He received much congratulations when the piece ran in October 1997, and the remark that he attributed to “a friend” in the article, that Updike was “just a thesaurus with a penis,” was widely circulated. Wallace did not like overly personal literary criticism, but he felt within his rights in this case because of his sense that Updike’s flaws had gone beyond the literary to the moral. His characters — well, the author himself — were forgetting that literature was not about showing off; it had to be a service to the inner life of the reader. How then to justify creating characters
who are also always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone. They never belong to any sort of larger unit or community or cause. Though usually family men, they never really love anybody — and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women. The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.
After the review ran, Wallace was sorry. He knew that Toward the End of Time was hardly representative of Updike’s best work, his attack seeming after the fact like another brain-fart. “It makes me look like a punk taking easy shots at a big target,” he wrote an admirer who praised the review. “Never again, ami, a book review of a titan.” (On the other hand, he included it in his next essay collection, Consider the Lobster, published in 2005.)
As he was finishing the Updike piece, Premiere asked Wallace to cover the awards ceremony the adult entertainment industry held every year in Las Vegas. Wallace loved the idea — pornography was a subject that never stopped interesting him. It was where the false pleasures and relentless marketing of America met, a metonym for what was toxic in the nation. “My opinions are only that the love you of this country speak of yields none of the pleasure you seek in love,” lectures Marathe in Infinite Jest. The piece was also a way to intellectualize an appetite a less guilt-ridden man might have just enjoyed. Rather than look for the movies locally, Wallace asked Premiere to rent them in New York and send them to his home. There he watched them in preparation and quickly shipped them back.
In January 1998 he went to the convention. He met the “gonzo porn” producer Max Hardcore and Jasmin St. Claire, known in the industry as “the gang-bang queen.” He was able to compare his penis size to those of male porn stars in the men’s room and take in a spectacle tackier than he had ever seen before. What always amazed Wallace about real life was the overload of information. He did not see how anyone could really capture what went on in a single moment. He wrote to a friend in frustration, “Writing about real-life stuff is next to impossible, simply because there’s so much!” He spent a great deal of time in the hallway of the convention, propped against a wall, scribbling in his notebook. (He was as interested in recording his reaction to what he was seeing as in what he was in fact seeing.) At night he would lie awake in his bed looking at himself in the ceiling mirror.6
Where Wallace didn’t find the remarkable, he invented or borrowed. He made use of interviews from his long-ago unpublished Playboy research. Premiere had asked a writer from Hustler, Evan Wright, to help out, and, with his permission, Wallace mined his research as avidly as his own. Wright told Wallace of a scene from two years before in which a porn star, angry at something he had written, put him in a headlock. For his article Wallace moved it to the present and improved the moment by giving Wright a pair of “special autotint trifocals” that the headlock sent “in an arc across the room and into the forbidding décolletage of Christy Canyon never to be recovered.” Wright had written in the LA Weekly about a woman at an industry charity bowling event who had valves under her arms through which she was slowly augmenting her bust size with silicone. Wallace turned them into air valves that would allow her to grow or shrink her breasts at whim, a character out of Philip K. Dick. In all, the convention left him with much the same feeling as the Caribbean cruise had: how sad the world was when you opened your eyes, how much pain it contained. “Some of the starlets are so heavily made up,” he wrote in the article, “they look embalmed. They have complexly coiffed hair that tends to look really good from twenty feet away but on closer inspection is totally dry and dead.” When he got back to Bloomington, he was relieved. He described his trip to DeLillo as “three days in Bosch’s hell-panel.” “I don’t think I’ll have an erection again for a year,” was his comment to Franzen.
Bit by bit Wallace scratched out enough short fiction so that by late 1997 he thought he had a new collection. He told Pietsch he was surprised how dark the stories were since he hadn’t been feeling “particularly dark” in the past few years. He knew that the mini-tales might not please all the readers of his last two books. They were funny but they were not playful or redemptive, qualities many readers had come to associate with his name. He immediately looked for reassurance that the publication of the collection would not become a replay of Infinite Jest, a chance for Little, Brown to cash in on what he called his “late 90s notoriety.” “I don’t think the book could stand up to that kind of hype,” he wrote Nadell. “It’d be slim, strange and a bit slight. A small book.” But the reflexive cast of his mind immediately set him to wondering whether his modesty meant he really didn’t think the book deserved readers at all. “Do I,” he asked Nadell, “secretly think it’s not strong enough to publish, meaning I should wait a few years or however long it takes to have some Bigger or more reader-friendly stories? Or am I a whore to think that way?”
With Wallace a desire to be published usually won out. Moreover, as he began organizing and revising the stories for a collection, he became more excited by how powerful they were as a group. They centered on fear, longing, anxiety, depression, and boundaries, the challenge of being human in an inhospitable time. Many of the stories examined courtship behavior — his, of course, which was particularly nauseating to him at times — but also the entire back-and-forth that he had witnessed between men and women, fortified by the many stories he’d heard in recovery and in relationships.
The set-up for the core of the collection is consistent: they are little plays, conversations, most between a woman and various men she is interviewing. The interrogator’s questions are never written, though; it is up to the reader to figure them out.7 The tales are designated only by place and date, as if they were jailhouse or psych ward interviews B.I. #59 04–98 HAROLD R. AND PHYLLIS N. ENGMAN INSTITUTE FOR CONTINUING CARE EASTCHESTER NY B.I. #15 MCI-BRIDGEWATER OBSERVATION & ASSESSMENT FACILITY BRIDGEWATER MA. The men are not named.
One man tells a story to a friend about seeing a woman get off an airplane and wait at the gate for someone who doesn’t show; he picks her up, exploiting her disappointment. A second invites women to let him tie them up; he claims an almost perfect ability to sense which women secretly want to be dominated in this way, comparing it to “chicken-sexing.”8 In a third, a man uses his withered arm — his “Asset,” he calls it — to get women to sleep with him out of pity: “I see how you’re trying to be polite and not look at it,” he challenges the interrogator. “Go ahead and look though. It don’t bother me…. You want to hear me describe it? It looks like a arm that changed its mind early on in the game when it was in Mama’s stomach with the rest of me. It’s more like a itty tiny little flipper.” In a fourth, a man tells the interviewer that men who spend a lot of time focusing on the sexual needs of women—“going down on a lady’s yingyang over and over and making her come seventeen straight times and such”—are actually as narcissistic as men who only want to orgasm. “The catch is they’re selfish about being generous,” he lectures. “They’re no better than the pig is, they’re just sneakier about it.”