Gimlet dreamed that if she did not see a concert last night she would become a type of liquid, therefore my friends Mr. Wonderful, Big, Gimlet and I went to see Keith Jarrett play a piano concert at the Irvine Concert Hall in Irvine last night.
The story, “Girl with Curious Hair,” was in the same key as Less Than Zero. Wallace felt that employing bored, vapid characters to capture boredom was poor writing, but as a natural mimic he admired the strong voice Ellis had found; he saw its potential. So he pushed the voice past where Ellis had taken it, moving it from the stylish into the gothic or repulsive.20 When Costello came to visit, Wallace recited the opening of A Clockwork Orange, and Costello realized that the Anthony Burgess novel had also been a model for the story his friend had just written. Wallace told his friend that Burgess’s novel showed how to use hyperbolic language to convey deadened emotional states. (The debt to Bret Easton Ellis was one Wallace would never acknowledge. When Howard asked after reading the story whether Wallace had read Less Than Zero, Wallace told him no.)
When Wallace was not with JT, he was with Walden. During the return from Christmas 1985 break, they each had car trouble, so they agreed that it would be romantic to join up and drive in a convoy back to Tucson, Wallace from Urbana, Walden from the South Side of Chicago. The only problem was that Wallace had already agreed to make the trip back to Tucson with his sister, Amy, who was coming to visit him, and his friends Heather from Iowa and Forrest from St. Louis. So when Wallace, Amy, Heather, and Forrest, traveling in two cars, got to Oklahoma, he called Walden, to discover she needed his company while she waited for a mechanic to fix her car. Then he drove off with barely another word, his change of plans pulled off so quickly that his sister’s suitcase was still in his trunk. When he and Gale finally got to Tucson—“two broken cars limping across the desert,” as Walden would remember it in a later poem — they found Amy hurt and bewildered, her feet bleeding from Heather’s borrowed shoes.
On the trip, Wallace listened to the southwestern accents. He had long wanted to write a variation on William Gass’s novel Omensetter’s Luck. The laconic hillbilly voice of the story appealed to him. As a “weird kind of forger,” imitating it would be a fun challenge. “He started to talk out ‘John Billy’ at rest stops,” Walden remembers. “He was trying to get the cadence of the dialogue down.” When he got home, he wrote a draft. “Was me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed,” the eponymous narrator states. There was, as ever, an element of parody in the homage. The goal was to push the original author out of sight. That the story was not easy to read mattered not at all to Wallace; all he cared about was the sentences.
Back at school for the spring 1986 semester, Wallace decided to try to finish his MFA more quickly. From his original boast to Washington that he would stay for “the next three years at least,” he now wanted to try to wrap up his graduate work in two. He may have wanted to be done at the same time as Walden, who was planning to graduate the next June, or to save tuition. He signed up for a workshop with program director Mary Carter, in which he would write extra stories for double credit, as well as a seminar on literary theory and an independent study on the theory and practice of poetry. In the last, when another participant called Derrida a waste of time, Wallace got so mad that everyone thought there would be a fight. He was still convinced that theory was what separated the serious novelist from the others, that without it writers were just entertainers. His interest in theory, like his fondness for stories with strong voices, also had a compensatory element. It served to satisfy energies that would have been frustrated had they gone into aspects of fiction writing he did not naturally excel at, like character development. It was a handy refuge for a writer who was still an odd combination of a mimic and engineer.
The workshop with Carter was Wallace’s happiest time at Arizona. The program director was supportive in the same way Dale Peterson had been at Amherst. She herself was an entirely conventional writer and not even a very good one, but she understood that her protégé’s work was special and encouraged him to write what he wanted. “He is going to make us all very proud,” she would tell the other students. Her support for him was evident to all. At a publishing conference Carter convened, she squired Wallace around to meet important fiction agents and editors. Wallace rallied to the challenge, surprising his fellow students who thought of him as shy. They had not realized that he could play the game when he wanted to.21
The double credit in Carter’s workshop required Wallace to supply six new stories in a semester, a rigorous pace. But he continued to write well and fast and anywhere he wanted, caught up in gusts of inspiration. One weekend that spring he disappeared. Walden grew worried, called him, went by and rang the doorbell of the casita but got no response. The next Monday at the offices of the program’s literary magazine, the Sonora Review, he presented her with the story “Little Expressionless Animals,” a tale about a young woman who is a champion Jeopardy! player. It was thirty pages long. “I wrote straight through,” he told Walden, who had been sure he had run away with another woman.
“Little Expressionless Animals” was Wallace’s first attempt to treat seriously issues that had mostly been played for laughs in Broom. Its central preoccupation is the relationship between people and the images they appropriate from media to shape and infuse their thoughts. The narrative tells the story of Julie Smith, the winner of the last seven hundred episodes of the game show. She is a smart, twentyish square peg of a young woman, a descendant of Lenore Beadsman, herself a descendant of Oedipa Maas (and of Amy Wallace). The question at hand for the show’s executives, Merv Griffin and Alex Trebek, is whether to let her continue her Jeopardy! streak. “Rules, though,” points out one of their staff. “Five slots, retire undefeated, come back for Champion’s Tourney in April…. Fairness to whole contestant pool. An ethics type of thing.” Griffin, though, prizes the ratings and the advertising income, and, more complexly, the ineluctability of a great image. He sees that Julie Smith is different. “She’s,” he says, “like some lens, a filter for that great unorganized force that some in the industry have spent their whole lives trying to locate and focus.” That filter operates only when she is on television. This girl, who is almost affectless off camera, comes alive on the set. As the narrator points out: