Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (35 page)

Now, see, if
I
were to give that answer, you would give me that kind of hurt look of, “Oh, my God, you’re not giving me anything.” It’s hard to talk about this stuff. It’s hard to talk about this stuff.

What did Penner write?

“I hope—this isn’t like what was in your portfolio, I hope it isn’t what you plan to do here, we’d hate to lose you.”

What was the exact quote?

“We were really excited by your portfolio. I hope this isn’t representative of the work you’re hoping to do for us. We’d hate to lose you.” (Right off the top of his head) What I hated about it was how disingenuous it was. You know, if you’re gonna threaten, “if you keep doing this, we’ll kick you out,” say that. But this whole, complex, self-protective, “we’d hate to
lose
you.” It was just representative of those guys, those guys were bitter and they were dishonest. They were helpful in weird ways. I mean they had good stuff to say. But they were … wait. I’m about to come up with a quote. I think it’s Emerson who says, “Who you are shouts so loudly, I cannot hear what you say.” You know?

But then Broom while you were there—how’d you find your agent and get the book sold?

There was a man at Arizona named Robert Boswell. Well, Boswell and I knew each other because I was frantically chasing his ex-girlfriend. He was married by this time, and he knew me as the guy who was like basically just not taking no for an answer from his girlfriend. [How Midwestern and young—the fun of being him and doing that.] And I told him that I had this thing done. And he said, “What you do is, you go to um, you go to the library and get a list of agents,” because there’s some agent’s union book. And to send it to like the first twenty names. Not an accident that my agent, that it’s Fred Hill. I couldn’t find the book, so he gave me his copy. And I wrote off to the agents, and I remember, there was also …

Other writers: taking M.D. and law degrees, getting grants, also getting NEA fellowships—

You think it’d be a little silly not to apply while it still exists. And I’ve applied for a Guggenheim several times, and one of my crazy hopes is that this will help.

Boswell was like a demigod around here. … Robert was such a successful student, he was so successful that he was still around …

So I sent chapters out. And it was real interesting, the variety of responses. Ticknor and Fields said, “I think in a story, either the plot or the characters ought to win. And here neither do, so I’m not passing it on to …” Cork Smith, was that his name? And a lot of letters from agents were like, “Best of luck in your janitorial career.” Or, “Love to read more. You do know of course that our handling fee is X,” and I knew enough to know even then that that was a total scam.

I ended up getting offers, firm offers, from two. And there was this man at Arizona that I liked. He said to go with the West Coast one, because I lived in Tucson, and all those East Coast agents were whores. So I went and had lunch with Fred Hill, who I would not see again for like eight years. And that’s when Fred decided my name would be “David Foster Wallace.” Because “David
Raines
Wallace” wrote for
The New Yorker
. But my real agent was Bonnie, who’d gotten out of Williams the year before I’d gotten out of Amherst, and we knew people in common.

And she’d already started, like, talking like a Jewish mom to me on the phone. Which I have this thing: like, the nearest Jewish mother, I will just simply, like,
attach
myself, just put my arms around her skirt and just attach myself. I don’t know what that means, sort of WASP deprivation or something. And then that was that. And Bonnie had used to work with Gerry.

And there was an auction, and I think Viking won with something like a handful of trading stamps. But … Tom Jenks at Scribner. I just thought he was totally cool and charming. He was a smoothie. I didn’t have any idea that people were nice with any kind of agenda.

So they bought it?

They bought it, it came out. Gerry had a number of very good editorial suggestions, all of which I ignored.

How did it feel when it sold?

It was an incredible thrill. I mean, it sold for, you know, thousands of dollars. I was like, I bought a new car. I was like …

Not
that
car
.

As a matter of fact, yeah.

[I laugh.]

