The obvious objection to such promotional ¶s is that if the booklets are any good at all…blurblets are unnecessary; whereas, if the booklets aren’t any good, it’s hard to see how my telling somebody that as a child I used to cook up what amounted to simplistic versions of Zeno’s Dichotomy5 and ruminate on them until I literally made myself sick, or that I once almost flunked a basic calc course and have seethed with dislike for conventional higher-math education ever since, or that the ontology and grammar of abstractions have always struck me as one of the most breathtaking problems in human consciousness — how any such stuff will help.
Wallace’s publisher printed the disclaimer. It also asked another mathematician to review the manuscript. He expressed serious reservations and pointed to errors, some small, some larger, in it. Much as during his time at Harvard, Wallace was beginning to wonder if he had gotten into deeper water than he had realized.
Everything and More was finally published in October 2003. In the book Wallace covered the history of infinity as a philosophical and mathematical concept, beginning with Zeno’s dichotomy and moving through calculus and axiomatic set theory, the idea that all of mathematics is derivable from a handful of simple axioms, and on to Cantor. Cantor had suffered from severe mental illness; Wallace took pains to point out that the mathematician’s willingness to delve deep into questions of recursion and paradox was not the cause. “The real irony is that the view of ∞ as some forbidden zone or road to insanity — which view was very old and powerful and haunted math for 2000+ years — is precisely what Cantor’s own work overturned,” he wrote. He noted:
In modern medical terms, it’s fairly clear that G.F.L.P. Cantor suffered from manic-depressive illness at a time when nobody knew what this was, and that his polar cycles were aggravated by professional stresses and disappointments, of which Cantor had more than his share. Of course, this makes for less interesting flap copy than Genius Driven Mad By Attempts To Grapple With ∞. The truth, though, is that Cantor’s work and its context are so totally interesting and beautiful that there’s no need for breathless Prometheusizing of the poor guy’s life…. Saying that ∞ drove Cantor mad is sort of like mourning St. George’s loss to the dragon: it’s not only wrong but insulting.
Wallace had written Everything and More in a slightly different voice than usual, that of an amateur delighting in his subject and eager to communicate his enthusiasm, Cavell on holiday. He adduced a made-up high school math teacher, Dr. Goris, as his guide and threw in his customary mixture of high and low vocabulary, as well as a lot of math notations. He hoped that the playful tone of the book would help critics and professionals identify Everything and More as the college bull session it was meant to be. A few were charmed. The distinguished math writer John Allen Paulos in the American Scholar praised Wallace’s “refreshingly conversational style as well as a surprisingly authoritative command of mathematics,” but many felt otherwise. One, a philosopher of mathematics, writing in the New York Times Book Review, thought the book suffered from some of the same flaws as Infinite Jest: “One wonders exactly whom Wallace thinks he is writing for,” noted David Papineau of King’s College, London. “If he had cut out some of the details, and told us rather less than he knows, he could have reached a lot more readers.” Papineau was kinder than some of the other experts. Science wrote of the book that “mathematicians will view it with at best sardonic amusement. Crippling errors abound.” The magazine’s reviewer, Rudy Rucker, who had given Broom a glowing notice in the Washington Post in 1987, went on to enumerate a host of technical errors: providing the wrong definition of uniform convergence, botching the crucial Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms that form the basis of much of set theory, and conflating Cantor’s continuum problem with his continuum hypothesis. Wallace-l, an electronic mailing list devoted to Wallace’s work, became a repository for suggested corrections by various professional mathematicians. Wallace’s publisher now asked one of the list’s contributors, Prabhakar Ragde of the University of Waterloo, Ontario, to re-review the book before paperback publication. He sent back a three-page memo. Some of his suggestions Wallace took, but he also finally cried enough: there was a distinction between trying to write for general readers and specialists. “Dr. Ragde, who is clearly one sharp hombre,” he wrote the editors, “has nailed many of the book’s crudities — it’s just there are lots of crudities that I decided were more perspicuous for lay-reader purposes.” The book became one of the publisher’s bestselling titles all the same, on the strength of Wallace’s name and its engaging style, though he always had the disquieting feeling that he had been mugged for trespassing.
Oblivion was a far smoother process. The collection consisted of eight stories, some of which came from the notebooks Wallace was using to write portions of The Pale King and probably began as sections of it. Wallace had downplayed the stories when he had first tentatively suggested a new collection to Pietsch in October 2001, calling them “the best of the stuff I’ve been doing while playing hooky from a certain Larger Thing.” But Pietsch, as ever his ideal reader, responded immediately to the portraits of “unhappy, complicated, intellectualizing men.” In the following two years, while Wallace worked on Everything and More, he also wrote the last story in the collection, “The Suffering Channel,” the story of a man for whom great art comes so easily that he can defecate it, and Pietsch began organizing the pieces for publication. “I don’t feel like much of an editor here,” Pietsch admitted to Wallace in October 2003, “but these stories didn’t strike me as needing many red-penciled queries…. Overwhelmingly, these stories do what they do with irresistible force.” Privately, he marveled at the creative pain and stress evident in his author’s newest effort.
The stories were mostly successors to those of Brief Interviews. They too concerned themselves mostly with middle-aged, middle-class white men in middle America.6 Though the subjects share their antecedents’ condition of total self-absorption, their pride in themselves — whether in their sexual politics or just in their sexuality — has by now been replaced by a sullen silence. These men are aware of themselves as over-the-hill, culturally disempowered, on their way to nowhere, especially vis-à-vis women. It is no accident the first story is called “Mr. Squishy.” Even irony has lost its power to protect them. They seem able to see everything but what’s in front of their eyes and to talk about everything but what actually matters to them.
The stories in Brief Interviews are afraid of expansion, so unattractive or unstable are the interiors of their subjects; the stories in Oblivion seem afraid of compression, as if the title were a threat that could only be defended against by the relentlessly engaged consciousness. Words cover the stories, coating them in thick layers of verbiage, perspectives shift, and there are disorienting chronological jumps. “It’s interesting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing,” the narrator of “Good Old Neon” writes. There is only one way to halt the onrush of data, to slow it down so you can find its meaning: “Think for a second what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died…?”