I was concerned when I started reading Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, as it begins with the birth of its subject. Not with a telling extended anecdotal lede, not with a brief trip through the lives of his grandparents. Just plain ol' "Every story has a beginning and this is David Wallace's. He was born in Ithaca, New York, on February 21, 1962." Clunk clunk stupid. This relatively thin volume-300 pages, plus notes—doesn't get much better as it goes on. Perhaps the problem is that Wallace has only been dead four years, or that ten years from now only Infinite Jest will be read and then mostly in schools, but this book reads like the SparkNotes for a better, longer, biography.
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sooo tiny
Author D. T. Max is a fan, and a magazine writer, and it shows. There are any number of compelling anecdotes and stories in the book, and many of them have been repeated online. Wallace almost tried to kill somebody!, he was in the midwest on 9/11 etc etc. But nothing is made of any of this collection of odd little stories. Here's my favorite clause from the book, about the time Wallace encountered the notorious Elizabeth Wurtzel:
He had never met anyone as self-involved as he was
Me neither!
Anyway, we're taken on a trip through Wallace's life. He was an anxious kid, he had some breakdowns in college. He kept towels everywhere, because he sweated a lot. He couldn't hack Harvard's graduate philosophy department, then he got published and got kind of famous, then he had a lot of sex—Wallace was always DTF—and some girlfriends. He was in a halfway house, and loved teaching, then he got super-duper famous when Infinite Jest came out and then you—or at least I—the reader realize that there's only fifty pages left of the book and Max still has twelve years to cover. A surprisingly large amount of it deals with Wallace's goofy interest in the tax code, which he got involved with as part of researching The Pale King. So we don't end up knowing much about Wallace at all. But we do learn that Wallace sweated a lot and liked to keep towels handy, that he knew the difference between "nauseous" and "nauseated", that he voted for Reagan (gasp!) and later had an interest in Perot before settling down to hysterical liberalism in the 2000s, and that he was worried about being authentic in an inauthentic world.
Here's what we don't know:
* what Franzen and DeLillo, who seem to have shared with Max their correspondence with Wallace, thought of Wallace. They're both more or less identical sounding boards for Wallace's anxieties. Wallace does seem to ask DeLillo for advice a bit more often.
* anything about Wallace's family life later on, except that there was some difficulty with his mother. In the last pages we read that Wallace told his wife that "he had no idea what had made him so mad at his family in his thirties." Well, I don't know either...except that I just read Wallace's biography! Max seems to have used Wallace's sister Amy as a source, but doesn't appear to have gotten much out of the parents.
* why Wallace continued taking magazine work if he didn't like it, and thanks to his grant awards and day job, didn't need it.
* pretty much anything about his internal life, despite his many many disclosures to correspondents, friends and acquaintances, and lovers. Remember, Wallace was self-involved right—but he never spoke about himself to the people around him? Or did Max not ask? Or did Max ask and then demur when he heard the answers?
What is missing is a sense of contradiction. He wrote pomo but didn't like irony is about as much as we get. That he was the nice guy who flew into rages and seriously planned to kill someone, that his two gifts were the magazine feature and the epic novel, that he quite transparently craved fame as well as being suspicious of it hardly comes up at all. Of course, if Max examined Wallace's contradictions, we might conclude that nobody can escape irony, and as Wallace was an anti-ironist and Max his Biggest Fan EVAR, well...we just can't have that.
As I was typing this up, a co-worker who had seen me reading the book last week floated over to my cubicle. I gave him my copy as a present. If you're interested, I'd recommend hovering nearby someone reading Every Love Story is a Ghost Story and waiting till he or she is done, then just hold out your hand. You'll get yourself a free copy.
sooo tiny
Author D. T. Max is a fan, and a magazine writer, and it shows. There are any number of compelling anecdotes and stories in the book, and many of them have been repeated online. Wallace almost tried to kill somebody!, he was in the midwest on 9/11 etc etc. But nothing is made of any of this collection of odd little stories. Here's my favorite clause from the book, about the time Wallace encountered the notorious Elizabeth Wurtzel:
He had never met anyone as self-involved as he was
Me neither!
Anyway, we're taken on a trip through Wallace's life. He was an anxious kid, he had some breakdowns in college. He kept towels everywhere, because he sweated a lot. He couldn't hack Harvard's graduate philosophy department, then he got published and got kind of famous, then he had a lot of sex—Wallace was always DTF—and some girlfriends. He was in a halfway house, and loved teaching, then he got super-duper famous when Infinite Jest came out and then you—or at least I—the reader realize that there's only fifty pages left of the book and Max still has twelve years to cover. A surprisingly large amount of it deals with Wallace's goofy interest in the tax code, which he got involved with as part of researching The Pale King. So we don't end up knowing much about Wallace at all. But we do learn that Wallace sweated a lot and liked to keep towels handy, that he knew the difference between "nauseous" and "nauseated", that he voted for Reagan (gasp!) and later had an interest in Perot before settling down to hysterical liberalism in the 2000s, and that he was worried about being authentic in an inauthentic world.
Here's what we don't know:
* what Franzen and DeLillo, who seem to have shared with Max their correspondence with Wallace, thought of Wallace. They're both more or less identical sounding boards for Wallace's anxieties. Wallace does seem to ask DeLillo for advice a bit more often.
* anything about Wallace's family life later on, except that there was some difficulty with his mother. In the last pages we read that Wallace told his wife that "he had no idea what had made him so mad at his family in his thirties." Well, I don't know either...except that I just read Wallace's biography! Max seems to have used Wallace's sister Amy as a source, but doesn't appear to have gotten much out of the parents.
* why Wallace continued taking magazine work if he didn't like it, and thanks to his grant awards and day job, didn't need it.
* pretty much anything about his internal life, despite his many many disclosures to correspondents, friends and acquaintances, and lovers. Remember, Wallace was self-involved right—but he never spoke about himself to the people around him? Or did Max not ask? Or did Max ask and then demur when he heard the answers?
What is missing is a sense of contradiction. He wrote pomo but didn't like irony is about as much as we get. That he was the nice guy who flew into rages and seriously planned to kill someone, that his two gifts were the magazine feature and the epic novel, that he quite transparently craved fame as well as being suspicious of it hardly comes up at all. Of course, if Max examined Wallace's contradictions, we might conclude that nobody can escape irony, and as Wallace was an anti-ironist and Max his Biggest Fan EVAR, well...we just can't have that.
As I was typing this up, a co-worker who had seen me reading the book last week floated over to my cubicle. I gave him my copy as a present. If you're interested, I'd recommend hovering nearby someone reading Every Love Story is a Ghost Story and waiting till he or she is done, then just hold out your hand. You'll get yourself a free copy.