David Foster Wallace

Perhaps someday we’ll be offered an explanation for why David Foster Wallace took his life on Sept. 12, but any reader can see how his fiction had, in recent years, moved into greater darkness. “Infinite Jest,” though “sad” in accordance with its author’s stated intentions, bubbled with humor and the sort of creative energy that is a kind of hope, the belief that, in the telling, the tale might redeem what is told. The story collection “Oblivion,” the last book of fiction Wallace published before his death, shows character after character flailing away at the impossible task of making life endurable. While Don Gately and Hal Incandenza, the heroes (more or less) of the novel “Infinite Jest,” fight to stay on the road through the desert, the men and women of “Oblivion” mostly can’t manage to convince themselves that such a road exists.

None of them more so than Neal, the suicidal narrator of “Good ol’ Neon,” a man who, we learn at the end, is based on a former classmate of Wallace’s. The story’s final paragraph sums up the preceding 40 pages as the thoughts flickering through Wallace’s mind as he glimpses the dead man’s photo while flipping through his high school yearbook. It’s impossible to resist the idea that the fictional Neal’s motivations in ending his life — he regards himself as utterly “calculating” and “fraudulent” — were Wallace’s own, but such conclusions would only have multiplied the author’s despair.

Wallace believed, I think, that one way out of Neal’s labyrinthine artificiality, out of his preoccupation with selling “a certain image” of himself to every person he met, was to practice a rigorous, imaginative compassion. If Wallace could persuade himself that he was able to conjure even an inkling of Neal’s inner life, then he, at least, might feel a little less alone. By getting it down on paper, he could further subdue that loneliness in other people, as other writers had subdued it in him. This was, in part, literature’s purpose, a task to which it was uniquely suited. Perhaps, at times, it also became Wallace’s purpose, and kept him alive a little longer as a result. So if we decide that “Good ol’ Neon” is primarily about Wallace’s own suffering, we betray him. That would amount to insisting that no matter how hard he tried to escape, he remained trapped in himself, concerned only with himself.

Perhaps in the end, that’s what he thought, but he was wrong. He was my favorite living writer, and I know I have plenty of company in that. His detractors accused him of being show-offy, of calling attention to his own cleverness, but they, too, were wrong. He meant, with his footnotes and his digressions, to acknowledge the agonies of self-consciousness and the “difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know.” Point taken. Still, I read about his characters, each tennis prodigy and recovering addict and transvestite hooker and yuppie and ad exec and game show contestant and closeted political aide, and thought: Hey, I know you. Maybe it was an illusion — Wallace would have been the first to admit as much — but it made me feel less alone, too.

I interviewed Wallace once, in 1996, and communicated with him occasionally over the intervening years. A reader once asked me to ask him to write a letter to a gravely ill friend, and he did. I don’t doubt that those who knew him better, including his many students, can further testify to his kindness and generosity. Really, though, I knew him as a reader knows a writer. I thought I could see him, even if he couldn’t see me, even if he couldn’t (clearly) see himself. Again, less alone.

Every author wants to sell books, to please his or her publisher, to reap critical accolades and to bask in the admiration of colleagues, and Wallace did want those things, at the same time that he was more than a little embarrassed by such desires and acutely aware of the fact that none of it could make him happy. However, all great writers — and I have no doubt that he was one — have a preeminent purpose: to tell the truth. David Foster Wallace’s particular vocation was to allow us to see just how fraught and complicated, how difficult yet how necessary, that telling had become — not just for him, but for all of us. What will we do without him?

The Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign became better known to readers outside the Los Angeles area when it appeared in Jonathan Lethem’s 2007 novel, “You Don’t Love Me Yet.” In that book, the main character, a musician named Lucinda, can see the sign from the window of her apartment: “The two images presented not so much a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot-based philosophical system. This was Lucinda’s oracle: one glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she’d delegated to the foot god.”

The sign also appears to have inspired a passage in “The Pale King,” the final, unfinished novel by the late David Foster Wallace, published last month. Wallace relocates the sign to Chicago and changes its appearance somewhat, so that one side depicts the name and telephone number of the podiatry clinic while the other features “a huge colored outline of a human foot.” As in “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” aimless young people — in this case, college students who can see the sign from their dorm room — use the rotation as a “wheel-of-fortune” to determine the evening ahead, depending on which side is facing them when the sign is turned off at the end of the day. “If it stopped with the foot facing our windows,” the narrator explains, “we would take it as a ‘sign’ (with the incredibly obvious double-entendre) and immediately blow off any homework or supposed responsibility we had.”

