David Foster Wallace
In 1996 the United States was feverish over a book. Bandana-clad David Foster Wallace, 34, published a dense, 1,079-page novel called Infinite Jest - about tennis, terrorists, addicts. The shy English professor from Bloomington, Ill., achieved instant rock-star fame. Magazines demanded interviews; he granted some, but only one interviewer, David Lipsky of Rolling Stone, got to hang out with the rock star of novelists, at his home.
It's interesting that this interview ever happened. Wallace probably allowed it because Lipsky was even younger, only 30, and was himself a novelist, having published The Art Fair to New York City acclaim that year. The two novelists met in Bloomington in 1996, then flew, drove, ate, smoked - "brothers of the lung," for Wallace - and talked during the latter days of the book tour in support of Infinite Jest. However, Rolling Stone ultimately scratched the profile.
Then, in 2008, Wallace, 46, committed suicide by hanging. The public appetite for anything about Wallace meant that Lipsky's notes from that five-day trip in 1996 metamorphosed into a Rolling Stone article entitled The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace. And now a book.
Lipsky's interview-tome is a transcript of the novelists' conversations. Conversations about TV (their enemy of the day), movies, music, the Internet (in passing, although Wallace has some fine commentary on it), writers (Wallace calls Updike a "nasty person" and "mentally ill") and fame. Lipsky craves fame, but Wallace is suspicious of it because, while he knows he "wrote a pretty good book," he's dubious about all the fuss, considering that Infinite Jest takes, in his words, "at least two months to read well" and that nobody had even read it yet.
The book is made up of italicized questions from Lipsky and then regular text for Wallace. But Lipsky interpolates commentary with editor's brackets - "[Interesting and very sad: setting the novel the year after his death]rdquo; - into Wallace's segments, which is irritating. Lipsky further confuses by commenting with parentheses - e.g., "(Testy)" - so that the reader pauses to clarify if it's a Wallacean aside, or more Lipsky.
While the book is interesting and yields neat stuff that makes you appreciate Wallace's humanity - he surprisingly asks Lipsky what "seigneurial" means - the problem is that the interview hasn't been silently corrected: It's full of gaffes. I know it's Wallace unplugged, but it's vexing to read pages of "I mean I know, you know, I mean I . . ." or "and uh, so, so no."
Lipsky furthermore fails to follow up on questions that Wallace gets distracted from - like his definition of the Novel and the names of two senior novelists who were Wallace's pen pals. DFW later confuses Blythe Danner with her daughter, Gwyneth Paltrow, in discussing the film Seven, and Lipsky either doesn't notice or doesn't bother to correct it.
To get a radiant interview, you need an interviewer to be subordinate to the subject. Not Lipsky. He swats one of Wallace's dogs on the nose - in Wallace's home! And he's full of himself, when all you want is for the book to be full of David Foster Wallace. Here's Lipsky in the Afterword: "In a few years, I'd get my taste of things I'd wanted - TV, contracts, bestseller list." Bravo, my good man, but more Wallace please. After 14 years and with Lipsky having the luxury of redacting his commentary from today's vantage point, the interview feels both young and dated.
Still, it's nice to have Wallace's brainvoice in your head, and Lipsky does turn up some finds. That Wallace loved velvety cotton and consequently appropriated his sister's softer blouses; that he felt inferior to novelist William T. Vollmann; that he was a towel boy at a private club and a security guard for Lotus Software Corp. (after two books and O. Henry and Whiting awards!). Also, that he never heard of Kurt Cobain until after Cobain's suicide, drank two six-packs of pop a day, loved Enya's music and burned for Alanis Morissette.
While you might expect cosmic connections of the Wallace = suicide variety, there aren't any, although Lipsky makes a melodramatic comment of the if-only-I-could-have-warned-him-then variety. The only moving thing is the heartfelt greeting Wallace gives his dogs upon his return home - "I'm never leaving you again … I swear, I swear" - while knowing that he did leave them for good in September, 2008.
When Wallace riffs on aesthetics, the book is interesting, but not brilliant. But it does serve the valuable function of portraying Wallace as he was: human and tormented. Ultimately, the most memorable item comes from Wallace's good friend and fellow novelist, Jonathan Franzen, who remarked that Wallace's death felt like a sci-fi movie's stock scene where a character is sucked out the air-lock into oblivion, to which Franzen bitterly added, "Does it look now like David had all the answers?"
No, of course not, because he was just becoming himself.
Tim Jacobs teaches at York University, and elsewhere. He wrote a PhD dissertation on David Foster Wallace.