He avoided interviews as much as he could and tried to show as little of himself as possible when obligated to sit down for them. He met a writer from Book magazine at the Cracker Barrel by the I-55 interchange in Bloomington, where he grouchily averred that he “just want[ed] to be left alone to eat my meatloaf.” Publishers Weekly found him at a K-Mart. In Los Angeles, he went on Bookworm, a radio show hosted by Michael Silverblatt. Silverblatt was special — he had been so excited by Infinite Jest he had called Michael Pietsch to ask to read the outtakes. In their conversation now, Wallace suggested that the collection was meant as a corrective for those readers who had misunderstood his last noveclass="underline"
I wanted to do a book that was sad…. It’s something I tried to do in Infinite Jest. Everybody thought that book was funny, which was of course nice, but it was also kind of frustrating. I designed this one so that nobody is going to escape the fact that this is sad.
Silverblatt gave a persuasive explanation of how Wallace was attempting to effect this:
Here, it felt as if, in reading these stories with eyes wide open, I was being asked to revolve so much that I would get dizzy. And that, in the fall, in the dizziness, a kind of compelling sadness — that the sadness is itself formed by the obligation to have no stable position. That everything has to spin on itself, until a kind of weariness, attrition, ecstasy, exhilaration, humor, terror, become compounded. And the emotion bomb, as the therapists say, is left in the reader.
To which Wallace answered, “Wow. You’re giving — I mean, this is why I look forward to coming to L.A. — is you tend to give interpretations of the stuff that’s real close to what I want.”
The country’s reviewers on the whole were more positive than Wallace expected. He was welcomed to the short story form (although in fact this was his second collection), and critics tended to play up his formal inventiveness and shy away from the knotty problem of what the reader was supposed to come away with. Benjamin Weissman in the LA Weekly praised this “full-scale harassment of the short story form,” while Andrei Codrescu in the Chicago Tribune admired Wallace’s “seemingly inexhaustible bag of literary tricks.” Adam Goodheart, writing in the New York Times Book Review, sounded a mixed note, comparing Wallace to Edgar Allan Poe, “another mad scientist of American literature.” But Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times chose to do unto Wallace as he had done unto Updike:
No doubt these portraits are meant as sardonic commentaries on our narcissistic, therapeutic age, but they are so long-winded, so solipsistic, so predictable in their use of irony and gratuitous narrative high jinks that they end up being as tiresome and irritating as their subjects.
She accused Wallace of writing an “airless, tedious” book that failed to live up to the promise in “E Unibus Pluram” to reanimate the “deep moral issues that distinguished the work of the great 19th-century writers.” “The NY Times just slaughtered the book,” Wallace wrote Moore afterward, “just panned it, in a review that caused my editor pain (he actually called me about it).” Wallace was in fact also devastated and could recite several sentences in it from memory.
The New York Review of Books soon afterward published the first major overview of Wallace’s mature work, taking a stance between impressed and skeptical and implicitly psychoanalyzing the author along the way. “The Panic of Influence,” by A. O. Scott, emphasized Wallace’s anxious relationship with post-modernism and also his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness. Scott also accused Wallace of fencing off all possible objections to his work by making sure every possible criticism was already embedded in the text. Brief Interviews, especially, the critic wrote, was not so much anti-ironic as “meta-ironic,” driven much like the characters in its stories by the fear of being known. This sort of writing, he continued, was clearly connected to the self-centered self-absorbed culture of late-twentieth-century America, but “does Wallace’s work represent an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its most florid and exotic symptoms? Of course, there can only be one answer: it’s both.” Wallace was not pleased but he was impressed. In the margins of a draft of the story “Good Old Neon,” which he began around this time, he noted (punningly), “AO Scott saw into my character.”
Brief Interviews, though, sold well, which made Little, Brown happy and, for better or worse, helped buff the statue. Though Wallace claimed he no longer read reviews, he printed out a post by a critic for Slate’s book club to tape inside his composition notebook: “The difference: BIWHM’s just too much telling, not enough showing. He needs to combine that urge to confront what matters with his ability to spin a wonderful tale. When that book comes out, I’ll be waiting in line.”
Wallace had been mulling the possibilities for a third novel since the mid-1990s, even as he began the stories that would form the heart of Brief Interviews. The setting had come early, possibly even before the publication of Infinite Jest: he knew he wanted to write about the IRS. The agency fit well with Wallace’s Pynchonian appetite for clandestine organizations and hidden conspiracies. And like the tennis academy and recovery house in Infinite Jest, it was a world unto itself, where characters would be in charged apposition to one another. Wallace himself had had numerous small brushes with the agency over the years, usually involving trivial errors on Form 1099s that he or his accountant had to get corrected. These encounters touched off the same anxiety within him as communications from lawyers and fact-checkers. He had an idea as well of the IRS as a secular church, a counterpart to Alcoholics Anonymous in Infinite Jest.14 But, finally, he probably settled on the IRS for the most obvious reason: it was the dullest possible venue he could think of and he had decided to write about boredom.
Wallace had no direct knowledge of life at the IRS or indeed in any office — he had never worked in one — and his grasp of accounting was shaky, but he was an avid study, so, soon after the publication of his novel, he began taking classes at the university. He went from beginning financial accounting in the fall of 1996 (“Examines the nature of accounting, basic accounting concepts, financial statements, accrual basis of accounting…”) to federal income taxation in summer 1997 and advanced tax that fall. He read countless agency publications and books on accounting and the IRS, from West Federal Taxation to D. Larry Crumbley’s The Ultimate Rip-Off. He interviewed real-life IRS employees and went to Peoria, where the agency had a large facility. He boasted to Costello that he was only a few credits short of passing the state accounting exam.
As Wallace moved forward, he acquired vocabulary and context for his novel, much as he would for one of his nonfiction pieces. He used to tell his classes that a novelist had to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him or her on an airplane; Wallace easily surpassed that benchmark. He learned that what outsiders called an IRS agent might actually be an examiner, an auditor, or an investigator. He read that the IRS had changed its focus in the Reagan era from an agency primarily involved with compliance to one engaged in revenue maximization; a fiscal mission had replaced a civic one. He thought there might be something in that conflict to dramatize. When something wasn’t true that would be good, he made it up. He decided junior employees were called “wigglers” or, dismissively, “turdnagels.” (This became his email address for a time, after he started using email in the early 2000s.) “‘Snout’=IRS Investigator / ‘Immersive’=Talented IRS examiner,” he wrote in a notebook. He imagined that all IRS agents got a new social security number when they entered the agency. Wallace found a prose poem by Frank Bidart that suggested a clever epigraph for this rebirth: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”