In an eerie coincidence, Lethem, formerly of Brooklyn, N.Y, is now the Roy E. Disney Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif. — the same position Wallace held when he died in 2008. He doubts that Wallace ever read “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” given the major depression his predecessor was wrestling with when it was published. Instead, he believes that they were both inspired by local legend.

“When I was researching my novel,” he said, “I visited L.A., and at one point I was driving down Sunset Boulevard with someone who’d agreed to be a source on the area. I laid eyes on the sign, and asked about it, and that’s when the Happy Foot/Sad Foot lore was unfolded for me. I was aware when I used it that I was keying into a Silver Lake meme — a non-Internet meme, that is. Later, a friend met a guy who had a Happy Foot tattoo, and got a photo of that for me.”

The sign has also been immortalized in a song by the Eels, “Sad Foot Sign” (bemoaning one of the increasingly frequent occasions when the sign is broken and therefore no longer rotating), and in a short animated video, “Happy Foot vs. Sad Foot.” The musician Beck is also rumored to believe in its divinatory powers, and locals have been known to dress up in foot costumes for Halloween.

The sign’s literary legacy would appear to be rather more exalted, however, and — who knows? — it could even achieve the cult, in-joke status of the “Wilhelm scream,” a sound effect that has been inserted into hundreds of movies by puckish sound editors since it was first recorded in 1951. Of course, it’s a lot easier to slip a brief yell into a cacophonous soundtrack without calling undue attention to the thing; casually introducing a rotating podiatry sign into any novel set in L.A. is a taller order. Lethem, when asked if he would like to see other Angeleno writers rise to the challenge and find a way to work the bipolar anthropomorphized feet into their fiction, said, “It would be nice to see it become universal.”

Further reading

An article about the Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign in Boing Boing

“Happy Foot vs. Sad Foot” animated video

“Sad Foot Sign” by the Eels

A (highly recommended) transcript and audio recording of a segment on the Wilhelm scream from the radio program “On the Media”

Since Wallace never envisioned this novel as observing a conventional plot, “The Pale King” doesn’t seem especially incomplete. It was always hard to find the figure in the carpet of his fiction and very easy to enjoy the individual sections, so in a way the reader is let off the hook. You don’t feel obliged to get a handle on what it all means and are free to let the sum of the parts amount to more than their total.

This also turns out to be a fitting form for the novel’s subject, which is the lives of several men and women working at a regional Internal Revenue Service office in Peoria, Ill., in the mid-1980s. As a summary, this could not sound more tedious, but as a book it could hardly be more engaging. “The Pale King” is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying and rousing. It feels less intently worked than Wallace’s 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” and is much better ventilated than his last short story collection, “Oblivion.” (When talking to a friend, I once inadvertently referred to that collection as “Obsidian,” an understandable malaprop; it’s a stony book, if a darkly glossy one.)

One of the novel’s characters is a rookie named David Foster Wallace, who steps in with the occasional first-person chapter to explain that the book in the reader’s hands is “in point of fact, more like a memoir than any kind of made-up story,” although “more than this I am legally enjoined from telling you by the refusal of certain members of my family to sign the appropriate legal releases.” The veracity of such claims is made instantly suspect: Surely, the facade of the Peoria REC (regional examination center) is not covered with a gigantic mosaic resembling a 1040 form? The feckless “Wallace” gets mistaken for some far more exalted personage with the same name and as a result finds himself plunged into a “very high-level” presentation on “the Minimum Tax on Preferences, which evidently had its origin in the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson.”

The “David Foster Wallace” chapters come amply footnoted and resemble the quintessential David Foster Wallace text, right down to the hilariously exhaustive explication of the traffic problems at the entrance to the REC’s parking lot and tirades against the “me-firsters” who try to circumvent the jam by driving on the shoulder (hilarious because it describes exactly the sort of thing many of us obsess about). There are also third-person accounts of first-day orientations, barroom confessions, vignettes from the childhoods of the other tax-form examiners (or “wigglers”), lore about the office ghosts, conversations whose participants and settings must be deduced by the reader, the adventures of one Claude Sylvanshine, a “fact psychic” whose mind is perpetually invaded by trivial information, and some transcribed interviews for a documentary about IRS workers whose ultimate purpose is a bit mysterious.

