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Speaking of literary quantity, I just came across this 8,000+-word 2023 LRB essay on David Foster Wallace and spent way too much time on it before giving up, and I pray that was the author’s meta-point.
Ican list a hundred things David Foster Wallace should have written before he wrote a book about tax accountants. One, and the most obvious, is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels like he doesn’t belong, and eventually Michael Flatley’s head, which has been seeming to grow on a parallel track with his sinister influence, gets microwaved successfully against all known laws of physics, and we have a moment where we hear all his thoughts as Death clogs his failing body through space and time. There. Done. The Pale King never needed to happen, nor all the rest of it.
Though there is one thing we wouldn’t want to lose: a character named Mr Bussy.
That’s how I felt before I read it, anyway. Criticism of the book at the time, less uneasy in its knowledge of Wallace (in fact performed at the peak of his sainthood), mostly centred on one question: Why did he choose to do it? As in, why would you choose to swim the Channel? Why would you lie on a bed of narrative nails? Why would you slip into the bodies of the men in grey flannel, the opaque fathers, the personified footnotes, the data mystics, the codes and by-laws among men? (We’ll get to the women later. If the male IRS worker’s backstory is that he carried a briefcase as an eight-year-old and had hyperhidrosis, the female IRSworker’s backstory is that she was diddled.)
Tax agents. Oh, I feared them. As far back as I can remember, my mother was always being stretched on the rack of something she called ‘an extension’. She saved every receipt she was ever given in a shoebox. Despite her efforts, we were always being audited for priest reasons, and every other year or so I found myself parked in a suffocating van, for hours on end, outside offices just like these. What was happening, was she being interrogated under hot lights? I had a sense of dark-suited agents walking among us, eyes on our daily business – on me, in the minivan, as I waited for my mother. I was a fearful child, as he was. I was also raised in Tornado Alley, with noticeably different results.
The Pale King was found by Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell: a chaos of paper, floppy disks, notebooks, three-ring-binders; words, some typed, some in his tiny handwriting, all adding up to hundreds of pages. There was no direction for its organisation, so they enlisted the help of Michael Pietsch, who ‘had the enormous honour of working with David as his editor on Infinite Jest, and had seen the worlds he’d conjured out of a tennis academy and a rehab centre’. In other words, a saint of 20 lb bond paper, who must have worked in a state of enthralled and transcendent boredom, of the type that Wallace had made it his mission to describe.
Pietsch assures us that had Wallace been in charge of the final product it would not have contained so many instances of the phrase ‘titty-pinching’. Judging by Infinite Jest, it would have contained more. He also offers the wistful hope that it would have contained fewer Doberman hand puppets. Dream on, I fear. But here’s the thing about The Pale King: it was going to be good. It was on its way to being good – in a Mister Squishee truck, on a rural highway, with a long fertile streak out the window. Wallace might have ruined it with his visions of what he called its ‘tornadic structure’. He might have ruined it with its women: the Toni Ware chapter in particular sounds like Cormac McCarthy breaking his hymen on horseback. (RIP.) He might have ruined it with his doubt, which caused him to turn somersaults like a cracked-out fairground child. (‘Is it showing off if you hate it?’ Hal Incandenza asks in Infinite Jest.) But it is there. The version we have stays largely in the personalities, and chapter after chapter, it is the impersonation of someone boring that allows him to rest.
It begins with the flannel plains of Illinois. The year is 1985, and the place is the IRSRegional Examination Centre in Peoria. Something to Do with Paying Attention first appeared as a long monologue in The Pale King – it comes about a quarter of the way through the book as Pietsch placed it – though Wallace had toyed with the idea of publishing it as a stand-alone novella. It is enthralling. ‘From what I understand,’ Chris Fogle says, at the beginning of his video interview, ‘I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career. Where I came from, so to speak, and what the Service means to me.’ He is trapped in the present, he disclaims. The work has had that effect on his mind, so that, ‘If I drank, for instance, some Tang, it wouldn’t remind me of anything – I’d just taste the Tang.’ Then he begins, beginning with his father, beginning with his ‘fairly long hair’, to remember.
‘Anyhow, all this was in the Chicagoland area in the 1970s, a period that now seems as abstract and unfocused as I was myself.’ He remembers his peace-sign pendant and his parents’ divorce and ‘everyone despising Gerald Ford, not so much for pardoning Nixon but for constantly falling down’. He remembers smoking pot with his mother and her new partner, Joyce, and watching them cry and stroke each other’s hair as they talked about their childhoods. He remembers thinking his father was one of a generation of men who were born to fill out a suit – but he himself was a ‘wastoid’, a nihilist; cycling in and out of three different colleges, marking time by the rotating neon foot he could see through his dorm-room window; feeling that he owned himself only in a pharmaceutical state he called ‘Obetrolling’.
