Conversations with David Foster Wallace

209 Pages·2012·1.05 MB·English

by  Stephen J. Burn

Conversations
with David Foster Wallace
Literary Conversations Series
Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
General Editor
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Conversations with
David Foster Wallace
Edited by Stephen J. Burn
University Press of Mississippi Jackson
Books by David Foster Wallace
The Broom of the System. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1987.
Girl with Curious Hair. New York: Norton, 1989.
With Mark Costello. Signifying Rappers. New York: Ecco, 1990.
Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, 1996.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Boston: Little, 1997.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Boston: Little, 1999.
Up, Simba! Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate. Boston: Little, 2000.
Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞. New York: Norton, 2003.
Oblivion. Boston: Little, 2004.
Consider the Lobster. Boston: Little, 2005.
McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of
Actual Reporters, Thinking about Hope. Fwd. Jacob Weisberg. Boston: Back-Little, 2008.
This Is Water. Boston: Little, 2009.
Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. Ed. Steven M. Cahn and Maureen Eckert.
Introd. James Ryerson New York: Columbia UP 2011.
The Pale King. Ed. Michael Pietsch. Boston: Little, 2011.
www.upress.state.ms.us
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association
of American University Presses.
“Approaching Infinity,” an interview with David Foster Wallace conducted by Caleb Crain,
originally published in The Boston Globe, Copyright © 2003 by Caleb Crain, used with per-
mission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2012
∞
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conversations with David Foster Wallace / edited by Stephen J. Burn.
p. cm. — (Literary conversations series)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61703-226-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-227-1
(pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-228-8 (ebook) 1. Wallace, David Foster—Interviews.
2. Authors, American—20th century—Interviews. I. Burn, Stephen.
PS3573.A425635Z66 2012
813’.54—dc23 2011027372
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Contents
Introduction ix
Chronology xix
David Foster Wallace: A Profile 3
William R. Katovsky / 1987
A Whiz Kid and His Wacky First Novel 8
Helen Dudar / 1987
Looking for a Garde of Which to Be Avant: An Interview with
David Foster Wallace 11
Hugh Kennedy and Geoffrey Polk / 1993
An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace 21
Larry McCaffery / 1993
The Next Big Thing: Can a Downstate Author Withstand the Sensation
over His 1,079-Page Novel? 53
Mark Caro / 1996
The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace 58
Laura Miller / 1996
The Wasted Land 66
David Streitfeld / 1996
David Foster Wallace Winces at the Suggestion That His Book Is Sloppy in
Any Sense 70
Anne Marie Donahue/1996
v
vi CONTENTS
Young Writers and the TV Reality 73
Donn Fry / 1997
The “Infinite Story” Cult Hero behind the 1,079-Page Novel Rides the Hype
He Skewered 76
Matthew Gilbert / 1997
David Foster Wallace 82
Tom Scocca / 1998
David Foster Wallace: In the Company of Creeps 89
Lorin Stein / 1999
David Foster Wallace Warms Up 94
Patrick Arden / 1999
Mischief: A Brief Interview with David Foster Wallace 101
Chris Wright / 1999
Behind the Watchful Eyes of Author David Foster Wallace 104
Mark Shechner / 2000
Conversation with David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers 110
John O’Brien / 2000
Approaching Infinity 121
Caleb Crain / 2003
To the Best of Our Knowledge: Interview with David Foster Wallace 127
Steve Paulson / 2004
The Connection: David Foster Wallace 136
Michael Goldfarb / 2004
Interview with David Foster Wallace 152
Didier Jacob / 2005
Just Asking . . . David Foster Wallace 158
Christopher John Farley / 2008
CONTENTS vii
The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace 161
David Lipsky / 2008
Index 183
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Introduction
“I’m wretched at interviews,” David Foster Wallace told me in a letter sent
late in the summer of 2007, “and will do them only under big duress.”1 Wal-
lace’s discomfort with interviews makes sense on multiple levels. His con-
cern about public revelation is reasonable in terms of the overall arc of his
career, which shuttled between what Wallace called the “schizophrenia of
attention” and the despondency of private torment (Stein). Equally, his the-
matic obsessions—self consciousness, the difficult exchange economy that
exists between characters’ interior landscapes and the world around them—
draw on the same energies that might be located in the interview process. Fi-
nally, one of Wallace’s signature techniques for revealing character through
dialogue—the one-sided conversation, which we might call the belled inter-
view, after a term coined for Nabokov’s critique of telephone conversations
where the reader hears only one speaker2—turned the mechanics of an in-
terview into a central focus of Wallace’s middle-period fiction (Infinite Jest
[1996] and Brief Interviews [1999]). This nexus of imaginative activity made
the set-piece of an interview something more than a polite formality for
Wallace, a pursuit that could not be coolly divorced from creative practice.
But there were clearly more personal reasons why Wallace became reticent
about interviews. After he became engulfed in the media storm surround-
ingInfinite Jest, Wallace wrote to Don DeLillo about the experience:
If you try to be unpretentious and candid, a reporter comments on the unpre-
tentious, candid persona you’ve adopted for the interview. It ends up being lonely
and wildly depressing. And strange. I had guys in my house (a tactical error). . . .
The guy from the Post . . . who’s become a friend because he was my first interview
and I was wildly indiscreet about stuff like drug histories . . . and he stopped me in
the middle and patiently explained certain rules about what to tell reporters . . .3
Yet good advice might only lessen, not eradicate, personal intrusion. When
Frank Bruni interviewed Wallace for New York Times Magazine, he felt
obliged to chronicle the contents of the novelist’s medicine cabinet (“his
bathroom contains special tooth polish to combat the effects of the tobacco
ix