Hal’s breakdown, the one at the start of the novel, is approaching clearly enough that I finished the book guessing how he got from here to there…. The revelation that Hal’s known all along of his mom’s many affairs seems like a key to it all…I’m assuming now that this part of the story isn’t resolved more clearly…because Hal’s still avoiding it.
He added that “Gately’s hitting bottom…is gorgeous and very very powerfully sad,” and saw that endnotes might be better than footnotes — less “academic and daunting.” Maybe, he thought, Little, Brown could package the book with a bookmark so readers could keep their places.
Happier though Pietsch was, he still felt the book was too long. He wanted the same effect achieved with less. So just before Christmas he added hundreds of specific suggestions for cuts. And in February 1995, Wallace responded with a sixteen-page letter of his own, acceding, rejecting, and counterproposing, wheedling, in a bath of faux mea culpa language for having birthed such a complicated and long book. “I guess,” he wrote, “maybe I have an arrogance problem — I think I’d presumed in some of this stuff that it was OK to make a reader read the book twice.” But he dug in on the ending, where Pietsch still wanted more clarification: “We know exactly what’s happening to Gately by end, about 50 % of what’s happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin. I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural argument for this, but let’s spare one another, shall we?”
Some of the new round of cuts Wallace took eagerly, other times with an undertone of reluctance. “Mugging of Joe D. in Cambridge. Cut, although it introduces three different characters and starts four different plotlines,” he groused at one point, agreeing to cut back one of the characters who dated all the way back to the Hammerhill boxes that had held some of his early attempts at the novel. Sometimes he wanted to keep a scene simply because it had been in the book for so long. Other times he threatened that if material were removed, longer, duller rewriting would rise up to plug the gap. Another of his favored tactics was to respond to a request for a cut with a condensation, turning ten pages into five or five into two, or taking the unwanted material and putting it in the endnotes, where some of his favorite passages went to make their last stand. Pietsch also hesitated to put the words “A Failed Entertainment” on a book people were supposed to buy. Wallace suggested it might go on the “frontispiece” instead. Pietsch objected that the problem with calling Infinite Jest “A Failed Entertainment” anywhere was “it’s not,” and it quietly disappeared from the manuscript.
The winter of 1994–95 Wallace took a major step. After almost a decade of an itinerant life, he bought a house. It was the largest asset he had ever owned and he thought of it as much as anything as a down payment on his maturity. The house had three bedrooms and a little patio in front and a yard in the back that he had fenced off for Jeeves. It was made of brick, allaying a fear of tornadoes that dated back to his childhood. The house stood at the edge of town, near trailer parks and a slaughterhouse and also open land; down the street were cornfields, much as with his childhood home in Urbana. He was particularly pleased that his mail address was “Rural Route 2,” rather than a street address. Wallace moved in with his books and manuscripts and soon letters from Franzen and DeLillo and then a copy of the Saint Francis prayer appeared on the walls.
Wallace had never owned anything bigger than a car before and he approached his new possession as if everything to do with it were a cause of wonder, a stance that also served to reassure him that though he was now a homeowner he had not totally sold out. “I bought a house,” he wrote to Don DeLillo in May,
it’s small and brick and next to a horse pasture. It has what seems like a 6-acre lawn, and I bought the house in the winter and it didn’t occur to me that the grass in this lawn grows and will have somehow to be dealt with. I haven’t mowed a lawn since I folded my childhood lawn-mowing business at 13, and I see all my neighbors mowing their own 6-acre lawns like every fourth day, and Weed-Whacking, and dispersing seed and nitrates through devices that look like enormous flour-sifters on wheels, and I am not keen on becoming a lawn-obsessed homeowner. But it’s nice to own a house and not pay off a landlord’s mortgage.
Wallace’s recovery friends were much in evidence in his new home. Many of them were handy, and they were vigilant that the impractical Wallace not get ripped off by their own. His best friend from recovery, Francis B., built his bookshelves. Another put in a cutoff switch for his main electrical cable; Francis B.’s mother volunteered to clean Wallace’s house; soon she was doing his wash, with Wallace hiding his underwear from her before she got there. She would cook for him or pick up a roast chicken at his favorite restaurant and stick it in his empty fridge while he was teaching or at a meeting. One time when the handle on his screen door came off, Wallace called Francis B.: “How much is a new screen door going to cost me?” His friend came by with a screwdriver. Wallace exaggerated his helplessness. It was at once a gesture of generosity and of selfishness. The others took pleasure in helping, and Wallace got things done that he didn’t have time or aptitude for.
In March 1995 Colin Harrison asked Wallace to go on a Caribbean cruise and write about it for Harper’s. He and Kymberly were split up, at least for the moment. Spring break was coming and, offered the chance to get away from the cold and the never-ending revisions to Infinite Jest, he accepted. Once again he would join the American hordes dosing themselves on fabricated amusements. He would sample shuffleboard, endless buffets, onboard talent shows, and whatever else came his way. But, as ever, he was unsure how to proceed. The hopes of editors always made him nervous. He asked Costello and Franzen if they would join him, but neither was available, so alone he flew to Fort Lauderdale, from which the ocean liner MV Zenith—dubbed by him the Nadir—was slated for a weeklong circuit around the Gulf of Mexico. From the ship, Wallace called Harrison and asked what the magazine was looking for. Harrison told him to just “Be yourself. Enjoy. You’ll find the story.”