Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so manically energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone.
.. The smaller of his two dogs, a black Labrador retriever mix named Jeeves, keeps trying to climb into his lap and lick his lips, a gesture not unrelated to the fact that Wallace is eating a bologna sandwich. ”They pretend they’re kissing you,” Wallace says of his dogs, ”but they’re really mining your mouth for food.”
.. Jonathan Franzen, a fellow novelist and confidant, says Wallace is like many serious writers who, by necessity, spend most of their time alone. ”You tend to develop the personality that corresponds to that solitude,” Franzen says.
This helps explain why sudden fame is often more awkward for a serious writer than for a serious actor, who does his work in public and is accustomed to being the subject, rather than the agent, of observation. An actor can mug his way through a fairly long string of parties and fashion shows before he is accused of overexposure and ridiculed; a writer hits that threshold sooner. ”Then his subsequent work isn’t looked at directly, but through the glare of all that publicity,”
.. Think David Letterman with a postgraduate degree and diction, and you get at least some idea of the sensibility.
.. Wallace is intentionally vague on this period of his life, and what he divulges sometimes contradicts the recollections of friends. He says he never formally entered a recovery program; Alice Turner says he did. He mentions a single suicide scare and subsequent stay in a psychiatric ward; friends allude to more than one.
.. Before moving back to Illinois, he became involved for a time with the writer Mary Karr, author of ”The Liar’s Club,” and had her name tattooed on his upper arm. He blames himself for the brevity of his attachments. ”I’m massively selfish about my work, and I don’t seem to be able to be very polite or considerate about other people’s feelings,” he says.
.. Back in Illinois, he began to attend Sunday services at various churches around town — there is something about religious faith, which was missing from his rearing by two atheists, that entices and calms him — and he formed his closest social relationship with an older, married couple, Doug and Erin Poag. They met at a Mennonite house of worship.