And at the official book party two nights later at an East Village club, M. G. Lord, the author of “Forever Barbie,” can be seen chatting up another novelist of the moment, A. M. Homes. Between puffs of their cigarettes, many people whisper what Wallace says he does not want to hear: he is the current “it” boy of contemporary fiction.
Wallace spent much of the time upstairs in a private room, watching the proceedings from a window that looked down on the main floor, with Charis Conn, his fiction editor from Harper’s, and Costello. His frequent trips to the bathroom led the uninformed to suspect cocaine use, though in fact he was pulling out chaws of tobacco. “I think I made it a project not to look in the mirror during that party,” he later told an interviewer, “because I knew that a whole lot of other people were looking at me, and if I thought about what I looked like, I was going to go crazy.” Wallace and Costello were sneaking out of the club together when a young blonde woman followed them from the party and presented herself to the author. “Do you want to meet my puppy?” she asked. Wallace went off, leaving his friend behind.
Afterward, Wallace wrote to DeLillo of how little he had enjoyed the gathering. The party, he told his miglior fabbro, had been “packed and scary…. It’s the only Pub Party I’ve ever been to, and if God’s in his heaven it will be my last.” The ensuing publicity tour had been the subject of careful negotiation with Little, Brown. Wallace had agreed to visit, as he wrote DeLillo, “some dozen cities” for readings and interviews. He had turned down the Today show, agreeing as compensation to a Rolling Stone interview, because, as he wrote DeLillo, “I argued (compellingly, I think) that Rolling Stone was essentially TV anyway.” The Rolling Stone reporter was the journalist David Lipsky. The two got along well, and Lipsky, also a novelist, took in what was left of the private Wallace in his home: chew toys on the floor, a copy of Cosmopolitan, which Wallace swore he subscribed to, claiming that “reading ‘I’ve Cheated — Should I Tell?’ a bunch of times a year is fundamentally soothing to the nervous system.” There was a Barney towel doubling as a window curtain, a postcard of Updike, and a Scottish battle scene painting. A large poster of Alanis Morissette, the intense, confessional female soloist, was on one wall. To someone who did not know Wallace, the décor might have looked like conventional professorial po-mo mockery of the middlebrow. But Wallace was serious — at least sort of — when he told Lipsky he liked to listen to Enya, the sugary Irish singer. He referred to Kymberly in the present tense as his girlfriend and said she had taught him to appreciate Ani DiFranco and P. J. Harvey, “and what’s her name? Tori Amos,” though he preferred Morissette. He was effectively underscoring to hipsters that he wasn’t one of them. Infinite Jest wasn’t just an assertion of anomie, the way grunge was. It was also supposed to be an answer to despair, a corrective to the misery of youth, a recipe for personal growth. Wallace could observe grunge and note its impact, but its undemanding hopelessness flew in the face of his recovery theology; it was too self-pitying. If you were as stupid as “Teen Spirit” asserted, there was only one person who could make you smarter.
Rolling Stone did not in the end save Wallace from TV. The public-TV talk show host Charlie Rose also wanted him on. Wallace asked the people he trusted whether he should do it. Franzen told him he had to, because, as Wallace wrote in summary to DeLillo, to whom he next appealed, “you guys made your bones in a different time, when the author’s own personal person wasn’t as necessary a part of a PR machine that itself wasn’t necessary to sell books.” He told DeLillo his inclination to avoid TV was “not out of integrity so much as an awareness that I do a fair amount of writing about TV and spectation and that I wanted to stay on my side of the screen and that I’d fuck up future work if I didn’t.”
Wallace wrote the letter in March, during a break between the two parts of his publicity tour. He had been to eleven cities by then, to Seattle, to read at Elliott Bay, an important independent bookstore, then to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, where he couldn’t sleep, and Iowa City, where he ran out of petty cash and a member of the audience stood up and accused him of being insensitive to those with disabilities, because in the mini-essay that Little, Brown had asked him for he had quoted an observation by Bill Gray, the blocked novelist in DeLillo’s Mao II, that writing a book was like having a “hideously deformed infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer.”
Wallace was accumulating regrets as he went. In Los Angeles, he and Nadell got into an argument with a dealer when he refused to sign hundreds of books, magazines, and memorabilia. And at the Tower Books reading in New York, the one Ethan Hawke had attended, Wallace, flying high on what must have felt like a toxic gust of celebrity, had added the name of the director Richard Linklater to the list of directors of the sorts of projects second-tier actors who were hired to be stand-ins for video phone conversations might be involved in. The ad lib got a knowing laugh from the crowd, but later Wallace heard that his “brain fart,” as he described it later, had offended Hawke, who had just starred in a Linklater film. Wallace’s sense of having been “a serious asshole” had a self-referential cast: “This poor guy can’t even go in the back. He didn’t want to be acknowledged. He just wanted to listen to a reading.”
Wallace was learning that all sorts of relationships that had been simpler — if never quite simple — when he was more or less unknown were tricky now. In Seattle, he had told Corey Washington he could not hang out because he was too exhausted to see even an old friend. Costello was furious at having been abandoned at the Tenth Street Lounge party. Elizabeth Wurtzel had continued during the past year to entrance Wallace. One time he had called Franzen from a payphone at 3 a.m. when they were out together to say, “I’m with a girl who has heroin in her possession. This is not good.” Then after the KGB reading, she brought him back to her apartment and took him up to her loft bed, but at the last minute changed her mind about sex. Wallace, suspicious that she had only brought him home in the first place because of his rising fame, grew furious. “You’re going to make me drink again!” he shouted at her. He threw on his clothes and stomped out, ending the friendship.
Even before Wallace’s tour was over, Little, Brown had reprinted the book six times for a total of forty-five thousand copies. Pietsch wrote Wallace that readers were calling him at the office to try out theories about the ending. “It reminds me of the exhilaration I felt finishing Gravity’s Rainbow for the first time and finding someone else who’d read it to knock brains with,” he wrote his author. There was even movie interest in the book. The director Gus Van Sant wanted to option Infinite Jest. Wallace worried it seemed whorish — he knew that serious writers did not sell their work to the movies — but a friend in the business told him he had nothing to worry about; no one could ever make a movie from that novel.24