My affinity for Obetrol had to do with self-awareness, which I used to privately call ‘doubling’. It’s hard to explain. I’m still not entirely sure what I meant by this, nor why it seemed so profound and cool to not only be in a room but be totally aware that I was in the room, seated in a certain easy chair in a certain position listening to a certain specific track of an album whose cover was a certain specific combination of colours and designs – being in a state of heightened enough awareness to be able to consciously say to myself, ‘I am in this room right now.’
I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I had once taken one of my brother’s Adderall and then gone to see Django Unchained. (Obetrol was later reformulated as Adderall. It was Andy Warhol’s drug of choice, and it literally does make you want to sell a soup label to someone for a million dollars.)
What makes a wastoid change his life? What could effect such a decision? In Something to Do with Paying Attention, it is a Jesuit who persuades Fogle to it, though it goes without saying that the Jesuit has long since been persuaded to something else. One day in late December 1977, just weeks before his father will be killed in a public transit accident, Fogle stumbles into Advance Tax by mistake and finds himself ‘particularly,uniquely addressed’. He remembers that the Jesuit was wearing a slightly racy watch (as in my experience they will). He lets slip the insider terminology that reveals his secret: he was once a probable ‘IRS wiggler’, who lived in the secular world. ‘Gentlemen, you are called to account,’ he tells them, and Fogle goes out, gets a haircut, and buys a grey wool suit. As in Infinite Jest, the death of Fogle’s father is technically impossible. It is a thing that cannot happen. But to step into your father’s shoes and become him requires just such an event; it requires a conversion experience.
The thing about the ‘I remember’ model is it’s inexhaustible, it can just go on. Recollection engenders recollection. Test it. Remember your local news anchors from when you were a child (mine were Rob Braun and Kit Andrews), describe their hair and cheekbones and your sense that they would never die, and go from there. Sing the jingle for the local pizza place. He is referred to as ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ by the character known as David Wallace, who also says: ‘Given the way the human mind works, it does tend to be small, sensuously specific details that get remembered over time – and unlike some so-called memoirists, I refuse to pretend that the mind works any other way than it really does.’
The cast that surrounds Fogle is large, cartoonish and alive. All of them carry, as if in briefcases, their own small, sensuously specific details. There is the hyperhidrotic David Cusk, a kind of incarnation of the author’s own sweatband. There is the boy contortionist whose project is to put his lips to every part of himself – who ‘did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt, inside.’ There is Merrill Errol Lehrl; I’ll allow it. There is the data mystic, the fact psychic who ‘tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person’s weight, shoe size, bowling average, American Legion career batting average; he knows the dimensions of the room that person is in right now. Overwhelming.’ There is Shane Drinion, the asexual tax monk who might actually be happy, who sits across the table from the ultra-fox Meredith Rand and levitates listening to her talk about her time on a psychiatric ward and her prettiness. And there are multiple David Wallaces. One David Wallace, wet behind the ears, with so notable a skin condition that he has catalogued the different kinds of attention people pay to it, might arrive at the office one morning and be taken for another.
As I read, I thought Wallace must have been taken by something very simple, the smallest sensual fact: that as an IRS worker you are issued a new social security number, in essence a new identity, a chance to start over. The old number, the old life, ‘simply disappeared, from an identification standpoint’. A whole novel could take flesh from that fact, one about the idea of bureaucratic identity as opposed to individual identity: memories, mothers, sideburn phases, the way we see ourselves. That we are, at our core, a person; in the bed of our family, a name; and out in the world, a number. Of course, as so often with Wallace, on actual investigation this turns out not to be true. The fact withdraws itself, and only the epiphany remains.
Why did he turn to it? Because it was impossible, probably – just as Infinite Jest had been to him fifteen years earlier. And when he took on the impossible book, something sometimes happened to him: a run, a state of flow, a pure streak. As those who are prone to them know, these simulate real living, which we are somehow barred from otherwise. ‘I’m deep into something long,’ he wrote to Pietsch in 2006, ‘and it’s hard for me to get back into it when I’m pulled away.’ He developed a habit of not leaving the house, in case he might write that day. ‘Once when I pressed him,’ Pietsch said, ‘he described working on the new novel as like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind.’ As he writes in one of his most typically tall-tale essays, ‘Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley’, he was, as a ‘near-great’ junior tennis player, at his very best in bad conditions. In fiction, he creates them; he serves himself sleet, hail, sun in the eye, all for the chance to play through them. Weather, from the beginning, was his best and most beautiful dimension; he trusted in The Pale King’s tornadic structure to finally lift him up. ‘Derivative Sport’ ends famously with a day on the court, hitting balls with Gil Antitoi. ‘A kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide.’ His life in tennis was spent chasing this moment, he tells us; he has been talking about fiction, too, this whole time. ‘We were young, we didn’t know when to stop. Maybe I was mad at my body and wanted to hurt it, wear it down.’ This funnel of concentration, this tunnel of play between people, rips somehow into the world and becomes force.
Ihave a tender partiality for the work in progress, and have always been electrified by the unfinished novel. My first was a copy of Juneteenth, which I insisted on buying instead of Invisible Man. Invisible Man was finished. The guy was invisible. Next. But Juneteenth held the secret, maybe. It was unbound. It bulged in the hand like a sheaf of papers, and Ellison was still alive in it, the process was ongoing.
