The Road Worrier

ALTHOUGH OF COURSE YOU END UP BECOMING YOURSELF: A ROAD TRIP WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

By David Lipsky

320 pages

Broadway Books

Among other things, we learn that David Foster Wallace chewed tobacco and liked to dance. We learn the dancing bit near the very end of Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky’s transcription of a 1993 cross-country conversation with the American writer who committed suicide two years ago. The writer is wrapping things up with his interviewer, saying he plans to go out to a dance at a black Baptist church later that night: “A lot of people come because black Baptists can dance… I’ve discovered that I really like it. Although I’m still not very good. I tend to do the jerk and swim.”

Somehow, the dancing tidbit is both reassuring and poignant. Judging from these unwieldy tapes recorded when Wallace was doing a book tour for the just-released Infinite Jest, the writer mostly considered himself just a big head walking around, too much consciousness and not enough silence and remove from it all. Or rather, he seems to be trying to adjust his head to all the new attention and fame, while still keeping a steady eye focused on what he considers salvation: writing.

It’s tempting to try to find clues here, possible reasons why Wallace would later become depressed enough to hang himself. Lipsky attempts to silence some of this ghoulish speculation in his “Afterword,” pointing out some sad truths: Wallace was on a certain antidepressant called Nardil for some eight years, then — feeling better, married, writing and teaching college — he decided to go off the drug in 2007. Recurring depression led to other substitute meds, but these didn’t work; going back on Nardil didn’t work anymore, either, and Wallace apparently spiraled downward from ’07 to ’08. This is the saddest part of Lipsky’s book for, while it doesn’t explain what had depressed Wallace so much, it grounds later (and perhaps earlier) events in certain realities.

But it’s best to approach this book as a celebration: Wallace was alive, on the upward trajectory of literary acclaim, something he both courted and feared. He invites Rolling Stone writer Lipsky in to his Bloomington, Illinois home, and the tape starts rolling. Wallace is pop culturally literate and lit major smart: the talk is never quite linear, but it’s pretty inviting throughout, casting light on the writer’s struggles and his “difficult” material.

The irony is that Infinite Jest mightn’t have happened at all. Wallace was coming off a bleak period, having a short story collection fall through the publishing cracks, attending Harvard for a semester before checking himself into Harvard’s McLean hospital (he jokes he may have been ward mates with Elizabeth Wurtzel), fearing he would do harm to himself. He started writing a chapter about a young guy who can’t make himself understood — which later became Hal’s dilemma in the opening of Infinite Jest. He claims not to be an AA member — though enumerating a bewildering catalogue of drug and alcohol intake — but found himself drawn to “lurking” at Boston’s halfway houses and AA meetings. Gradually, this and his own theories about America’s sinister need for endless doses of “entertainment” led to the 1,000-plus-page novel that sealed Wallace’s fame.

The thing is, Wallace can be really funny (Infinite Jest is often very funny; he says it was his experiment in writing a “really difficult book that was also somehow entertaining,” à la Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow) and he’s highly quotable.

• On why he’s attracted to crazy women at book signings: “Psychotics tend to make the first move.”

• On why America’s appetite for “addictive, self-consuming pleasure” via TV doesn’t spell our doom: “What saves us is most entertainment isn’t very good.”

In Lipsky’s book, you get a sense of how the interview process changes people. During the road trip, Lipsky starts adopting some of Wallace’s phrasing and verbal habits; Wallace lets his guard down but keeps worrying how he will be portrayed in the Rolling Stone article (turns out the article never runs).

For someone noted for his sense of humor, there’s a great aura of sadness in Wallace’s ruminations: mostly they’re about his own pitfalls, his demons, real or imagined. He says Infinite Jest was really his way to “speak to the nerve endings” of his age group, those who feel a certain numbed contentment mixed with ineffable sadness. At the same time, the book’s blue-sky packaging and promotional blurbs made him fear that people wouldn’t actually read it, would just respond to the hype.

He can also be spectacularly wrong about things. Infinite Jest is partly a sci-fi take on America’s near future, wherein most entertainment is provided by a corporation called Interlace. In Lipsky’s book, Wallace elaborates on this, believing that the (still relatively new) Internet will eventually lock up people’s entertainment choices, filtering them through a controlled dosage system of a single provider. Of course, within a decade the Net instead became all about “You” — people demanding and providing their own content through YouTube, social networking and downloading, a Wild West shooting gallery of choices that seems at odds with Wallace’s early reductive predictions.

But anyway, Wallace was a mass of contradictions. He loved logic, philosophy, but was also a highly competitive jock. He distrusted fame, but got his first novel published — The Broom of the System, his college thesis — in his early 20s. His early work reveled in rigid metafictional theory, but he won awards for his humor essays on, among other things, the Illinois State Fair. He seems a serious fellow, yet admits to a post-adolescent crush on Alanis Morissette, who was “hot” at the time and whose poster hangs upon his Bloomington wall. Wallace tells Lipsky he’d literally trade all his current Time and Newsweek attention for the chance to, say, ring up Alanis and get together with her for a cup of tea. Though he realizes, somewhere inside, that that would be a really weird thing to do, and he’d probably chicken out in the end.

The thought of Wallace sitting down to tea with Alanis Morissette: about as incongruous, and somehow just as right, as Wallace doing the jerk and swim at a black Baptist dance.