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

widely and imaginatively, and let everyone know he had sex with his girlfriend. When Wallace and Costello would go to his dorm, the three would drink gin and tonics and eat Nutter Butter cookies and listen to U2. (Wallace was delighted to find his roommate looked like the band’s guitarist, The Edge.) But when Wallace came alone, the atmosphere was more intense: despite Wallace’s effort to stop smoking pot, he and McLagan would get high together. “God damn Charlie and his damn drug-allure,” he wrote Washington that summer. The two would sometimes even drop acid, but Wallace found he preferred mushrooms. “Don’t do LSD, and don’t do coke, because they’re both dangerous and expensive in that order,” Wallace advised Washington, but “mushrooms are fun andgiggly and they make you think you’re smarter than you are…which is fun for a while.” While they tripped, Wallace and McLagan would listen over and over to “The Big Ship” by Brian Eno on McLagan’s expensive stereo. McLagan heard birth in it; Wallace thought it captured the earth in the time of the dinosaurs.
    One day McLagan had run into Wallace and Costello discussing
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and tossed them his copy of
Lot 49
, which they promptly read. The novel is the story of Oedipa Maas, a young woman trying to uncover a centuries-old conspiracy involving a secret postal organization known as Trystero. Maas travels around California encountering people who give her clues to the puzzle—or the whole action of the novel may be a hallucination or a hoax set in motion by an ex-boyfriend; the reader is left uncertain. One thing that caught Wallace’s eye about the book was the idea that to live in America was to live in a world of confusion, where meaning was refracted and distorted, especially by the media that engulf and reconfigure every gesture. As one character announces, pointing at a television, “It comes into your dreams, you know. Filthy machine.”
    Lot 49
was an agile and ironic metacommentary, and the effect on Wallace cannot be overstated (so much so that in a later letter to one of his editors Wallace, ever nervous of his debt to the other writer, would lie and say he had not read the book). Wallace reading Pynchon was, remembers Costello, “like Bob Dylan finding Woody Guthrie.” One postmodernist made way for another. Barthelme was hermetic, Pynchon expansive. He tried to take in the enormity of America in a way that Barthelme did not. And he showed you that the tone and sensibility of mainstream culture—
Lot 49
drew its energy from pop songs, TV shows, and thrillers—could sit alongside serious issues in fiction. At the very least, the book was funny, and Wallace already knew how to be funny. The irony of the writing was a more directed version of what he and Costello had been turning out at
Sabrina
.
    Wallace had been free of depression since the beginning of 1982, but now, twenty months later, the black hole with teeth got hold of him again. Toward the end of an otherwise happy summer, he began to have acute anxietyattacks, perhaps brought on by a feeling of letdown after his perfect semester. His life had had the quality in the past year of using one click to drown out another. He himself in later interviews would—not entirely credibly—blame the breakdown on a sudden realization that he did not want to be a professor of logic, that he had “a kind of midlife crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur real well for my longevity,” as he told an interviewer. The discipline suddenly seemed lifeless and pedantic to him; and his amazing grade point average was just an evasion, a reflection of his fear of dealing with living people as opposed to dry equations. “The same obsessive studying that helped me come alive,” he would later explain to an interviewer, “also kept me dead.” Whatever the onset of the attack, things got worse when a psychiatrist prescribed Tofranil, a tricyclic antidepressant, to help