Wallace knew whose thinking had influenced his own. He sent Franzen a draft of the piece, “mostly just to see what you think about all the anti-irony stuff. You’ll see I’ve adopted a Franzenian view of Leyner, too.” And he dedicated the article to M. M. Karr, his other fount of sincerity. Crucially, Wallace was confident that his malaise was not just a personal issue but a societal condition. He sensed that there were others like himself. He mentioned to an interviewer after the publication of Infinite Jest that it was in Boston that he had
decided that maybe being really sad, and really sort of directionless, wasn’t just that I was fucked up. Maybe it was, maybe I was, maybe it was interesting in a way…. I just had so many friends who went through terrible times exactly when I did. In so many various different ways. And so many of them seemed to have so much going for ’em…. We’re talking lawyers, stockbrokers, young promising academics, poets.
His new commitment to single-entendre writing, writing that meant what it said, brought with it a surge in confidence that Wallace hadn’t felt in years, not since his 1987 visit to Yaddo. Not even his breakdown in November could stop it. And Karr’s departure for Syracuse didn’t hinder it: in fact it may even have been the spur for it, leaving Wallace with the need to prove he deserved her love. At any rate, he later wrote about the following year in the margin of a book, “The key to ’92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were).” “The writing is going surprisingly well,” he wrote Karr, probably in the spring of that year. “I’m scared, and physically I write very slowly, rather like a small child. It’s a long thing I want to do, and I’d started it before, so right now I divide my time between writing new stuff, which is a little disjointed…and looking back through two Hammermill boxes worth of notebooks and notecards and incredibly pretty laser print from my computer, which is now with Mark.”
He had been eyeing his old drafts for a long time without knowing what to make of them. He hadn’t known what the right or wrong track was because he didn’t know where he was going. That explained his fitful efforts since Yaddo. He told Karr, “I’d remembered the old stuff, a couple years old, as being just awful, but it turns out it isn’t; it just doesn’t go much of anywhere and is way too concerned with presenting itself as witty arty writing instead of effecting any kind of emotional communication with people. I feel like I have changed, learned so much about what good writing ought to be.”
There is no clear start date for Infinite Jest. Pieces of the novel date back to 1986, when Wallace may have written them originally as stand-alone stories.15 The work contains all three of Wallace’s literary styles, beginning with the playful, comic voice of his Amherst years, passing through his infatuation with postmodernism at Arizona, and ending with the conversion to single-entendre principles of his days in Boston. These three approaches correspond roughly to the three main plot strands of the book: the first, the portrait of the witty, dysfunctional Incandenza family; the second, the near-future dystopian backdrop of the book, in which the United States has united with Canada and Mexico to form the Organization of North American Nations (“O.N.A.N.,” its symbol an eagle crowned by a sombrero, maple leaf in claw), spawning a Quebecois separatist movement; and the third, the passion of Don Gately, set in the thinly fictionalized version of Granada House. Some parts of the book had already been with Wallace for five years by the breakthrough of 1991–92. In the fall of 1986, in Arizona, for instance, Gale Walden noticed a draft of some pages with her sister Joelle’s name under Wallace’s bed. She asked what he was working on and Wallace said it was fiction about a terrorist organization in Canada. “At which point,” she remembers, “my eyes glazed over and I didn’t ask any more.” This is at least the beginning of the dialogue between the two secret agents, Marathe, of Québec, and Steeply, of the U.S., which takes place on a mountain not unlike the ones Walden and Wallace liked to hike outside of Tucson, where the desert had, as Wallace writes in Infinite Jest, “the appearance of [a] mirage…. The sun of A.M. had no radial knives of light. It appeared brutal and businesslike and harmful to look upon.”16
On his first application for Yaddo, filled out in September 1986, Wallace wrote that along with “Westward” he was also working on a novel with the tentative title Infinite Jest, adding that one reason he wanted to go to the retreat was to “try to determine just where and why the stories leave off and the novel begins.” Likely, by then, the Incandenza family’s follies were already in draft. Stylistically, they follow closely in the hyperverbal footsteps of the Beadsmans:17 Hal, the family’s “tennis and lexical prodigy,” corresponds to Lenore of Broom; his father, the brilliant suicide James, a filmmaker, tracks to Lenore’s great-grandmother, another absent genius. In addition, without the Incandenzas the title on the Yaddo application makes little sense. You can’t have Hamlet without a ghost.18
But at Yaddo, Wallace clearly found writing “Westward” more urgent, and it was likely not for several years that he returned to the novel. The third strand, the pages on Don Gately, could not have been begun before early 1990, by which time Wallace had entered the real-life counterpart to Ennet House. By fall 1991 he had likely begun interweaving his narrative; the delicate design of the novel was beginning to fall into place. On one side were the Incandenzas led by Avril, the dominating and complex matriarch. Hal, addicted to pot, is the youngest of her three sons, the emotional center of this part of the book, except that one of the points of the book is that that center is empty:
Hal himself hasn’t had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he’s in there, inside his own hull, as a human being …when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows.
Hal’s two older brothers are Orin, a professional football player and womanizer in Phoenix, and Mario, who suffers from a cognitive and physical disability. Avril is now in a relationship with her late husband’s brother, another of the many whiffs of Hamlet in the story.
The family runs the Enfield Tennis Academy, where perfection is the goal and the best of the players are trained to satisfy, through their tennis games and commercial endorsements, the appetite of the consumerist culture they came from. On the other side are the residents of Ennet House, led by Gately. The Ennet House addicts are not being cultivated to feed America’s obsessions; they are the people who’ve OD’d on them.19 The two worlds, as in real life, live in parallel, interacting only when they have to, with only a “tall and more or less denuded hill” separating them. Yet they are thematically joined — the Enfield Academy world is preppy, team-focused, and saturated with drugs; the Ennet House world is poor, crime-ridden, and shattered by drugs. Both are hemmed in by self-absorption: for the Enfield players their solipsism is narcissism, the risk that all the attention being focused on them will make them believe they are blessed in some more than ordinary way; for the Ennet House residents the solipsism is that of despair, but also the self-centeredness at the heart of therapy and recovery, a world where the self is so damaged that nothing else can get near it. Character after character there sees his or her wounded past and nothing else, while up the hill player after player sees only his or her potential. Overseeing both sides, literally, are Marathe and Steeply, competing (or possibly cooperating) secret agents, whose function in the novel is to sound the themes as well as give a motor to the plot, which centers on the idea that before committing suicide James Incandenza had made a movie so absorbing that anyone who watches it succumbs to total passivity. The original of the video cartridge — Wallace imagines cartridges as something like minidiscs — has disappeared and if the Quebecois find it they will have the ultimate terrorist weapon to use against their decadent neighbors to the south.