“It’s been a couple of very humbling years,” Wallace wrote Michael Pietsch soon after, admitting the novel was not going forward but insisting he had the maturity now to withstand fallow times: “When there’s sufficient humility and non-seriousness-about-self, it’s not all that bad, more like when the two guys are laughing existentially…at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” It did hurt, though, that the turn of the millennium had brought with it an abundance of large literary efforts that threatened to push Infinite Jest to the edge of the stage. Dave Eggers’s memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, had appeared in 2000, with a quote from Wallace on the jacket praising this “merciless book.” The work sought that characteristic honesty beyond honesty of Wallace’s essays.20 Eggers was also the editor of a new magazine, McSweeney’s. With its self-conscious sense of pleasure and wariness of hype, McSweeney’s shared Wallace’s goal of recording real life in a media-saturated age. (He in fact contributed three stories.) The admiration was mutuaclass="underline" Wallace proposed Eggers to Little, Brown to design Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
And in September 2001, The Corrections was finally published, a novel Franzen had worked on — as Wallace noted with admiration to Pietsch a month later — for ten years, including “two periods when he threw [away] nearly-completed books he just knew in his gut weren’t right.” Wallace watched with amazement as the book became a bestseller. “I apologize in advance for the fact that I will never make you, me, or our joint employers,” Wallace wrote Pietsch, looking for reassurance, “anything even close to the amount of money he’s making FSG [Farrar, Straus & Giroux], by the way.” In truth he was happy for his friends — sort of — but knew (and cared and didn’t care) that his role as one of the founders of a new kind of writing was threatening to slip into the historical.21 At the same time as he was being pushed aside as its leader, he was being held responsible for its flaws. For many years, critics had asked Wallace if he saw himself as part of a movement, and for as many years he had said no. Back in the early 1990s, he had written Morrow, half-jokingly, to suggest an issue of Conjunctions designed to show how he, Vollmann, and Franzen had nothing in common. When Salon.com inquired at the time of Infinite Jest what he and Franzen, as well as Donald Antrim, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, and Richard Powers shared, Wallace responded, “There’s the whole ‘great white male’ deal. I think there are about five of us under 40 who are white and over 6 feet and wear glasses.” Then, in August 2001, James Wood warned in a review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth in the New Republic that there was a disturbing new trend in fiction: “A genre is hardening…. Familial resemblances are asserting themselves and a parent can be named.” Wood dubbed the new style “Hysterical Realism,” its principal characteristic being a desire
to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence…. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page, as these novels continually flourish their glamorous congestion. Inseparable from this culture of permanent storytelling is the pursuit of vitality at all costs. Indeed, vitality is storytelling, as far as these books are concerned.
Wood believed this freneticism came at the price of intimacy and psychological acuity, the true gifts of the novel. Wallace wasn’t the father of this undesirable new movement in fiction — that was Dickens, in Wood’s conceit — but he was named as one of the louche uncles, corrupting literary youth. And the next year would bring two more additions to the family: Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, both debut novels that seemed to owe their exuberance — their commitment to “vitality at all costs”—to Infinite Jest. The irony was that Wallace had now spent half a decade trying to slow down not just literature’s pulse but his own.
Wallace was beginning to feel like time was passing him by. He read in the New York Review of Books about electronic publishing and wondered what it meant that he didn’t like the idea, was wed to the artifact—“the traditional galleys-and-proofs-and-pub-dates-and-real-books-with-covers-you-hate” approach, as he wrote to DeLillo. He used to welcome change, he remembered: “The whole thing makes me feel old, sort of like the way Heavy Metal music or cum-shots in mainstream movies make me feel.” When his high school class in Urbana had celebrated their twentieth reunion the year before, Wallace hadn’t been able to attend — he was at Marfa — but sent a check for a floral arrangement for classmates who had died and asked for someone to videotape the event. Shortly afterward, he came through Urbana and was absorbed by the images of his classmates celebrating, which he watched in the home of the class reunion chair. He apologized to her for not having been more sensitive to her depression when they were students, and when he found out she worked with the man whom as a boy he had tormented with snowballs, he wrote a letter apologizing to him too. He made amends wherever he could, sometimes to excess.22 He wrote to his Arizona sponsor that “I struggle a great deal, and am 99.8 % real,” then crossed that out and wrote in “98.8 %,” noting in a parenthesis in the margin, “Got a bit carried away here.”
Wallace knew it was time to leave Illinois State. His writing was stuck and his relationships with women were falling into a pattern so predictable that even he saw the humor in them.23 The university had also begun to back away from “the Unit,” the oasis for experimental literature in the prairie. Wallace cared little by now for this kind of writing, but the people who had worked so hard to create it mattered to him.
Ever since Infinite Jest, various high-level writing departments had put out feelers to him in the hopes that this well-known author, so obviously wasted on a second-tier midwestern university, would be willing to move. In the fall of 2000 he received a letter from Pomona College, in Claremont, California, which had just created a chair in creative writing. Wallace responded to the English department chair with caution. The department head, Rena Fraden, reassured him that the post was designed for a full-time fiction writer. On a later call he joked that all his friends had gotten a letter too, including Franzen (who said he was not interested and recommended Wallace). He and Fraden agreed that he would visit the school in December and give a reading and teach a class to see what he thought of the school. When he came, the students at the class, as one remembered, sat “in a narcotic state of awe.” Wallace taught a workshop and said if he could leave them with one thing it was the difference between “nauseous” and “nauseated.” He gave a reading to a small group in Crookshank Hall and met the faculty and liked them. He went to a dinner at Fraden’s house, where the participants each talked about a book that had affected him or her deeply. One mentioned Clarissa; another Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Wallace surprised all by naming a popular page-turner (no one can remember quite which).