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76 The “Infinite Story” Cult Hero behind 1,079-Page Novel Rides the Hype He Skewered Matthew Gilbert/1997 From Boston Globe, 9 April 1997. © 1997 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted by permission . There is The Thing, plunked down in the coliseum of our consciousness. There is The Viewer of this Thing, sitting in the stands, hand on chin. And there is The Viewer of The Viewer of The Thing—the postmodernist metaphysician hovering in the helicopter above, discussing the way people watch. And then, somewhere out in the cosmos, watching the watcher watch himself watching, talking about talking about talking, there is David Foster Wallace, novelist, essayist, recovering ironist, and wizard of giddy self-consciousness . Wallace is the writer best known for a multitiered novel called Infinite Jest that weighs in at 1,079 pages, 96 of which are footnotes in a section at the end. When Infinite Jest was released last year, the critics dubbed it a Pynchonesque work of genius and “The Grunge American Novel,” and trend writers called Wallace the post-Brat-Pack-premillennial Jay McInerney and the voice of Generation X, despite his age, which is thirty-five. He became the hero of grad students and alternative readers everywhere, including the Internet, where there are websites devoted to him. Now, the more affordable paperback of Infinite Jest has arrived in bookstores , along with an exhilarating new collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, and the press-phobic Wallace is doing the promotional circuit once again, exposing himself to more media generalization and imprecision and hype out of loyalty to his publisher, Little, Brown. MAT THEW GILBERT / 1997 77 Wallace is a strapping Illinoisan whose brown hair leaks out from a loose ponytail. Like his prose, his interviewee style is maximalist and filled with sub-commentary, with Wallace repeatedly qualifying his statements and simultaneously conducting a review of his interviewer’s interviewing style, which he calls “psychiatric.” Nothing is simple to Wallace, and a question on his feelings about his year in the American hype machine yields first a preresponse and then a gaggle of responses. “Do you want a univocal answer?” he asks. “Because I can pretend as if I feel one way about it. But, of course, the reality is that at last count I feel about fifty-three different ways.” For the sake of the concision of daily journalism, he is granted four feelings about becoming famous. — Feeling No. 1, edited down: “I think the book is the best thing I’ve ever done, and I’m proud of it, and it was an extremely pleasant surprise to have it get a lot of attention, and some of that is absolutely great.” — Feeling No. 2: “I’m also someone who has problems with self-consciousness . There’s part of me that craves attention, but it’s an increasingly small part. I’ve seen attention [mess up] writers I admire. I’m leery of it, and a great deal of the hype occurred at the time when rudimentary arithmetic yields the result that most people haven’t read the book. So it’s hard to take it seriously at the same time that it’s gratifying.” — Feeling No. 3: “I had never been interviewed before. In the first interview I did, I was talking about old girlfriends and who I didn’t like. And this guy shut off the tape recorder halfway through and said, ‘I need to explain a few things to you.’ He put a couple of embarrassing things in his story, but 90 percent of the horrible stuff he didn’t put in out of his own decency. So big feeling number three: This”—his finger points back and forth between us—“is hard.” — Feeling No. 4: “Exquisite irony, because a lot of the book is about hype and spin and position. So it’s really an enormous cosmic joke. It’s like, OK kid, you want to learn a little bit about hype? Have a taste from the big boys’ drinking fountain. And not a big gulp, because I’m well aware of where books exist in the consciousness of the culture. I thought I was very sophisticated and had learned a lot about hype from TV. But it’s entirely different. The cliché that getting a lot of attention is not the same as getting a lot of affection takes on new dimensions when...

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