Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D. T. Max Read Free Book Online Page A

interlocking gears on the blackboard.
    Afterward, Wallace was no less sour about the experience than he had been going in: “Marriage therapy degenerated into family therapy,” he would later write in
The Broom of the System
. “God knows what all went on.” He fictionalized the marriage therapist’s attempt to get Amy to draw images of how she saw her family into a scene in the novel in which Lenore’s sister’s family put on masks in a ritualized attempt to express their emotions, to the applause of a LaserDisc audience. Perhaps Wallace was angry because the therapy did not avert the formal dissolution of the family. Soon, Jim and Sally told the children they were getting divorced. But one day a month later, their mother was back in the house she had not been in for a year. The children didn’t ask what happened and the parents didn’t offer, Amy remembers.
    During the summer Wallace was also beginning to think about fiction differently. He had always liked and read novels; he found them absorbing and relaxing and mined them for the information they provided. He had hoovered everything on his parents’ shelves, from a compilation of the underground nineteenth-century porn magazine
The Pearl
, a favorite, he once told a therapist, of his high school masturbations, and
Fanny Hill
, to popular crime novelists like Ed McBain and John D. MacDonald, to creators of literature—Updike and Kafka. Friends and relatives often tried to suggest books to him that combined his parents’ two interests. This usually meant recommending the big popular philosophical titles that were a mainstay of the era, like
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, which, Wallace noted in a letter to Washington that summer, his mother “practically rammed…up my ass.” 6 But this wasn’t the reading he was after. Instead, the first story that, as he later put it, “rang his cherries” was Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon.” Barthelme didn’t tell straightforward stories. He sought to fracture the surface of fiction to show the underpinnings on which its illusions depended. As with other postmodernists, the point was not to make the reader forget the conventions of the charade butto see them more clearly. A truly fulfilled reader was one who always remembered he was just reading a story.
    “The Balloon” is typical of Barthelme’s work. In the story, a large balloon appears over Manhattan. While it hangs above the city, various characters approach and consider it, each from his own point of view. Children jump up and down on it for fun, while adults grouse that it serves no purpose or talk about how looking at the balloon makes them feel. The police worry about the threat to public order. In the end the narrator reveals that the balloon is an artifact, something he just felt like inflating because he was lonely. This was writing that a self-described “hard-core syntax wienie” like Wallace could appreciate. It peeled back the skin of literature just as logic peeled back the skin of language. Wallace told an interviewer years later that Barthelme was the first time he heard the “click” in literature. He added that Barthelme’s sort of writing appealed to him far more than the fiction he had enjoyed in high school, writing that contented itself with telling a story. “Pretty” as Updike’s prose was, Wallace acknowledged to the interviewer, “I don’t hear the click.”
    Soon another postmodern work came his way. That book was Thomas Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49
. Charlie McLagan, a fellow student, had turned him on to Pynchon the semester before. McLagan, who was a year behind Wallace, was different from the rest of their circle. He came from a wealthy suburban Chicago family who belonged to a country club. At Amherst he kept himself apart, rooming alone in Tyler House, a distant dorm, in a room he nicknamed “the Womb” with madras prints on the wall. His two cats were named Crime and Punishment. McLagan read