Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.
The problem came up when he tried to dramatize this idea. How do you write about dullness without being dull? The obvious solution, if you had Wallace’s predilections, was to overwhelm this seemingly inert subject with the full movement of your thought. Your characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the rippling tactility of your writing would keep them from appearing static. But this strategy presented its own problem: Wallace could make the characters vibrant, but only at the risk of sacrificing what made their situation worth narrating — the stillness at the center of their lives. How could you preach mindful calmness if you couldn’t replicate it in prose? A failed entertainment that succeeded was just an entertainment. Yet Wallace had never really found a verbal strategy to replace his inborn one. In more ways than he cared to acknowledge he remained the author of The Broom of the System. He wrote to Franzen around this time:
Karen is killing herself rehabbing the house. I sit in the garage with the AC blasting and work very poorly and haltingly and with (some days) great reluctance and ambivalence and pain. I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic.
Usually when Wallace found work frustrating, his relationships suffered. But this time his love for Green flourished. He had found something as important to him as his fiction. “It’s a dark time workwise,” he wrote Franzen, “and yet a very light and lovely time in all other respects. So overall I feel I’m ahead and am pretty happy.” His fit with Green worked in ways no other ever had. She was herself creative but not a writer. She didn’t have his intense competitiveness; she created to create, unshadowed by any statue. When she teased him it was with love. “We used to have this joke about how much can you irritate the reader,” Green recalls.
Time was on the relationship’s side too. Wallace no longer thought of himself as young. “No more nymphs for me,” he had written Steven Moore as he was about to turn forty in early 2002. Wallace had a strikeout drawn through the fading word “Mary” on his tattoo and placed an asterisk under the heart symbol; farther down he added another asterisk and “Karen,” turning his arm into a living footnote. He knew he could not sustain the emotional availability of a parent and he was worried about passing on his mental instability, so he did not want to have children anymore, but he enjoyed being with Stirling. They would often play chess, which Green’s son usually won. Wallace’s whirring mind made him an inconsistent competitor.
As Stirling began his final year of high school, Green and Wallace made plans for her to move to Claremont. They began house hunting. Wallace first asked the university if he could buy his house on Indian Hill Boulevard and was surprised to be told it wasn’t for sale. So he and Green looked elsewhere. When he tired of the search, she went alone, eventually choosing a ranch home in a newly developed area at the very northern limit of the town. Like the house in Bloomington, it was far enough from the university to allow for privacy, and from their street they could see the mountains.
Wallace at this point considered Green his fiancée, but other women had had that title before. He emailed Franzen in February 2004, “I hear Kath[y] gaffed and landed you”—Franzen had moved in with Kathryn Chetkovich, a writer from Santa Cruz whom he had been dating. Ever competitive, Wallace saw his own girlfriend as a counterpart to Franzen’s, another K from California. A week later he emailed, “I am more and more sure KG and I will get married. Now it’s a matter of getting her to be more and more sure.”
At the end of 2004, Wallace and Green flew to Urbana for Christmas, staying at the Jumers Castle Lodge, “a sad place with trophies on the walls,” as Wallace’s sister, Amy, remembers. She and her two daughters had the job of luring his parents to the courthouse, where they discovered their son in a suit, with his companion in a dress. The forty-two-year-old Wallace and Green were married, his nieces as the witnesses. After lunch, the newlyweds walked down a path and Wallace gave a hop and clicked his heels together. Amy photographed the moment, and this became their wedding announcement. They spent the evening watching a Law & Order marathon in their “shitty motel,” as Wallace reported to DeLillo, assuring him that “my ass is not as big as it looks in the photo.”
Six months later, Green moved to Claremont. Wallace had already been living in the house for a while, and by the time his new wife got there, he had taken it over. A jockstrap hung from a lamp, and the town had earlier posted a notice on his door ordering him to remove the weeds on his lawn. Green painted the garage bright red and furnished it with his recliner, a comfortable desk, and Wallace’s lamps, his accounting books, the old Scottish battle scene, a poster of Klimt’s The Kiss, and other miscellanea he had brought from Bloomington. She tore out the wall-to-wall carpeting in the house. He had developed a personality for social interactions that he had never had before. Whenever anyone came over and complimented the décor, Wallace would quickly say it was Green’s doing. But Green would see another side at night, when he would beg her not to get sick or die.
Wallace was thrilled that his personal life was finally in order: he took it as evidence that he had matured, left behind his unfocused, hedonistic, self-indulgent past.9 The couple watched DVDs together—The Wire was a favorite; he thought of writing an essay on how the best writing in America was for television shows. Wallace felt strong in his sobriety as he never had before, the pair even keeping wine for guests. Wallace liked to remind Green what a good companion he was. “I took out the garbage. Did you see that?” he would say to her, or “I put tea on for you when you were driving home!” Some of his bachelor ways lingered, though. When he wrote he would go from the garage to the guest room, where there was an extra computer, and on to the family room, to write in longhand with his earplugs in—“scattering debris, intellectual and otherwise,” as Green remembers. She was appalled to find his towels and socks hanging from her paintings. Soon they were in couples therapy, working on these issues. He agreed to a clothesline outside.
Wallace often got mail from aspiring authors, many modeling their prose after his, and one day Weston Cutter, a young writer, wrote to ask Wallace, why bother writing? “It’s just this: how do you keep hope?” Cutter asked. “How do you not just get tired of all this shit, all the time from every vector, public and private and governmental? And more pressing, how do you not wear yourself out and feel as if you’re just another supplier of said stuff?” “This is like listening to a transcript of my own mind,” Wallace jotted at the bottom of his letter in response, adding, “Basically — I empathize. I have no answers. I do know I’m easiest when I accept how small I am and how paltry my contribution is as a % of total. But >60 % of the time I don’t/can’t accept it. Go figure.”