out on the page reminds me of the way that I
think,"
says Maniatis. "He
is extremely humorous, encyclopaedic, truthful and can tell a great
story."
Wallace, though, doesn't even own a modem and claims to have no
knowledge
of such shrines
as "The Howling Fantods" which tracks the writer's every literary move
with
almost alarming
precision.
"(The Internet) is clearly a force for like-minded people," he says.
"Huge fans of the
television show `The White Shadow' can get together and share
anecdotes,
whereas before they
had that chance maybe two or three times a year at some `White Shadow'
convention. I'm not
dissing it. I just think it's probably a Net thing."
Yet, for whatever reason, Wallace has become a figure of sorts in
the
literary world, with
fans and journalists attempting to pry into his personal life. He has
even
had to bar
journalists from his home after writer Frank Bruni peeked into his
medicine
cabinet and
reported the contents in a New York Times Magazine piece.
"'Infinite Jest' was like my third or fourth book, but I never had a
book
that got that
kind of attention before," he says. "I invited the guy over to my house
to
meet my dogs and
stuff. He asked to use the bathroom and I didn't think twice about it.
It's
just creepy.
"Writers really aren't entertainers in the way movie stars or rock
stars
are. Our personal
lives aren't and shouldn't be as interesting as movie stars. It's no
accident people who
seriously deal with the press have these professionals who train them
basically not to say
anything that can be spun or taken advantage of."
The publication and media blitz by Little, Brown for `Jest' did,
however,
produce what has
been called the first full-fledged literary event since James Joyce's
"Ulysses." But Wallace,
who is uncomfortable with the comparison, says the bar for "book as
event"
has been raised too
high by television, movies and the Internet.
"('Infinite Jest') was pimple on a flea," says Wallace. "Every once
in a
while, a book will
be an event. But it's really only colleges and graduate schools were
books
can get kind of hot
and people can get energized. I'm tickled to death if a lot of grad
students
like the book but
I think our standards of what an event is has been drastically altered
by
TV.
"The movie and record industry look at the book industry and think
we are
kind of quaint
and cute. In literary fiction, things are going to create pools and
ripples
but there are
smart, well-dressed young women from Seven Sisters Colleges who are
plotting
the next
`event.'"
SIDEBAR:
In the company of Wallace: Blame it on Neil Labute
Of the nearly two dozen "stories" in David Foster Wallace's
collection
"Brief Interviews
With Hideous Men," the four sections from which the title takes its
name
contain the most
engaging, thought-provoking and generally horrifying pieces in the
book.
Each interview is a clinical documentation of sorts of several
dysfunctional and severely
unpleasant men and each reads as if Wallace plucked them from some
sociological resource book
(i.e "B.I. 14 08-96 St. David PA"), hinting that there were even more
of
these heinous
ramblings of patient to psychologist. And, in fact, there were.
But about five months before "Interviews" was to go to press,
Wallace saw
Labute's debut
film S"n The Company of Men" and then proceeded to watch the follow-up,
"Your Friends &
Neighbors." It caused the author to pause, rethink and reshape the
book,
which was to be made
up almost entirely of interviews.
"Some were repetitive and some just weren't very good. Others were
too
brutal," Wallace
says. "Some of these are really brutal and really unpleasant, but there
were
others that were
like having excrement smeared in your face. Seeing the movies of Neil
Labute
helped in some
way. `Your Friends & Neighbors' was nastier than it needed to be. I
ended up
taking 10 or 11
of the interviews out and regarded it as a very helpful movie for me to
see.
You have to look
at unpleasantness and decide when it's necessary and when it's not. I
pulled
back in the end
and I'm glad I did."
The two most powerful interviews, Nos. 20 and 46, deal on some level
with
sexual violence
toward women. In B.I. 46, the interviewee tries to explain his
perceived
connection between
brutal rape or incest and Victor Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning,"
one
which is predicated
on the concept that no experience is ever wholly good or bad.
"Alls I'm saying, it's not impossible there are cases where it can
enlarge you. Make you
more than you were before. More of a complete human being. Like Victor
Frankl. Or that saying
about how whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. You think
whoever it
was that said
that was for a woman getting raped? No way. He just wasn't being
knee-jerk."
It's hard to imagine anything more Draconian, but it's all there.
That
may be one reason
why the book has received mixed reviews. Influential critic Michiko
Kakutani
has dismissed the
work as "boring" and "frequently repellent."
But Wallace, who acknowledges the darkness of the work and has
stopped
reading reviews,
says his newest book clearly isn't for everyone.
"Michiko Kakutani stomped on it with golf shoes except I knew she
was
going to stomp on it
with golf shoes," Wallace says. "I've been stomped on by her before.
I'm
reasonably happy with
this book, but somebody who doesn't like unpleasantness in a book or
wants
characters to be
pleasant should not buy this book. It's not for everybody. The reason
she
disliked it, because
the characters are dislikable. I think that's a bit vapid."
And in "Interviews," even the person Wallace considers the main
character, the unseen and
unheard interviewer (designated when speaking by a mere Q. and who is
revealed only by the
"tiny, little remarks the men say to her") is not exactly flawless.
"She, to me, is the main character of the book, but also someone who
is
extremely sensitive
to misogyny in all its forms and darkness, in all it's manifestations,"
Wallace says.
In the end, with throwaways like `Datum Centurio' and `Tri-Stan: I
Sold
Sisse Nar To Ecko',
Interviews comes off as a bit uneven, but the title stories and the
flair
and genuine pathos
Wallace brings to them are well worth the price of admission.
Besides, Labute has enough enemies as it is.