Picketing the Zeitgeist: DFW: The Normal Years

The first time I laid eyes on David was in December 1992 in a New York City hotel room. We were interviewing candidates for a fiction writing position at that year’s MLA convention. As chair of the Illinois State University English Department, I presided over the interviews, about a dozen of them, as I recall, several involving writers with more imposing writing credentials than David had at the time.

Of course, we interviewed and eventually hired the pre-Infinite Jest (1996) David Foster Wallace. But we were struck by the early genius evident in his first novel, The Broom of the System (1987), written as an Amherst undergraduate thesis, and his follow up short story collection, Girl with Curious Hair (1989). He had also contributed three fine essays to Dalkey Archive Press’s Review of Contemporary Fiction, whose forthcoming Younger Writers Issue featured David (along with William T. Vollmann and Susan Daitch). Published in summer 1993, just before he joined our faculty, that issue included David’s landmark essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” his now famous interview with Larry McCaffery, and a brief selection from his novel-in-progress Infinite Jest. The issue quickly became a collector’s item.

We had just attracted Dalkey and RCF to our department the year before, where they joined American Book Review, the innovative fiction press FC2, and a few other presses and journals as part of a center we were developing that combined the creation, reception, and publishing of innovative literature (the center became the Unit for Contemporary Literature). David shared our excitement about the project and eagerly accepted a part-time assignment with Dalkey. Sure, that assignment was designed in part to reduce his teaching load, but David took it seriously, editing a special “Quo Vadis” issue of RCF (“The Future of Fiction,” Spring 1996) and vetting several Dalkey fiction translations.

None of us, David in particular, could have predicted the media sensation Infinite Jest and its young author would become. Yet, in Bloomington-Normal, where he lived among us for almost a decade (1993–2002), his fame went virtually unnoticed. Indeed, he was much more likely to be recognized walking the streets of New York City than in Bloomington-Normal, where he could eat undisturbed at his favorite restaurants, including the Garden of Paradise, where he discussed a film version of Infinite Jest with Gus van Zant, and that Denny’s on Oakland Avenue he acknowledges in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999). BloNo was “a good place” to continue his writing career, he told David Lipsky in the five-day interview that, transcribed, became Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (2010). “‘Cause, ‘cause I’m left alone here. And I also have a set of friends who like me for reasons that don’t have anything to do with this [his writing]. Which is a real precious thing. Yeah, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Pete Rose once said that he was just like everyone else with two legs, two arms, and four thousand hits. Similarly, David’s Normal years were comparatively normal, like anyone else’s with a genius IQ and a famous book to their credit. His depression was under control, his substance abuse behind him, and he was as content as someone of his complex mental makeup could ever be. His decade here was his most productive period, during which he completed Infinite Jest and finished or began almost everything of note he published over the rest of his life. His behavior in no way implied a “tortured genius,” friends never worried about his mental health or psychological well-being, and he accomplished his best work, not despite his illness, but, as he suggested to Lipsky, because he had found a way not to let it “drive.”

A major strength of The End of the Tour (2015), the recent film adaptation of Lipsky’s book, is that it avoids the temptation to portray David’s life as “a romantic, lurid, tormented-artist thing,” the representation he most resisted. Had the film’s accomplished young director James Ponsoldt...