McCain’s campaign was fast folding. After he lost the primary elections of early March to Bush, Rolling Stone needed the article in a hurry. Wallace took only three weeks to write twenty-seven thousand words. The piece — cut by more than half in three days of frantic editing by phone — was in print by mid-April, a speed that Wallace found both liberating and upsetting. In the end Wallace used his unaccustomed ringside seat at American history to further preoccupations that dated back to his “E Unibus Pluram” essay. His conclusion was that McCain was America looking in the mirror. “Whether he’s truly For Real,” he ended, “depends now less on what’s in his heart than on what might be in yours.”
The article would win a National Magazine Award, but Wallace always felt his take on the “three months that tickled the prostate of the American Century,” as he called the campaign in a letter to DeLillo, was just a vacation from the novel he was supposed to be working on. “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do,” he added as “The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub” was about to appear, “but it does, and now I’m back here flogging away (in all senses of the word) and feeding my own wastebasket, and taking half-hours off to write letters like this and still calling it Writing Time.”
In June 2000, an editor from Atlas Books approached Wallace with the idea of writing a volume on mathematics for its Great Discoveries series, which it was copublishing with Norton. Jesse Cohen suggested as subjects either Georg Cantor, a pioneer in set theory, or Kurt Gödel, who authored the incompleteness theorems, which state that no matter how much one knows about a system there is yet more to know. That knowledge has limits that are themselves the product of our knowledge was the sort of thing that Wallace never stopped thinking about. “Obvious fact,” he would later write in the book, “never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is.” Cantor, though, held the prospect of something even more appealing: an inquiry into a man who took on a puzzle of the sort that had always fascinated and worried Wallace — in this case, the nature of infinity. Most investigations into thinking of this sort, Wallace knew, led to paralysis, the a.p.-s’s (adolescent pot smoker’s) solipsism he always feared. Cantor though had broken through to the other side by showing that there are different sized infinities and that they can be thought about almost like ordinary numbers. He had turned a fearsome unknown into a quantity that mathematicians could manipulate. Cantor also presented the more achievable challenge. “I know [enough] about Gödel’s proof to know that the math and notations alone would take me years to get proficient at,” Wallace wrote Cohen. He added in a stern fax he sent shortly after from Marfa that if he did undertake the book it would be “on the side as a diversion from other contracted stuff.” All the same, he couldn’t resist thinking how rewarding such an effort would be:
Did you know that the implifications/ramifications of Cantor’s diagonal proof are huge, especially for contemporary computer science (e.g. “trans-computational problems,” etc.)? Did you know that it would take 500 pages even to outline these consequences and ramifications? Would the book just be a bio of Cantor and contemporaries and discuss the Proof and its context, or would you also expect a Consequences discussion?
When Cohen wrote back that the book was meant to be a book of ideas, the thrust being on “Cantor and the sheer mindbending quality of his theories,” Wallace was hooked. This was the part of him he had left by the side of the road when he became a fiction writer, the part he had tried to breathe life back into when he went to Harvard, the part that made him the smartest guy in the room. He had slid into lightweight magazine work, offering insights on porn and tennis. The information that the advance might be as high as $100,000 did not hurt either. That was a bigger advance than he had gotten for Infinite Jest. He said yes.
It was now the fall and Wallace was more than halfway through the second leave that was supposed to be devoted to his fiction. He started research on the infinity book. His efforts on what he had taken to calling “the Long Thing” did not go well. “Most of my own stuff I’ve been delivering to the wastebasket,” he wrote Markson in November. “It looks good in there.” All the same he was so glad not to be teaching that when he found out that the university was accidentally still paying him, he wrote his department head to say he wouldn’t cash the checks in case they tried to make him pay them back with classes later. But in the spring of 2001, he was back in the classroom, trying to balance his nonfiction, his fiction, and his fears. The article on American usage he had begun when he was with Juliana finally appeared in Harper’s. The magazine ran less than half of what he had originally written but he acknowledged in a note to DeLillo that Colin Harrison, his longtime nonfiction editor there, “did a pretty good cut.”
That summer he went with friends to a two-week meditation retreat at Plum Village near Bordeaux, France, under the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. The retreat required abstention from both coffee and smoking. Wallace wanted to understand more deeply what it was he was proposing in The Pale King. What did the bliss that followed great boredom actually feel like? He found that writing about mindlessness and achieving it for oneself were two different things; he left early, blaming the food, and was home as soon as he could be. He wrote to DeLillo on his return, “Highlights: 1) Went AWOL from Viet-Buddhist monast[e]ry’s retreat….2) watched 2 of 4 drunk Peruvians drown in Dordogne off St. Foy La Grande. 3) Ate a snail on purpose.” He mentioned that Franzen, whose third novel, The Corrections, was coming out in mid-September, was “gearing up for his turn at having Sauron’s great red eye upon him.”
The morning of September 11 found Wallace at his usual activities, going to his meeting, running errands, planning to write. At the actual moment of the attacks, he was showering, “trying to listen to a Bears post-mortem on WSCR Sports Radio in Chicago,” as he remembered. He did not know whether he had feelings about the attacks beyond the ordinary, but when Rolling Stone approached him for a piece on his response, he felt drawn to try. In three days, he wrote a short, delicate essay—“Caveat. Written very fast and in what probably qualifies as shock,” he appended to the draft. “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” is a piece of oblique social analysis, a tribute both to the heartland and recovery. (It was first punningly called “A View from the Interior.”) He once more disguised his recovery group circle as friends from church. Thus Mrs. Thompson, his pseudonym for the mother of Francis B., became “a long-time church member and leader in our congregation.” He captured the essence of her and her friends’ diffuse, gentle articulations as they viewed the awful events, their worries about family in or near Manhattan, and their tears as they watched the towers collapse on television. “What the Bloomington ladies are,” Wallace wrote,
or start to seem, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a bizarre lack of cynicism in the room. It doesn’t once occur to anyone here to remark on how it’s maybe a little odd that…the relentless rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn’t seen it yet.
He contrasted the sincerity of the women with the attitude of a young man named Duane, also present, whose “main contribution was to keep iterating how much like a movie it is.” Wallace ended, “I’m trying to explain the way part of the horror of the Horror was knowing that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my own — mine…and poor old loathsome Duane’s — than these ladies’.” Did a certain part of America then deserve what it got? This was a point Wallace of course had to sidestep, but for anyone who had absorbed the lessons of Infinite Jest it was present all the same.