Wallace knew that he could not hide out in Bloomington forever. On publication day he would have to pack up and head east to face what he liked to call, referencing his old Tolkien reading, “Sauron’s great red eye.” But in fact Sauron was coming his way.
His first interview was with Details magazine. Wallace had never been interviewed by the mainstream media in depth before — the only feature magazine piece written on him had been by a friend of his agent for Arrival in 1987. So he left up the letters from Franzen, DeLillo, and others—“a whole wall of letters that help me or are important,” as he later wrote to DeLillo. The reporter, David Streitfeld, who was on staff with the Washington Post, told him he should take them down, because a journalist could see them and quote from them. He also told Wallace that rambling self-analysis might not be the ideal approach to conversations for publication; an interview was not the place for confidences. “I was wildly indiscreet about stuff like drug histories and M. Karr,” Wallace wrote DeLillo after, “and he stopped me in the middle and patiently explained certain rules about what to tell reporters.” About his time in substance abuse programs, he needed no coaching, since Karr had already warned him about it via her phone call to Pietsch. When Newsweek soon after asked him how he knew so much about recovery, he trickily replied:
I went with friends to an open AA meeting, and got addicted to them. It was completely riveting. I was never a member — I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.
By the time the New York Times Magazine came to see Wallace in Bloomington on the eve of his book tour, he was cannier. All the same, some of his personality came through. The reporter, Frank Bruni, got to watch Jeeves eat a bologna sandwich from Wallace’s mouth. “They pretend they’re kissing you,” Wallace said, “but they’re really mining your mouth for food.” And he went along to a dinner at the home of a couple named Erin and Doug Poag. They ate Kentucky Fried Chicken and heroes on trays and watched The X-Files, a taste of Wallace unbuttoned. Wallace did not mention that his connection to the Poags was from his recovery circle — he claimed to have met them at a “Mennonite church.” And, understandably, without that information, Bruni was left with the impression that Wallace’s fondness for ordinary midwestern people might be a put-on. In all, Bruni’s article grappled with — and never quite decided — whether the author of Infinite Jest was more “shtick” or “soul” or a combination of both that was generationally unique.20
Next came the book tour, which began in Manhattan in mid-February. Erin Poag went with him to steady her friend while he was away from both his home and his recovery group. One reporter mistook her for either his mother “or the Illinois version of a publicist.” Walking up the rickety stairs to his first New York reading, Wallace tried to turn around and go back down. “I don’t think I can do this,” he told Poag. She answered, “If you get up and don’t like it, we don’t have to stay,” and, a solidly built woman in her fifties, she put her hand on his back and pushed him along. Wallace had the strange feeling as he walked into the room of the crowd parting. The Times Magazine noted the turnout:
The critics aren’t the only ones angling to prove that they get it. Wallace’s contemporaries have shown up at his public appearances in force. When he read at K.G.B., Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of “Prozac Nation,” claimed a spot near the front of the room.21 The following night, at another jam-packed reading, this time at Tower Books in the Village, Ethan Hawke lurked in the back.
Soon afterward, Gerry Howard recalls bumping into a long line of fans waiting to see Wallace read at a Rizzoli’s bookstore on West Broadway. He was amazed that this writer, whom he had always thought destined for a small, essentially intellectual, literary public, had become a phenomenon. “There was this adoration,” Howard remembered. “He had reached people in this highly personal way.” The Times Magazine, trying to pin down this connection, dubbed Infinite Jest “The Grunge American Novel,” signaling the link between a fragmented novel of fragmented souls and a cultural movement led by singers like Kurt Cobain of Nirvana characterized by a similar affect. There was considerable truth to it; both proffered an awkward sincerity. They shared an allergy to façades, to disco-type slickness. Infinite Jest’s jagged multiple-conjunction-opening sentences held the same promise of authenticity as the primitive musical arrangement and bad amping of Seattle garage bands. Both music and novel implied that communication had gotten harder and harder, hitting walls of isolation too high to scale, reducing us to diminished gestures, preferences, grunts. As Wallace would tell an interviewer around this time, “there’s a way that it seems to me that reality’s fractured right now; at least the reality that I live in.” The chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” paralleled Wallace’s portrait of a generation addicted to media with its assertion that everyone was “stupid and contagious…. Here we are now, entertain us.”22
There was a shared look between writer and singers too. The unwashed hair with bandana, unlaced work boots, and old plaid shirts that Wallace had been wearing since Arizona were also now practically a uniform for anyone who felt disenchanted with the post-Reagan American culture of buying and owning. Wallace’s “impulse to second-guess every thought and proposition” had become, as Howard notes, “something like a generational style.” “When I was younger,” Wallace told an interviewer for the Boston Phoenix, “I saw my relationship with the reader as sort of a sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.”23
The possibility that Wallace himself was going to become famous filled him with confusion, though of course he saw the irony of what was happening. He wanted his work to be fully experienced, not lightly absorbed with all the other noise of the culture. When a fellow English professor at ISU congratulated him on the cruise ship piece in Harper’s, Wallace pointed to his mouth with one hand and made a butt-wiping gesture with the other. To anyone who praised his achievement, he would only repeat that he had “worked really really hard on” Infinite Jest, as if he were a child talking about his artwork. He posted a sign on his office door at ISU during his book tour: “D.F. Wallace is out of town on weird personal authorized emergencyish leave from 2/17/96 to 3/3/96 and from 3/5/96 to 3/10/96.”
The low point of Wallace’s rise was his publication party. Little, Brown wanted to mark the arrival of the book with a media gathering at the Limbo Lounge, a trendy East Village club. Nadell had not loved the idea. Infinite Jest was “not a hip downtown kind of book,” she wrote the publisher. “It is a major literary novel.” But Little, Brown believed that to ignite enthusiasm for the novel it had to establish the book’s of-the-moment credentials. The party wound up being held at the Tenth Street Lounge, if anything a more glamorous destination. A large crowd of editors and writers gathered there on February 21. The New York Times Magazine filed this report: