Since his suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, David Foster Wallace’s influence on contemporary literature has expanded to the point where even writers who haven’t read him struggle to keep out of his shadow. Traces of his style can be found every time a young writer uses a compound conjunction, or a comically extended footnote. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the first biography of Wallace, has the difficult task of chronicling his life and work while we are still coming to terms with their impact.
Born in the American Midwest to liberal and academic parents (the kind who read Ulysses to each other before bed and tolerated their teenage son’s pot-smoking), Wallace was unusually clever from the start. D.T. Max doesn’t dwell on Wallace’s well-known talent for tennis (a successful player, though never close to world class) and spends more time on his intellectual precocity. Wallace’s father, who is a teacher of philosophy, said that his son’s mind was faster than that of ‘any undergraduate I have ever taught’. At Amherst College he won ten academic awards and regularly argued against the cherished ideas of his elders. One teacher responded by calling Wallace’s early attempts at fiction ‘philosophy with zingers’.
With adulthood came trouble. He was a man of obsessions and dependencies. Not just drugs, but also television, therapy, pop psychology, writing. Most of all writing. Max claims that Wallace could type 24 pages in three hours, and a substantial short story over a weekend. ‘He was so excited that when he wasn’t writing he would go to the gym and do sit-ups until he puked.’ This vacillated over time, in rough parallel to his horribly consistent dips in mood, which he began to medicate with the anti-depressant Nardil. But Wallace was always worrying about the next book.
For Max, too, the work is what’s important. Despite the advance press for this biography, as well as the dopey dust jacket comparing Wallace to Kurt Cobain and James Dean, this is not a book about a celebrity martyr. While Max doesn’t neglect the drama — addictions, messy relationships, family conflict — the book pivots on Wallace’s creative turnaround between his first novel, The Broom of the System, and his masterwork, Infinite Jest. No other major novelist in recent memory fought so hard to be original. He started as what Max calls ‘an odd combination of mimic and engineer’, in love with postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. Yet he grew to reject his earlier influences, as well as his earlier writing, to become a ‘full-fledged apostle of sincerity’. The quest was to get outside the ‘ironic loop’ that infected the cutting-edge fiction of his time.
As Wallace once wrote, ‘The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “how banal”.’ He was constantly caught between twin desires: what he called the ‘physics of reading’ (the need to entertain and engage readers) and the sweeping maximalist impulse to include everything. After his first novel he realised he also wanted to redeem the reader in some way, rather than just confuse or beguile. Dostoevsky replaced Derrida as his literary model. ‘The last thin patina of rebelliousness has fallen off,’ he wrote in a letter to Jonathan Franzen. ‘I am frightfully and thoroughly conventional.’
Max’s approach is clean and methodical, and when he interjects it is neatly done. He has read widely enough to be able, for example, to follow a quote from Wallace — his definition of great fiction as ‘making heads throb heartlike’ — through Lester Bangs, to its possible origin in Gravity’s Rainbow. But mostly he stays out of the way and keeps his judgments to himself, so that the experience of reading Every Love Story is cocoon-like, a highly pressurised echo chamber that gets somewhere close to what it must have felt like to know Wallace. It turns out that he was perhaps one of literature’s last great letter writers, and his casually intense and self-deprecating voice is all over the book.
Anyone who has read the unfinished final work, The Pale King — ‘the novel that would defeat Wallace’, according to D.T. Max — will know he never resolved his vision. The problem of adventurous fiction in a digital, commercialised age stayed with him until the end, but what he produced in the struggle will continue to grow in truth and relevance. In Max’s words, Wallace ‘suggests a way to somewhere else’. This is a magnetic book, one that left me wishing for more pages, more life.
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