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.