For six thousand dollars, from Budget Rent-A-Car. The car I’ve had for … I remember getting a really unkind, I mean I went from you know, borderline-getting-ready-to-be-kicked-out. To, you know, all these guys—because it was such a careerist place—all these guys being, “Glad to see ya, you’ll have to come over for dinner.” And it was just, it was
so
delicious. I had gotten to have unalloyed contempt for them, they showed what they were like. That they didn’t even have integrity about their hatred. So …

[On his landscape, the long fields] When the wind blows, you can see ripples, it’s like water. It’s like the ocean, except it’s really green. I mean, it really is. Not so much here. But you get another mile
south, where it’s
nothing
but serious full-time farmland and farmhouses? Sort of calm, real pretty.

There’s a Mitsubishi plant, and then there’s a lot of farm-support stuff. There’s a lot of firms called like Ro-tech and Anderson Seeds. And State Farm Insurance.

I had a whole vampire thing when I was a little kid. Also partly superseded by the shark thing. [He likes the movie
The Lost Boys
.] You couldn’t really figure out—I wasn’t really confident that he wanted to switch back and forth …

[He’s the sort of rugged man of self-reliance who, faced by a reporter armed with an expense budget, is eager to pay for his own Diet Rite soda.]

(Rhapsodizes metal Savarin can) They make great paperweights, filled with pennies. The lids make good dog Frisbees for inside the house. Like Oddjob’s hat. [He speaks, he says, as a fan of “movies with things that blow up.”]

[We order so much, he tells the counter girl, “There’s a bus that we’re from.”]

[He makes the last nondate joke.

She smiles at us and asks whether our huge order is to go. Back in the car, he remembers the bacon from the McD’s Double Bacon Cheeseburger fondly: “Kind of rubbery, no fat involved.”]

I always forget how good their fries are …

I don’t eat there a lot.

[We’re plucking fries from the bag in the car.]

Have to take pickles off: I’m what my mother used to refer to as a picky eater.

[Blanches when I write this down]

[Gives food to dogs. Warns me against leaving plates, bags unattended.] You can’t put it on the table because the dogs will eat it, have to eat at the table.

I’m just worried I’m going to look like one of those insane old women who talk to their dogs. [Moans when I write down stuff about him and dogs. “The dogs will be offended.” “How will your dogs be offended? Your dogs won’t
read
it.”]

[Asks for half my cupcake ration.]

(Bible-epic voice) “They ate. And it was good. It was
good.”
Sit. Sit. [Re MacDonald’s] It’s bad, but in a really good way.

[On NPR, George Burns dead today.]

I wonder what George Burns died of: Maybe someone just dispatched him with a club, figuring that was the only way.

Long eulogies on the radio this morning when I was in the shower.

Saw all those vitamins in your hotel room. Where’s that at?

I take a lot of C and B. I was told that if you smoke a lot, or do a lot of nicotine, you have to take megavitamins. I take between 3,000 and 5,000 mgs of vitamin C: I aim for urine the color of a legal pad, and then I figure I’m safe. I take 100 mgs of B-6. I take A, because I have bad skin. I take zinc. And I think that’s it.

These are emergency reserve ones of like 500 mg: they’re just a pain in the ass, you’ve got to drink like a whole soda pop to take one. (To dogs) We’ll give ’im some right now, because he looks like he’s going to start feeling a little poorly.

You give vitamins to your dogs?

No,
you
. You can’t burn the candle at both ends, man. You’re not getting enough sleep, you’re not eatin’ right, working too hard. On the go. (Laughs) Busy ’90s man.

Do I just take all these?

Yeah, not all at once, else’ll make you choke. Take them one at a time, in a precise little anal, philosophical way.

You’d take this many in a day? This many pills?

Yeah. It dudn’t hurt ya. Whatever dudn’t get used gets pissed right out.

Why a thousand pages?

I don’t know. I wanted to do something with a whole lot of different characters that had kind of queer, broad, slow movements. I didn’t set a goal of a thousand pages.

Knew it was going to be long, though
.

Uh-huh. Do you ever have an idea how long something’s gonna be? I never do.

I see what you mean. But, like at the plate, you know what you’re swinging toward
.

