Conversations with David Foster Wallace

The Connection: David Foster Wallace

136 The Connection: David Foster Wallace Michael Goldfarb/2004© 2004 by WBUR and The Connection. Reprinted by permission. GOLDFARB: Here are some things we know about author David Foster Wallace. He is from the Midwest, but currently lives in Southern California . He knows more about mathematics than most of us, and he’s a tennis player of some quality. And for better or worse, for richer or poorer, whether he wants to be or not, he has been handed the mantle of writer of his generation, the person among his peers most likely to write the great American novel. His last novel was Infinite Jest, a thousand-page excursion into twelve-step programs, terrorism, and other stuff, and it was published in 1996. His latest work is a collection of stories, some short others not so short, called Oblivion. The stories show an interest in the work world of media , and also the panicked world of ordinary life where substitute teachers go barking mad and babies suffer accidents that boggle their parents’ minds. We’re talking about the work and worldview of David Foster Wallace in this hour. With me in the studio is David Foster Wallace. Hi. WALLACE: Hello. GOLDFARB: It’s nice to meet you because I have been reading you in a variety of different places for a while now, and it’s nice to have you face to face with me. First of all, just out of curiosity, when did you move to Southern California? WALLACE: I moved there in the summer of 2002. I got a really good teaching job that was just un-turn-downable. GOLDFARB: And you’re living in LA? MICHAEL GOLDFARB / 2004 137 WALLACE: I live between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. GOLDFARB: And is it a place that’s kind of begun to work on your imagination in a different way than being in downstate? WALLACE: I think for the most part I’m just trying to adjust. It’s both very beautiful weather-wise and very, very urban. The place I live in is essentially one great big stripmall. GOLDFARB: Just the perfect environment. A stripmall, presumably, where every single item that’s visible to the naked eye has already been pretested and preplotted by marketing men. WALLACE: I smell a segueway here. GOLDFARB: Yes, thank you David, you’re very helpful. The thing that struck me in the book is how interested you are in the world of work, that nobody else is interested in. Just in the last hour we were talking about gender inequality in the workplace, talking about Walmart. But you’re interested in the way that the work of media, of marketing goes on. It’s something that comes across in the book. Where did that come from? WALLACE: I don’t know. I know that I’m now forty-two, and grew up watching a lot of television and being part of a heavily mediated culture. I think that one of the things that interest me is the fact that, though it does compose our generation’s reality, we don’t often think of it as a human product—the product of human choices, and human thought, and human work. And I think you’re right. I think a lot of people aren’t interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff about media, as much as I am, although on the other hand, I don’t have any particular experience of it, and a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff that I do is made up. GOLDFARB: Yeah, well it’s called fiction. WALLACE: There we go. GOLDFARB: The first story in this collection, Oblivion, is set in a focus group, and it’s imagined, obviously. Why don’t you tell us a bit about the story and maybe read us a bit? 138 CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE WALLACE: This is a long one, called “Mister Squishy,” that originally I’d done pseudonymously as part of a cycle, and the rest of the cycle kind of died. It started out to be a kind of twelve-angry-men jury story—but set in a focus group—and then I got more and more interested in the facilitator, the statistician who’s kind of in charge of the focus group. The focus group is together testing a made-up snack cake called Felonies!© that is due...