27. Wallace admired Raymond Carver, whom he distinguished from his minimalist acolytes (Wallace dismissed them as “crank turners”). He was a man who had outrun alcohol in moving from a deflected style to a more sincere one, and Wallace doubtless saw the relevance to his own story.
28. Hints of effeminacy always brought out a bit of Wallace’s anxiety. When he moved to Illinois he placed a special order from a Bloomington store for T-shirts with dark squares on the front meant to hide what he saw as his flabby chest.
29. As he explained in a later letter to the critic Sven Birkerts, he found writing directly onto a computer to be like “think[ing] out loud onto the screen,” adding, “Writing by hand and typewriter not only brings out the best in me — it brings out stuff I never would have dreamed was there…. It is this — not improvement, but transfiguration of the contents of my head that I am addicted to. It is astonishing when it happens — magical — and it simply doesn’t happen on a computer.”
30. A hint as to Karr’s motive is to be found in Infinite Jest, where her stand-in, Joelle Van Dyne, comments, “Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents. As tall and basso as a man might be on the outside, he nevertheless sees his parents from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always. And the unhappier his childhood was, the more arrested will be his perspective on it. She’s learned this through sheer experience.”
31. The name was a source of some amusement to Wallace, viz this from Infinite Jest: “That in metro Boston the idiom of choice for the male sex-organ is Unit, which is why Ennet house residents are wryly amused by E.M.P.H. Hospital’s designations of its campus’s buildings.”
32. Typically, Wallace met DeLillo through worries about plagiarism. He was concerned that DeLillo’s work was a too obvious source for the Eschaton scene in Infinite Jest, in which Ennet Academy students pretend to wage a nuclear war with computers and tennis balls. DeLillo, who admired Wallace’s writing, responded that it was not, a generous gesture given the scene’s overlap with his novel Endzone.
Chapter 6: “Unalone and Unstressed”
1. In Infinite Jest the government sells naming rights to each year. The year in which the key action in the story takes place is the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment,” which most Wallace researchers agree was 2009. There is, however, one bit of data that points to 2011, possibly an error, possibly a deliberately misleading clue on Wallace’s part.
2. Marathe is an example of the pleasure Wallace takes in recursion: He is a quadruple agent whose Quebecois bosses think he is a triple agent. In other words, he pretends that he is only pretending to betray the people he is in fact betraying.
3. In Infinite Jest, Wallace traces Americans’ neediness with a Freudian touch to the original mother-infant bond. The lethal “Infinite Jest” cartridge is said to consist of a baby looking up at a mother’s face, the mother intoning, “I’m sorry. I’m so terribly sorry. I am so, so sorry. Please know how very, very, very sorry I am.”
4. “Ticket to the Fair” was not the first time Wallace had improved on reality. In “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” for instance, he says he was born in Philo, Illinois, a claim that later found its way onto websites and into books on the author. And who but an East Coast reader would have believed that a tornado could blow up out of nowhere and suddenly sweep Wallace and his tennis opponent over the net, “blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet over to the fence one court over”? As Amy Wallace remembers, in the Wallace family, ”We quietly agreed that his nonfiction was fanciful and his fiction was what you had to look out for.”
5. Wallace was aware that he had transgressed, and many times he hinted to journalists that their rules weren’t his, as in an interview he gave to a writer for the Boston Phoenix in 1998: “The thing is, really — between you and me and the Boston Phoenix’s understanding readers — you hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there’s going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.”
6. The problem of how to use an innovative writing style to carry out a conservative fictional purpose would become Wallace’s biggest artistic challenge and would prove insurmountable in The Pale King.
7. One suspects the silver lamé outfit was borrowed from Wurtzel and the vomit, as at the Illinois State Fair, was invented, both being, in magazine fact-checking parlance, on author. A description of losing to a nine-year-old girl at chess in the ship’s library that only appears in the book version of the piece also has the sort of headlong specificity that characterized Wallace’s enhancements for effect, viz: “My first inkling of trouble is on the fourth move, when I fianchetto and Deirdre knows what I am doing is fianchettoing and uses the term correctly…. My second ominous clue is the way her little hand keeps flailing out to the side of the board after she moves, a sign that she is used to a speed clock. She swoops in with her developed QK and forks my queen on the twelfth move.”
8. The news reports Wallace refers to were probably about Grant Medeiros, fourteen, of Saanich, British Columbia. On February 17, 1995, on the last night of a cruise aboard the Royal Princess, Medeiros vanished. His eyeglasses and shoes were found on the deck, and he left his necklace and a note in his parents’ cabin, but no one saw him jump, and his body was never found. The press ascribed his misery to fighting with his parents over having to join them on the cruise. The part about a “a ship-board romance” was likely Wallace’s invention.
9. On the junior circuit, Wallace and his friends had run into a player with the name of the movie star; this spurred them to make lists of ordinary people with famous names.
10. When Big Craig read the novel after it was published he remembers thinking, “Holy crap! The bastard was just looking for information.” For all that Wallace subscribed to the ethos of anonymity in recovery, his fiction always came first. “You didn’t get sober to fuck people over [but] it’s a hazard in writing,” he wrote a friend.
11. Another source for the name may have been the nickname he and Costello shared for junior lawyers, “compliance drones.”
12. He wrote in a notebook a few years later, “My dog-emotions shifted when Drone came — there was sort of one to break my heart w/ goodness and one who was ‘trouble.’”
13. Blue is a dominant color in Infinite Jest. One character is killed drinking Drano, “blue like glittershit”; another reveals “a blue string” behind an eyeball; Joelle vomits “blue smoke” into “the cool blue tub” when she hits bottom; the Charles is transformed to “robin-egg’s blue” by the Clean US Party; the skies of the novel range from “Dilaudid-colored” to “pilot-light blue”; one section begins simply, “The following things in the room were blue.”
14. Wallace was becoming a brand of his own. “I think he will fulfill Nick’s request for a big-name writer,” an editor at Tennis wrote a colleague after approaching Wallace to write a piece on the U.S. Open for the magazine.
15. The point of his style he omitted. Perhaps he thought it was self-evident, but in a similar fax to Harper’s before the editing of a piece he published in 1998 on Kafka, he explained that his goal was to “preserve an oralish, out-loud feel” to his writing. That piece began as a talk, but it is also true of Infinite Jest. You are meant to think of it as a story being spoken rather than written — or even better, thought.