As has often been repeated, “The Pale King” is “about boredom,” although that is only where it starts. It’s also about the transformation of America from a stakeholder society in which citizens view themselves as active, responsible participants into a consumer market in which people simply demand value for money. (“Big Q,” Wallace’s notes read, “is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one.”) And it’s also about existential dread and loneliness, which “David Foster Wallace” suspects of being at the root of the human aversion to boredom, because humanity seeks “enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there … Right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size.”

The wigglers respond to the “unbelievable tedium” of their work in several ways. Some simply endure. Others, like “David Foster Wallace,” dive so deeply into the arcana of “the Service” (as it calls itself) that they find drama in its hierarchies and the rare savants who can master them. Another, Shane Drinion, even appears to have achieved a state of serene, zen-like detachment.

But I like to think that the moral center of the book is the long narrative of Chris Fogle, who describes his transformation from a “nihilistic child” (aka, average wastrel college student) to a sort of ninja of the recondite. He’s nudged toward this transition (which amounts to a reconciliation with the stoic virtues of his once-disdained, quintessentially Midwestern father) when he enters the wrong classroom and hears a lecture intended for CPA candidates. The rivetingly self-possessed speaker galvanizes him by explaining that all familiar forms of heroism are empty because they are “all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience. An audience.”

“Gentlemen,” the nameless lecturer goes on, “welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. … Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.” After receiving this revelation, Fogle embraces the motto of the Service — whose name takes on a quasi-religious quality as the book goes on — which translates to “He is the one doing a difficult, unpopular job.” (Need I add that this is not the real motto of the IRS?)

The work of the IRS is indeed all this: excruciatingly boring, absolutely necessary, completely uncelebrated and widely loathed. Wallace’s notes indicate that Chris Fogle supposedly possesses a magical number (shades of “Lost”!) that, once recited, gives the speaker the power to concentrate on anything, indefinitely. Attention is another of the novel’s themes. We struggle to make our minds do what they need and ought to do, and more often than not we fail. Surely Wallace — in his own long, doomed struggle with depression — knew this all too well. Yet, as Pietsch observes in an endnote, “nowhere in the chapters we have does Fogle display this power.”

Maybe Wallace thought better of the idea, or perhaps he meant for Fogle to renounce that magic number, to decide it’s better to do what needs to be done the hard way. If “Oblivion” described the struggle of human beings to find meaning in their suffering, the “The Pale King” seems intended to plumb the meaning of boredom, a phenomenon usually defined by its meaninglessness. In his notes, Wallace explains that Shane Drinion has found a way to “the other side of crushing, crushing boredom” where there awaits a state of “constant bliss in every atom.” But he doesn’t say how Drinion did it, and now he’s gone, leaving the world so much less meaningful. What is there left for the rest of us to do but follow the example of Chris Fogle and gut it out?

The profile never ran (Rolling Stone sent Lipsky off to write about heroin addicts in the Pacific Northwest instead), and the interview went unused until last year, when Lipsky had the mournful task of writing about the last weeks of Wallace’s life; the author killed himself in September 2008. Still, that left five days’ worth of 1996 material largely untapped at a time when hunger for Wallace’s words and thoughts has never been keener. “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace” is a book-length transcript of those three days, an engaging and occasionally frustrating record of an extended conversation between two young men who had no idea that, 12 years later, the literary world they took for granted would melt away and one of them would be dead by his own hand.

The posthumous transformation of Wallace’s reputation has been a disconcerting thing to behold. In 2008, he hadn’t published a novel since “Infinite Jest,” and his final short story collection, “Oblivion,” was filled with riches, but bleak ones, and a strenuous harvest to boot. His nonfiction, always more popular and accessible than his fiction, was no longer sensationally fresh. The moment for fat, formally adventurous novels designed to capture the historical moment seemed past, if for no other reason than that the media institutions required to launch such books — the New York Times, Time and Newsweek, etc. — had lost much of their authority. The kind of fiction Wallace wrote had begun to drift toward the cultural margins, and in August 2008 anyone nominating him as the most significant American writer of his time was more likely to have encountered raised eyebrows and sneers about “pomo cleverness” than appreciative nods.

