Jeffrey Eugenides on time with David Foster Wallace, etc
The crowd was overwhelmingly male, very close in age, largely from the Midwest, and engaged in a kind of generational struggle to make sense of the postmodern literary legacy—of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and others—that they found both consuming and unsatisfactory, especially as a guide to writing about the new, weird America of the eighties and nineties.
.. In November, Wallace told Harvard health authorities that he felt he was a threat to himself, and he was sent to a locked ward at McLean Hospital, the well-known psychiatric institution in Belmont, Massachusetts. The head of the Whiting Foundation heard the news and asked Mary Karr, who had recently won a Whiting Award for her poetry and was living nearby with her husband, if she would go see Wallace when he was in detox.
.. “I hated The Broom of the System,” Karr says. “I thought it was one of the worst books ever written.” She felt Wallace was “showing off,” writing fiction that pointed to all that he’d read rather than stirring feeling in the reader. And wasn’t that the point? If the literary bright white guys were going to follow in the line of the bright white guys of a generation before, she wasn’t interested.
.. Was fiction about mastering the sweep of the culture in an innovative way, or was it about telling a more intimate story and delivering reading pleasure?
.. He once wrote to her about the “long thing I want to do” and said that when he looked at material he’d written earlier, it wasn’t as “awful” as he feared, but it was “way too concerned with presenting itself as witty arty writing instead of effecting any kind of emotional communication with people. I feel like I have changed, learned so much about what good writing ought to be. Much of what I’ve learned I’ve learned from you, more from the example of your work and your feelings about your work than from any direct advice. You’re good about not giving advice; you just live, and let me watch.”
.. Wallace remarks in the note that he seems better able to summon enthusiasm for something when it is secondary to something else in his life. He writes, “The key to ’92 is that MMK was most important; IJ was just a means to her end (as it were).”
“Who is IJ?” Karr said.
“Infinite Jest.”
“Oh!”
She did not seem flattered. I read the sentence again. “How is it a means—to capture me, is that it?” Karr said. “That’s crazy. That’s really insane.”
.. As Franzen saw it, Wallace had managed to incorporate the kind of broad-canvas social critique that the great postmodernists did into a narrative “of deadly personal pertinence.”
.. Franzen became more secure in himself in the wake of The Corrections, Costello says. But Wallace? “Dave never had a secure hour in his life.”
.. Like Eugenides, whose search for faith is a major element of The Marriage Plot,Wallace quietly sought out spiritual answers and flirted with joining the Catholic Church, as Karr later did. (When they were together, they tried to pray every day.)