His scholarship having ended, that fall Wallace had to teach. The prospect did not delight him. In his audio letter to his Amherst friends on arriving, he had declared the undergraduates at UA to be “roughly of an intelligence level of a fairly damaged person.” More important, he was aware that the teacher-student relationship was one of performer and spectator. The teacher was under constant pressure to entertain if he wanted to be liked — and no one wanted to be liked more than Wallace did. The bind was not just that he did not think he could do it, but that if he did do it, was he actually doing something he would admire himself for having done? The first morning of classes found him lying on the floor of the Sonora Review offices in the Modern Languages Building, unable to move. “Give him space. He’s nervous,” Walden whispered to everyone. The others were shocked. Wallace to them was by now the epitome of confidence.
But once he had decided to become good at something, Wallace usually succeeded. It was the decision to dive, not the entry into the water that was hard. Quickly, he became a top instructor, charismatic and popular. He scoured every piece of undergraduate writing, striving to overwhelm the students with the volume and sincerity of his comments. It did not matter that much of what they wrote was indifferent, nor that he was teaching ordinary undergraduate expository writing classes, classes, in other words, for people who by and large only wanted to be done with the class to move on to other things. The vitalizing — he would have said “erotic”—power of his mind made what they did interesting. What he wrote of Julie Smith in “Little Expressionless Animals” applied equally to him:
This girl not only kicks facts in the ass. This girl informs trivia with import. She makes it human, something with the power to emote, evoke, induce, cathart.
And as with Julie Smith, there was at once an out-of-proportion commitment and a hint of irony to his behavior. When the university sent an examiner to evaluate his teaching, Wallace had every student in the class bring an apple to present to him. Whether his mockery was appreciated or went unnoticed, that year he won the prize for best teaching assistant in the department.
Teaching taught him a hard lesson, though: he had only a limited amount of energy. If he taught, that drew down the tank with which he wrote. “I leave at dawn and get home at night,” he wrote Washington as the semester began, “promptly get drunk and fall into a sweaty half-sleep.” Two months later, he was back to Washington with more complaints: “I mostly sit around smoking pot, cigarettes, worrying about not working, worrying about the tension between the worry and the absence of and action fuelled by that worry.”
The page from Penguin’s winter 1987 catalog promised “an ambitious, irreverent novel that speaks to the anxieties and concerns of a new generation,” but trade magazine reviews of Broom failed to spot what was special about Wallace. Kirkus Reviews, for instance, dismissed the author as “a puerile Pynchon, a discount Don DeLillo,” though conceding he was “even a bit of an original.” Walden read the review to Wallace over the phone, sending her boyfriend into a tailspin. “The guy seemed downright angry at having been made to read the thing,” an upset Wallace complained to Howard afterward. He took particular issue with the reviewer’s characterization of the ellipses in quotes to denote a non-response that Howard had warned him against overusing as “pseudo-Wittgensteinian” pauses. “If the technique is a rip-off of anyone it’s of Manuel Puig,” he noted. The book was officially published on January 6, 1987, and came with a nasty surprise. Viking Penguin sent Wallace a bill for $324.51 for his reversal of some of the copyedits. He was incensed. “Maybe,” he wrote Howard, “they never found out that the copy editor had a wild hair up every orifice of his/her body? I can’t see any way that I made 300 bucks worth of my own whimsical corrections in galleys.”
Post-publication book reviewers were kinder than Kirkus. If they didn’t exactly see Broom as a portent, they at least tended to appreciate that a writer in his mid-twenties was reviving some of the energies of postmodern fiction in the midst of the entropic wasteland of minimalism. The Washington Post Book World put its review of Broom on its front page, declaring it “a hot book…a terrific novel.” The New York Times Book Review proclaimed the book
an enormous surprise, emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin’s “Franchiser,” Thomas Pynchon’s “V,” John Irving’s “World According to Garp.” As in those novels, the charm and flaws of David Foster Wallace’s book are due to its exuberance — cartoonish characters, stories within stories, impossible coincidences, a hip but true fondness for pop culture and above all the spirit of playfulness that has slipped away from so much recent fiction.
But the review’s author, Caryn James, didn’t like the ending of the book, in which a “tortured running joke turns into a contrived explanation and characters we expect to appear never show up.” Other reviewers filed in in similar fashion: exuberant versus sloppy, homage versus theft. Wallace was particularly hurt by the review in the daily New York Times by Michiko Kakutani. Many first-time authors would have been excited to be written up by a critic known for spotting young talent. Her praise of Wallace’s “rich reserves of ambition and imagination” was flattering, to be sure, but Wallace told a friend he hid in his room for two days and cried after reading yet another paragraph devoted to parallels between his first book and Pynchon’s most popular novel. “I didn’t think the review was all that favorable,” Wallace wrote Howard afterward. “But if you and Bonnie think it’s nice, I’m more than happy to see it that way.” To Howard he noted in general that the reviews had him “kind of down.”
A film company, Alliance Entertainment, optioned the book for $10,000. There was talk that Terry Gilliam, famous for the near-future satire Brazil, a movie Wallace had loved, might want to direct it. Wallace took a try at writing a treatment in the winter of 1987, simplifying the plot and minimizing the philosophical underpinnings. The story, he wrote in the précis, “is one not only about coming of age, but also about romantic love, and familial love, and the reconciliation of the heroine’s present with her past, and how these three sub-elements relate to the process of ‘growing up’ in particular and being a person in general.” “Bonnie,” he wrote, “I’ve never had more difficulty and less fun working on anything in my life. This project is dead to me, and my head is full of fiction.” He joked that if she would write the screenplay she could have the money.