Wallace’s death was tragic, but the actual tragedy has been further wrapped in a mantle of hysterical pop tragedy, that process by which virtually any self-destroying celebrity is transubstantiated into the avatar of each fan’s personal misery. (Special bonus irony: Who would be perfect to write about this metamorphosis? David Foster Wallace!) He’s also been reincarnated in the public’s imagination as a dispenser of inspirational wisdom, largely thanks to the circulation of the commencement speech he made at Kenyon College in 2005 (published in gift book format as “This Is Water”).

The latter role would probably have made Wallace himself cringe, but it’s not a bad fit. He was always burrowing down to the moral roots of whatever he wrote about. The best passages in “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself” show him doing just that with Lipsky, whether the subject is film (David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” was a turning point) or the likelihood that he’d behaved like a “prick” as experimentalist in the University of Arizona’s realism-dominated creative writing program. To read what Wallace has to say about fiction’s mission — that its task is to surmount “loneliness,” to illustrate the “toxicity” in the idea that “pleasure and comfort are … really the ultimate goal and meaning of life” — is as exhilarating as ever.

For the most part, Lipsky makes a worthy partner in these wide-ranging discussions, which took place in diners, pizza parlors, airport lounges and bookstores as well as during long drives across the icy Midwestern landscape around Bloomington, Ill., where Wallace lived at the time. They talk about books, movies, music and family.

And Wallace did get his wish in a way; the book winds up being an expression of Lipsky’s preoccupations almost as much as Wallace’s, an unwitting self-profile of the interlocutor at age 30. He was four years younger than Wallace, had published two novels to good reviews and had spent seven financially catastrophic years trying to live off of his fiction before turning to journalism. Lipsky is dogged in his efforts to get Wallace to talk about how great it feels to be so widely celebrated and well-reviewed, to make the bestseller list and read to packed houses on a multi-city book tour. Isn’t he “thrilled”? Isn’t it “exciting”? Wasn’t it “fun”? And Wallace keeps telling him, over and over, that it’s “nice” but he’s trying not to think about it too much because “I gotta be very careful about how much of this stuff I take inside.”

We now know Wallace wasn’t entirely honest with Lipsky. After suffering a suicidal breakdown in 1989, he began taking the antidepressant Nardil. (He led Lipsky to believe that he rejected such drugs and he also claimed not to be “biochemically depressed.”) In 2007, during a period of what Wallace’s friend Jonathan Franzen called “optimism, happiness and strength,” he decided to go off the drug. Unfortunately, Wallace’s depression returned in a form that resisted all treatment, including Nardil.

Wallace believed that his earlier despair was in part a hangover from the success of his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” and the relative failure of the short story collection that followed it, “Girl With Curious Hair.” He’d also reached the end of a creative arc with “Girl,” and concluded that “writing was empty and just all a game … You get all that affirmation from the exterior that, when you’re a young person, you think will make everything all right. … It fucked with my sort of ‘metaphysics of living’ in an incredibly deep way.”

“Infinite Jest” was Wallace’s resurrection. “I’ve finally discovered I really love to write this stuff. I really love to work hard.” In his conversations with Lipsky, he couldn’t have been more clear about perceiving the accolades and attention that the younger writer coveted as a threat: “I’m so terrified that this [i.e., being profiled by Rolling Stone] is going to somehow twist me. Or turn me into somebody whose hunger for approval keeps it from being fun.” Nevertheless, Lipsky kept prodding him to say “something positive” about his fame, and Wallace kept patiently deflecting him, finally announcing, “I’m serious, man — this would have been over a day ago if you hadn’t been somebody who writes novels.”

Wallace did lose his temper just once, when Lipsky accused him of pretending to be less “smart” than he actually was, like an adult holding back while playing in a kid’s softball game. It’s an utterly ambiguous moment — Wallace gives every sign of being hurt, which temporarily shuts down the conversation, but Lipsky’s suspicion that he’s been patronized and his courage in saying so can’t be summarily dismissed. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that after this turning point the interview feels more forthright and searching.

In his introduction to “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” Lipsky writes that when he pulled out these transcripts a year after Wallace’s death, “one thing kept touching me: We were both so young.” The text is studded with contemporary interjections noting that this independent bookstore has since shuttered, that literary publication has folded. The cultural apparatus that made the ascension of “Infinite Jest” possible no longer exists. All that’s left now are the words on the page — and on the pages of “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” too, with the voices they conjure of two writers talking, talking, talking as they drive through the night.