But mostly, once again, Wallace was writing. He was starting new stories and reworking old ones. The work was coming quickly and easily. He would look up and hours would have passed. He was evolving into a different kind of writer. The change was gradual and never involved entirely abandoning his interest in words and play and how we know what we know about the world, the material of Broom, but it took a new direction. Spurred by his readings in literary theory, he was trying to grow beyond such self-referential questions, to answer the question of how to write in a new way.
Trying to write in a new way was not a goal unique to Wallace; it is the exemplary act of each new literary generation. For writers from the 1920s to the 1950s the main route had been modernism, with its emphasis on psychological subjectivity and its retreat from assertions of objective knowledge. Many writers in the 1960s and ’70s, faced with the ugliness of the American landscape and its saturation by the culture of mass media, turned to highlighting the artificiality of the literary act itself. Wallace of course had a great fondness for many of the writers of this postmodernist movement, primarily Barthelme (who, as he would say, had “rung his cherries” in college) and Pynchon, whom he had all but engulfed Bombardini-like in The Broom of the System.
But the path the writers who had come just before Wallace’s generation chose was very different. They sought to pare down their prose, to purvey an exhausted realism. Life weighed heavily; existence carried few possibilities of pleasure or redemption. In minimalism, simple sentences carried great meanings and a waitress’s trip to the K-Mart telegraphed misery and blighted opportunity. It was the world according to Raymond Carver, as interpreted by his thousands of descendants.8
As Wallace entered Arizona, MFA students all over America were writing stories in the minimalist style, affecting ennui and disappointment toward a world they knew mostly from other minimalists. Wallace accepted the minimalists’ attitude toward the landscape of America and its debilitating effect on its inhabitants, but he disliked how formally and verbally claustrophobic their writing was. Minimalist stories gave the reader little experience of what it was like to be assaulted the way in real life their characters would be. They were effectively unease recollected in tranquillity. While Wallace certainly knew what it felt like to be overwhelmed by the stimuli of modern life — indeed his response to them when under stress was more extreme than anyone knew — this was not his stance when he recreated experience. As a writer, he was a folder-in and includer, a maximalist, someone who wanted to capture the everything of America.
Most of the teachers at Arizona were not fans of postmodernism, which they associated with a different era and condition and a preciousness that stories in the true American grain should not possess, but they also did not like minimalism, which smelled trendy to them. They particularly disliked one thing the minimalists did that Wallace admired. In his class Elman assigned both Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Ellis and McInerney were minimalists with attitude, bored with being bored. Dubbed “the brat pack,” by the mid-1980s they had become required reading among the affluent and college-educated young. Predictably, then, the students in Elman’s class tore apart their easy plots and heartstring-plucking narratives. Wallace, though, did not go along entirely. He was interested in the way their simple narratives swept up and held the reader and, in the case of Ellis, how he used brand names as shorthand for cultural information like status and even to stand in for emotional states. “What should we be writing about?” he demanded to know, “Horses and buggies?”9
What the teachers at Arizona did like was the well-made realist short story. The well-made story was teachable, annotatable, and suitable for differing levels of talent. The professors were themselves mostly trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where such stories were the orthodoxy. They believed stories should be character-driven; they should have arcs, with moments of crisis ending in epiphanies. Most of all, for a story to succeed the reader had to know who he was reading about and why the events of the story mattered so much to him or her. “Show us what’s at stake for the character,” was a constant request from the faculty, as was, “Why is this person telling us the story?”
Wallace probably did not know much about any of the faculty when he applied to the school. Mary Carter’s welcome letter suggested the opposite of a program bias toward realism. But it did not take long for him to learn that the teachers in Arizona wanted one thing, and he wanted another. He was at a point where he was more interested in experimentation in form and voice than in conventional narratives. He felt he had entertained readers once in Broom; what else, he wondered now, could he do with them? And once he grasped these were not the questions on the table at Arizona, he may even have enjoyed the consequent head-butting — Lelchuk had shown him that opposition could energize him. He perhaps even baited the teachers to bring it out.
His first-semester workshop was with Jonathan Penner, an Iowa Workshop graduate and a writer principally of well-honed, closely observed realist novels. Penner, then in his forties, had supported Wallace’s application for admission, thrilled by his submission of a chapter from Broom in which two Amherst fraternity pledges barge into Lenore’s sister’s dorm room and try and get her and her roommate to sign their rear ends. A flashback to 1981, it does not sound like anything else in the book. Someone familiar with only these pages might have thought Wallace had written a ribald tour de force, in the bravura style of early Roth or an update on Terry Southern — maybe even something by Lelchuk.10 When Penner began reading Wallace’s new efforts in class he was surprised to find that a very different writer had apparently come to Tucson. The comic energy and verbal dexterity had been replaced by something experimental, self-referential, and deliberately graceless. Wallace was beginning to play around with the props of narrative, rearranging them to see what might catch his attention. He was also going through the various tools in the postmodern tool kit, trying each one out. Part of his goal was to erect a wall between his writing and the pleasure it could give. A passage at the beginning of the first story Wallace submitted, “Here and There,” is a parody of minimalist openings: “I kiss her bitter photo. It’s cloudy from kisses. I know the outline of my mouth from her image. She continues to teach me without knowing.”
The story goes on in the same arch vein. Bruce, a Wallace stand-in, is reeling after his girlfriend, a Susie Perkins — like nurse/lover figure—“a certain cool, tight, waistless, etcetera. Indiana University graduate student”—has ended their relationship. In an exaggerated variant on the typical college breakup story, he reflects on what went wrong as he flees toward elderly relatives in the mythic Maine town of Prosopopoeia (literally, “mask-making,” but also a literary trope for the voice of an absent speaker).11 The ex-lovers and their therapist converse in the space the rhythms of the highway open in Bruce’s brain, the story told as a flashback, a memory dance in three voices.
Part of what ended the lovers’ relationship — we learn — was Bruce’s desire to be “the first really great poet of technology.” To which the therapist (who seems to have something of Lelchuk or Penner in him) chimes in: