Wallace came into his own as a writer at Amherst College in Massachusetts in the 1980s, where he arrived as an interloper from Illinois among well-heeled preppy peers. “Midwestern boys might teach or read or make ironic fun of novels”, writes Max in one of his bizarre asides about the heartland, “but they did not go to college to learn how to write them.” Fiction on campus, Wallace would claim, was the province of “foppish aesthetes”, who “went around in berets stroking their chins”. Max’s portrait of these years is of a student getting the top marks, lest anyone mistake him for not being the cleverest boy in the room. (When, years later, the film Good Will Hunting came out, Wallace not only seemed to identify with Matt Damon’s character, but actually tried to follow the blurry equations on the chalkboard.) Max describes a regime that reserved forty-five minutes for dental hygiene, afternoon bong hits, six-hour bouts with the books, and evening whisky shots on the library steps. We get good glimpses of Wallace’s table-talk: “Does anyone want to see Friedrich Hayek get hit on by a girl from Wilton, Connecticut?”. Wallace’s fanbase in future years would consist of fellow liberal arts graduates who saw his work as an opportunity to exercise their education while savouring the pop-cultural references in his prose. But it was Wallace’s style itself, at once laid back and hilariously precise, that seduced a generation. Take this classic passage where Wallace pre-emptively mourns the etiquette of the old-school telephone call:
“A traditional aural-only conversation – utilizing a hand-held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (62) or 36 little pinholes – let you enter into a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet – this was the retrospectively marvelous part – even if you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other little fugue-like activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided. During a traditional call, e.g., as you let’s say performed a close tactile blemish-scan of your chin, you were in no way oppressed by the thought that your phonemate was perhaps also devoting a good percentage of her attention to a close tactile blemish-scan.”
This is a snippet of a much larger passage, but it’s cherishable, not only for the way it mimics the fleetingness of our attention spans, but also for the truth it delivers about our socially repugnant self-centredness. The huge interference and distracting pleasures that we conspire to build between us would become one of Wallace’s great subjects.
Wallace’s struggle with depression is one of the main points of orientation for Max’s biography, and it’s the most valuable contribution of the book. Twice during college, Wallace was forced to leave school and return home to Champaign, Illinois, where he tried to ride out his illness on a drug called Tofranil. It’s no exaggeration to say depression was one of Wallace’s reasons for writing fiction in the first place. In “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing”, his first published story in the Amherst Review, Wallace enters the mind of a Brown undergraduate who goes on anti-depressants after trying to kill himself. The power of the story lies in Wallace’s ability to convey what the “Bad Thing” feels like from the inside. The story begins, as Max notes, with a seemingly loose Salingeresque introduction:
“I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.”
The repetitions and played-up quaintness here give the sense of a consciousness that has been lulled into congeniality. But as the story unfolds, and the imprecisions come into focus, the narrator comes to see that depression is not “just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies, or when Bambi’s mother gets killed in Bambi”. Rather, it’s a kind of auto-immune deficiency of the self:
“All this business about people committing suicide when they’re ‘severely depressed;’ we say, ‘Holy cow, we must do something to stop them from killing themselves!’ That’s wrong. Because all these people have, you see, by this time already killed themselves, where it really counts. By the time these people swallow entire medicine cabinets or take naps in the garage or whatever, they’ve already been killing themselves for ever so long. When they ‘commit suicide,’ they’re just being orderly.”
by Thomas Meaney, TLS | Read more:
Photo: David Foster Wallace, 1996 © Garry Hannabarger/Corbis
h/t 3 Quarks Daily
