Conversations with David Foster Wallace

Young Writers and the TV Reality

73 Young Writers and the TV Reality Donn Fry/1997 From Seattle Times, 6 March 1997. © 1997 by The Seattle Times Co. Reprinted by Permission. There’s just no getting around it, as far as David Foster Wallace is concerned: Reality ain’t what it used to be. After all, fiction writers of his generation—Wallace is thirty-five—were raised in an environment in which the average American family spends six hours a day in front of the television. He sees that reflected in myriad ways: young people’s diffident, inarticulate conversations—or lack of them; their preference for visual imagery over the printed page; their acceptance of fractured, bite-size storytelling techniques in place of the leisurely narratives of an earlier generation of writers. “I was born in 1962, and the first serious disciplinary run-in I had with my parents was over the amount of television I was watching,” said Wallace, picking through a room-service breakfast in his Seattle hotel as he contemplated the state of American fiction. He had arrived frazzled at 3 a.m. and, he admitted, watched a little TV “to unwind.” “We are surrounded by narrative: every television show, every movie, every commercial,” Wallace said. “They all have a very clear agenda—not one that’s mine—but I’ve absorbed literally hundreds of thousands of hours of very skillful manipulation. “As a result, I’m far less trusting of standard narrative techniques.” He means that the “backyard-barbecue and three-martini” mother lode of American realism mined by an earlier generation of writers—writers from Updike Country—simply fails to connect with him, either as writer or reader. Rather, Wallace is a descendant of that subversive, anarchic branch of American literature (“Nabokov’s children,” he calls them) that began veering 74 CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE off the main stem in the 1960s: novelists such as Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow), John Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor), Robert Coover (The Public Burning), William Gaddis (J R, The Recognitions) and—Wallace’s favorite— Don DeLillo (White Noise, Libra). Wallace’s own techno-media-savvy approach to fiction is best exempli- fied by his massive (1,079-page), grandly chaotic-comedic tour de force, In- finite Jest, which was published last year to lavish critical praise and has just been released in paperback (Back Bay/Little, Brown, 14.95). It’s also a subject he addresses in his new collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown, 23.95). “For younger writers (today), TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We literally cannot imagine life without it,” declares Wallace in one essay. While acknowledging the downside of America’s fixation with television, he declines to join in disdainful pummeling of the medium: Though I’m convinced that television today lies . . . behind a genuine crisis for U.S. culture and literature,” he writes in the lively, irreverent style that characterizes both his fiction and criticism, “I do not agree with reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes. Yet, ironically, he would seem to see evidence every day that supports the “anti-TV paranoia” he bemoans. When not writing fiction and essays, Wallace teaches literature and creative writing at Illinois State University—and tries to fathom an even younger generation that often appears to have abandoned the written word altogether. “My students don’t like to read,” acknowledged Wallace, who himself projects the air of a brainy, intense but good-humored grad student, in his rumpled jeans, wire-rimmed specs and uncooperative long hair. “They’ll say it’s boring, but what they really mean is that it’s too hard, the ratio of work to pleasure is too high.” Students who don’t like to read also don’t like to write. One fears for the next generation of American fiction writers—and Wallace is not reassuring, detecting “an inherent hostility” to well-crafted composition. “The bigger problem with college students is that in high school they have been taught something called ‘expressive writing’—where any thought you have is considered good and valid—and you have to convince them that DONN FRY / 1997 75 just because it’s their opinion...