That’s true. Yeah, I knew this would be over five hundred. Which—I don’t think I’d ever done anything over five hundred before.

Why?

[He’s shower-wet now. I remember his head steaming while smoking outside the St. Paul NPR studio.]

One of the things that made me think the book wouldn’t get a very good reception. Probably one answer is that I wanted something that had kind of the texture of what mental life was like in America right now. Which meant, sort of an enormous tsunami of stuff coming at you. And also—it’s not entirely reader-unfriendly. Except for certain parts that are supposed to be hard in the middle. It’s divided into chunks, there are sort of obvious closures or last lines—that make it pretty clear that you’re supposed to go have a cigar or something, come back later.

Short chapters too
.

Yeah. Especially at the beginning. A lot of them are very very short.
Hard for readers at work. All day, head home, open the door, a thousand pages a hard thing. A big thing to come home to
.

Like I said, the goal was really weird. The goal was to have something that was really pretty hard, but also to sort of be good enough, and fun enough, to make you be willing to do that. And in the course of that, teach you that you were … more willing than you thought you were?

I’m talking about what the goal was, I’m not talking about what it accomplishes.

Tactically, though, you’re right. I mean, Michael pointed out, and I agreed, that this was basically, you know, all but stomping on reviewers’ feet, spitting in their eye, and daring them to be pissed off. Because I’ve reviewed before, I know how much you get paid for it, I know what kind of deadline you’re working.

Do you think it’s a hard book or do you think it’s an easy book?

I think it’s both. I think it can be read in a way that’s somewhat easy, although there are parts in the middle that I think are fairly challenging just on a line-to-line level. The book was
designed
to be both, I guess. And for it to be set up so that—it’s a very different book depending on whether you read the endnotes or not. Or whether you read them when the numbers direct you to them or afterwards, or before. There’s just a whole lot of plot stuff that isn’t clear, if you don’t read the endnotes.

Experience of reading it hard or easy?

I don’t know—I know it was excruciatingly boring for me the last two times I read it. But that was the copyediting and the galleys. That’s one reason—I mean, I sent early drafts out to people. And I really, they were friends who were good enough that if they had hated it they would tell me. You know? To sort of get an idea. It was actually very heartening. They would like call me up on certain
pages, chuckling and laughing. And it seemed like, it wasn’t
unfun
. (Soft voice) Charis, Mark Costello, Jon Franzen.

And the book is
about
fun
.

So it’s supposed to be sort of fun and unfun. For instance, I like a joke that you laugh hard at, but then it’s sort of unsettling, and you think about it for a while. It’s not quite black humor, but it’s a kind of, a kind of creepy humor.

And there’s some stuff in the book that’s set up to be high camp. Like the corporately subsidized years. But it’s supposed to be plausible, it’s not out of line with the logic of the way subsidization of various things works. Or a way to satisfy voters who demand a high level of services without being willing to pay for ’em.

Or subsidizing national debt
.

I think the things that stand against it are the things that stand against, for instance, legalization of certain kinds of drugs. Do we want to be the sort of society that allows our years to be sold to corporations? I think that if things got bad enough so that sort of thing would be necessary, um, the trouble and crisis would erupt in lots of other ways first.

Can you imagine your readers? And how do you imagine them?

I think I imagine them being, uh, young enough to kind of appreciate a contemporary argot or idiom: something being
true
to the way the language works now the same way
Diner
was true to certain types of language in the fifties. And I guess I imagine the reader either being pretty well educated, or being somebody with a lot of practice reading. Because there are parts of the book that I think you’ve gotta sort of
know
that, you’ve gotta have had some practice reading hard stuff and know that there’s a payoff for it.

[His sister Amy’s question, similar to Michael’s: How much reader irritation do you want here? Because you’re gonna need …]

I don’t think somebody whose only experience reading long stuff is Anne Rice or Stephen King will find this—I think they’ll find the demands on them just unacceptable, fairly early on. I don’t really have any aspirations for a truly mass audience.