David Foster Wallace – man, that name looked great. That’s part of it, right? – David Foster Wallace, colloquially known as DFW, died by suicide in 2008, after years of suffering, sobriety, intractable depression, Nardil and its discontinuation, shock treatment as a last resort; and throughout it all hand-to-the-plough hard work. The Pale King was released in 2011, was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. The lack of an award that year seemed to reproach the others on the list (Karen Russell and Denis Johnson) for still being alive. He didn’t get to finish.
In the ‘Notes and Asides’ at the end of The Pale King, Wallace is alive too; you can hear his voice tilting up with the question marks:
‘Film interview’ a sham? Point is to extract from Chris Fogle the formula of numbers that permits total concentration? Point is he can’t remember – he wasn’t paying attention when he happened to read the series of documents that added up to the string of numbers that, when held in serial in his head, allows him to maintain interest and concentration at will? Has to be sort of tricked into it? Numbers have downside of incredible headache.
His monologue unspools as my mother’s might have, under the hypnosis of hot lights. If ‘“Irrelevant” Chris Fogle’ tells us everything, everything he thinks and feels and remembers, won’t we eventually arrive at the string of numbers that does not bind but sets us free?
I was sceptical of Sarah McNally’s claim, in her brief and somewhat subdued introduction to Something to Do with Paying Attention, that it is ‘not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace’s late style’, but that’s exactly what I found it to be. It is the first time his nostalgia sounded adult to me, looking back at childhood not just as the site of personal formation but as the primal experience of bureaucracy: queues, signs, your own name on the line, textures of waiting-room chairs. Waiting to become what, a person. It was not his childhood, perhaps, but it had some of the same surfaces, colours, engineered fabrics. Time to care about JFK again, or still. A kind of cinematic obsession with the sound of joints sucked in and breath held and the textural impact of gold-orange-green couches, invariably described in his work as ‘nubbly’. Posters and dropped needles and a vacancy in teenage faces, and finally he was far enough away.
Wallace’s idea of publishing it as a stand-alone text must have been born of desperation: he could not get the thing done. ‘But how to get this idea sold?’ he asks in the notes. ‘Is this a plausible plotline?’ He had the who, what, when, where; but the same thing that led these characters to the IRS left them motionless at their desks, what were they there to do, and where could they go from here? ‘Supervisors at the IRS’s regional complex in Lake James township are trying to determine why no one noticed that one of their employees had been sitting dead at his desk for four days before anyone asked if he was feeling all right.’
Perhaps Wallace was writing toward paradise, where the forms are also motionless. ‘Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into colour. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.’ He did not feel that, maybe, but he could make a man who did.
‘I don’t remember what I did with all my real attention, what-all it was going towards,’ Fogle says. It is always underlined in Wallace’s work, it is believed in without qualification or irony: your real attention. What is it, as a substance? An ichor that flows; a kind of beam that illuminates? Is it corrupted to look on the wrong thing? No, it is not corrupted. I would recommend that you read The Pale King in its entirety – it says something about how novels work, and how they don’t work, and how, if you are avoiding life, it is easier sometimes to exist in the very long middle of them. Something to Do with Paying Attention has the spirit of his best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest.
Experiment: use my brain damage to travel back to a time when we did not know this about him.
The memory wipe I experienced after Covid in 2020 extended backwards to 2018. Many who had died became alive again. David Bowie went on again for quite a while, a star painted over his eye. Certain things were very clear: people, places. But many things I had read online were just curiously gone. Betty White was either dead or a landlord. It all merged into a single uneasy datum, like a button under a desk or a composite face.
When I thought of Wallace, I saw two black and white author photos set side by side: one in a trench coat, another turned in profile. I remembered the phrase ‘moving car’, but only because it was something I had written. As for the rest, it was as if it had never happened, or had gone back into that original inch of secrecy between people. All this to say that when I picked up Something to Do with Paying Attention almost at random one morning, I could not have told you with any certainty what it was that he had done.
I did not think, here is the opportunity for a fresh encounter, a chance to read him as he was read back then. I simply picked it up and went on with it, absorbed. Poured out that peculiar quantum, my readerly goodwill. I thought, what is it exactly? He makes people feel they are in real possession of the word ‘volute’, that their vast untapped icebergs of vocabulary and perceptual detritus are readily available to them. His entire personality is present in the word ‘supposedly’ – it is actually frightening. How can the book be separate from the person. What are we reading when we are reading a book. What are we learning when we discover that someone was not good.
We knew he was not benevolent exactly (well, some of us knew) but there was the sense that he was suffering on the same side as us. Why we believed we were reading him for moral instruction in the first place I have no idea, but it did prefigure the primary way we construct morality now: to be paying attention. To everything. That means you. To read him freshly in a time of failure: his, to be loved; mine, to hold all the facts, to have paid enough attention to sit for the test.