The Salon Interview:

Abstract

The SALON Interview DAVID FOSTER WALLACEBy LAURA MILLERIllustration by Harry AungDavid Foster Wallace's low-key, bookish appearance flatly contradictsthe unshaven, bandanna-capped image advanced by his publicity photos.But then, even a hipster novelist would have to be a serious, disciplinedwriter to produce a 1,079-page book in three years. "Infinite Jest,"Wallace's mammoth second novel, juxtaposes life in an elite tennisacademy with the struggles of the residents of a nearby halfway house,all against a near-future background in which the U.S., Canada andMexico have merged, Northern New England has become a vast toxicwaste dump and everything from private automobiles to the very yearsthemselves are [Sneak Peeks: New from Julian Barnes, Angela Carterand the Ragin' Cajun] sponsored by corporate advertisers. Slangy,ambitious and occasionally over-enamored with the prodigious intellectof its author, "Infinite Jest" nevertheless has enough solid emotionalballast to keep it from capsizing. And there's something rare andexhilarating about a contemporary author who aims to capture thespirit of his age.The 34-year-old Wallace, who teaches at Illinois State Universityin Bloomington-Normal and exhibits the careful modesty of a recoveringsmart aleck, discussed American life on the verge of the millennium,the pervasive influence of pop culture, the role of fiction writersin an entertainment-saturated society, teaching literature to freshmenand his own maddening, inspired creation during a recent readingtour for "Infinite Jest."What were you intending to do when you started this book?I wanted to do something sad. I'd done some funny stuff and some heavy,intellectual stuff, but I'd never done anything sad. And I wantedit not to have a single main character. The other banality wouldbe: I wanted to do something real American, about what it's liketo live in America around the millennium.And what is that like?There's something particularly sad about it, something that doesn'thave very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy,or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It's morelike a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends indifferent ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness. Whetherit's unique to our generation I really don't know.Not much of the press about "Infinite Jest" addresses the role thatAlcoholics Anonymous plays in the story. How does that connect withyour overall theme?The sadness that the book is about, and that I was going through,was a real American type of sadness. I was white, upper-middle-class,obscenely well-educated, had had way more career success than I couldhave legitimately hoped for and was sort of adrift. A lot of my friendswere the same way. Some of them were deeply into drugs, others wereunbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night.You could see it played out in 20 different ways, but it's the samething.Some of my friends got into AA. I didn't start out wanting to writea lot of AA stuff, but I knew I wanted to do drug addicts and I knewI wanted to have a halfway house. I went to a couple of meetingswith these guys and thought that it was tremendously powerful. Thatpart of the book is supposed to be living enough to be realistic,but it's also supposed to stand for a response to lostness and whatyou do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't.The bottoming out with drugs and the AA response to that was thestarkest thing that I could find to talk about that.I get the feeling that a lot of us, privileged Americans, as we enterour early 30s, have to find a way to put away childish things andconfront stuff about spirituality and values. Probably the AA modelisn't the only way to do it, but it seems to me to be one of themore vigorous.The characters have to struggle with the fact that the AA system isteaching them fairly deep things through these seemingly simplisticclich{é}s.It's hard for the ones with some education, which, to be mercenary,is who this book is targeted at. I mean this is caviar for the generalliterary fiction reader. For me there was a real repulsion at thebeginning. "One Day at a Time," right? I'm thinking 1977, NormanLear, starring Bonnie Franklin. Show me the needlepointed samplerthis is written on. But apparently part of addiction is that youneed the substance so bad that when they take it away from you, youwant to die. And it's so awful that the only way to deal with itis to build a wall at midnight and not look over it. Something asbanal and reductive as "One Day at a Time" enabled these people towalk through hell, which from what I could see the first six monthsof detox is. That struck me.It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing ofprinciples and values in this country is one of the things that'sgutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me,like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nodat that but I really don't feel it. Until I get to be about 30 andI realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel thatI'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why.Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is reallynot to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aestheticallyuninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting,complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta,ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. Thatseems to me like something our generation needs to feel.Are you trying to find similar meanings in the pop culture materialyou use? That sort of thing can be seen as merely clever, or shallow.I've always thought of myself as a realist. I can remember fightingwith my professors about it in grad school. The world that I livein consists of 250 advertisements a day and any number of unbelievablyentertaining options, most of which are subsidized by corporationsthat want to sell me things. The whole way that the world acts onmy nerve endings is bound up with stuff that the guys with leatherpatches on their elbows would consider pop or trivial or ephemeral.I use a fair amount of pop stuff in my fiction, but what I mean byit is nothing different than what other people mean in writing abouttrees and parks and having to walk to the river to get water a 100years ago. It's just the texture of the world I live in.What's it like to be a young fiction writer today, in terms of gettingstarted, building a career and so on?Personally, I think it's a really neat time. I've got friends whodisagree. Literary fiction and poetry are real marginalized rightnow. There's a fallacy that some of my friends sometimes fall into,the ol' "The audience is stupid. The audience only wants to go thisdeep. Poor us, we're marginalized because of TV, the great hypnoticblah, blah." You can sit around and have these pity parties for yourself.Of course this is bullshit. If an art form is marginalized it's becauseit's not speaking to people. One possible reason is that the peopleit's speaking to have become too stupid to appreciate it. That seemsa little easy to me.If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid,then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall,where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, soyou don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. Youworry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge:involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextualreferences, making it look smart. Not really caring about whetheryou're communicating with a reader who cares something about thatfeeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other endof it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that aredone in a formulaic way -- essentially television on the page --that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuffin a childishly riveting way.What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other andreally they both come out of the same thing, which is a contemptfor the reader, an idea that literature's current marginalizationis the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuffthat has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectualdifficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the readerconfront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such away that it's also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someoneis talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.Part of it has to do with living in an era when there's so much entertainmentavailable, genuine entertainment, and figuring out how fiction isgoing to stake out its territory in that sort of era. You can tryto confront what it is that makes fiction magical in a way that otherkinds of art and entertainment aren't. And to figure out how fictioncan engage a reader, much of whose sensibility has been formed bypop culture, without simply becoming more shit in the pop culturemachine. It's unbelievably difficult and confusing and scary, butit's neat. There's so much mass commercial entertainment that's sogood and so slick, this is something that I don't think any othergeneration has confronted. That's what it's like to be a writer now.I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably thebest time to be a writer. I'm not sure it's the easiest time.What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attackfor that question is that there is this existential loneliness inthe real world. I