Where were you when the first plane hit the World Trade Center? David Foster Wallace—the experimental novelist who grew up in Illinois; who wrote Infinite Jest, which established him as the most influential author of his generation; and who committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46—was in the shower of his Bloomington-Normal home, listening to a Bears postmortem on WSCR.
With the publication of D. T. Max’s Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, the first full biography of Wallace, we can start to answer such questions. In 2009, Max wrote a very good profile of the author for the New Yorker, and his book makes it even clearer that, from the beginning, Wallace struggled with his mental health—that he was always the smartest kid in the room, and also the most troubled.
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By the time he enrolled in high school, Wallace was smoking prodigious amounts of pot. It made tennis and any other high-level cardio impossible, but at least it calmed him down. He had begun suffering from occasional anxiety attacks and a near-constant sense of self-loathing. “Feet too thin and narrow,” he wrote in one early note dug up by Max. “Thighs squnch out repulsively.”
It’s no surprise, then, that when Wallace got to Amherst, his father’s alma mater, he won more awards and prizes than any student in the college’s nearly 200-year history. Max’s account of Wallace the student provides some of his book’s best passages. Far from home, the young polymath began to stand out, studying with his dad’s former profs and even writing a senior thesis on philosophy. But he also discovered fiction. Max tells one story about a friend tossing Wallace a copy of Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern satire The Crying of Lot 49—”like Bob Dylan finding Woody Guthrie,” in the words of Mark Costello, another student and one of Wallace’s two best friends. Wallace ended up writing a second senior thesis, a novel called The Great Ohio Desert, working the whole time with a picture of Pynchon pinned up on the wall.
By 1991, Wallace was working feverishly on his second novel. He settled on some familiar settings (a tennis academy, a halfway house) and some new themes. Where Broom of the System was a novel primarily aware of and amused by its own novelness, Infinite Jest confronted the universal: addiction, the cultural obsession with irony, and the way that, in the end, the pursuit of pleasure could only stoke the need for more pleasure.
Wallace clearly influenced the farm kids. But how did the farm kids influence him? To consider this question, we might move past Max’s biography to a theory of Jonathan Franzen’s. Franzen grew up in a suburb of Saint Louis, and an interviewer once asked him about his own relationship to the midwest. He replied that it had offered him “a prolongation of innocence.” “Something about not having had a clue when other people the same age were already getting a clue,” he continued, “produces both a sense of optimism and a kind of reactive curdled cynicism. You become more worldly in response to not having been worldly enough.”
Max’s treatment of the midwest hints at a larger problem with his book. Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story fails to bring much subtlety to its issues of interpretation—not just Wallace and the midwest, but Wallace and religion and Wallace and literary history. It also fails to tell a story of its own. Most biographies begin with a key moment or idea before flashing back to the beginning and later revisiting that turning point. Even Max’s New Yorker profile centers on Wallace’s struggle to follow up Infinite Jest. But his book starts at Wallace’s birth and simply plods along. It rarely pauses to explain what unifies Wallace’s life or why we should care, and the result sometimes reads like a book-length Wikipedia entry.
