D. Max - Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story - A Life of David Foster Wallace

19. Its previous tenant had been Planned Parenthood. Wallace told Costello that if he got bombed or shot there, the police should look for right-to-lifers with an outdated phonebook.

20. The earnest authenticity that was Wallace’s core literary voice had by now spread far. It was even in the process of being appropriated by advertising, no doubt to Wallace’s horror. But the change was bigger than this. The 1980s era of masculine hyper-certainty that had spawned Wallace in rebellion was far in the past. He had helped to move the culture and, with the culture moved, the question he had to answer was what new to write against.

21. Wallace told the New York Times Magazine that Franzen exercised in black socks, but then felt ashamed, as he wrote DeLillo. (The comment was not used in the article.)

22. “He spent his entire life apologizing to me,” Amy Wallace remembers. “Almost every time I saw him he’d apologize.”

23. As did others. The Onion , the satirical newspaper, ran a parody with the headline “Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter at Page 20” in February 2003, shortly before he left Bloomington.

Chapter 8: The Pale King

1. But, as Wallace himself would have asked, was he writing these letters to be open and honest or merely to make Green believe he was open and honest — which would actually make him the opposite?

2. Stecyk’s flaw, in Wallace’s eyes, was the same as that of the men described in Brief Interviews who are so busy worrying about pleasing their sex partners that they get no pleasure themselves; being pleased is an indispensable part of giving pleasure, just as being helped is an indispensable part of being helpful.

3. The story may have been inspired by an episode of Lars von Trier’s The Kingdom , a show Wallace loved.

4. Wallace had met DeLillo only one time before for a dinner set up by Franzen at an East Village restaurant in 1998. He was amazed then at how much the older writer looked and sounded like his father.

5. Zeno’s dichotomy is the idea that motion is impossible because it requires an infinite series of submotions. To get somewhere, you must first get halfway there, but to get halfway there you must first get halfway there, and so on.

6. The two longest are set in offices. What drew Wallace to office life were its codes of conduct, the implicit restraints on the individual that were so lacking in his own life. For him office life bore the same relation to real life that literature did. It was a beguiling simulacrum, a cleaned-up imitation, a playful variation with rules.

7. A draft of “Good Old Neon” ends, “Ghosts talking to us all the time — but we think their voices are our own thoughts.”

8. After Costello read Oblivion he told Wallace it could be the road map for The Pale King . Wallace snapped back, “You don’t understand how tough the problem actually is.”

9. This was a past he made mild attempts to deny over the years. To an acquaintance who read in Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace that the author had had a promiscuous period in the late 1980s, he responded, “Huh? I’ve never been ‘promiscuous’ though I would have loved to…. Where do people get this stuff[?]” To another he refuted stories about Elizabeth Wurtzel: “I know her, may have been at the same table as her at a coupla dinners. But we have never ‘dated.’”

10. Wallace enjoyed having younger sponsees in particular. “Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces,” the narrator reflects on Hal in Infinite Jest , where his job is to be a Big Buddy to younger players.

11. The speech, transcribed from a recording made by a member of the Wallace-l email list, moved around the Internet quickly, to Wallace’s surprise. When an acquaintance mentioned seven months later that he had read it, Wallace wrote back, “I never gave Kenyon a transcript of it. Much of it was handwritten. I don’t get it.”

12. From the notebooks for The Pale King : “Would that we scrutinized our technology the way we do our people.”

13. This passage updates nicely Wallace’s insistence in his “Fictional Futures” essay that successful contemporary writing must recognize “a loss of innocence about the language that is its breath and bread.”

14. In 2007, when a former colleague from Illinois State University, Becky Bradway, asked him to explain for a textbook she was writing the role research played in a novel, Wallace wrote back, “What’s tricky is just what you’re asking: how much is enough? You can drown in research. I’ve done it. I’m arguably doing it now.”

15. In a later section of the novel, a picture of the infant on his desk comforts Dean, an evangelical Christian, in a moment of despair. Dean is processing forms, trying to visualize a sunny beach as the agency taught him to do during orientation, but he cannot maintain the image — it turns in his mind to a gray expanse covered with “dead kelp like the hair of the drowned.” Overcome with boredom, he considers suicide. “He had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor.”

16. Wallace informs the reader that during a suspension from college he was hired by the IRS as a wiggler. “I arrived for intake processing at Lake James, IL’s I.R.S. POST 047, sometime in mid-May of 1985,” he writes. Upon arriving at the intake center, he is mistaken for another David Wallace — a high-powered accountant transferring to the facility from Rome, New York. For much of the chapter, everyone at the IRS thinks that David Foster Wallace is the other Wallace, a double to his fictional double.

17. From a notebook: “Beneath S[tecyk]’s niceness is incredible rage. Sadism. Waiting only to be unleashed. His rage is a secret within a secret — a secret even from himself.”

18. In keeping with his new maturity, Wallace also became more straitlaced about the need for literal accuracy in nonfiction. When Becky Bradway, his former colleague at Illinois State, wrote him for her textbook on creative nonfiction in 2007 and asked what his standard of accuracy was in his writing, he answered, “We all knew, and know, that any embellishment is dangerous, and that a writer’s justifying embellishment via claiming that it actually enhances overall ‘truth’ is exceedingly dangerous, since the claim is structurally identical to all Ends Justify Means rationalizations.”

Throughout this book I quote liberally from David’s work. To avoid clutter, unless otherwise indicated in the chapter-by-chapter notes that follow, quotations are drawn from the following editions of David’s work.

FICTION

David Foster Wallace, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” Amherst Review , 1984.

——. “Solomon Silverfish,” Sonora Review , Fall 1987.

——. The Broom of the System (New York: Penguin, 1987).

——. Girl with Curious Hair (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).

——. Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown, 1996).

——. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (New York: Little, Brown, 1999).

——. Oblivion: Stories (New York: Little, Brown, 2004).

——. The Pale King (New York: Little, Brown, 2011).

NONFICTION

——. “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” Review of Contemporary Fiction , Spring 1988.