The David Foster Wallace Reader Read online

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  Introduction

  The purpose of this David Foster Wallace Reader is simple: to gather in one volume a selection of the most celebrated, most enjoyable, funniest, and most remarkable work by this always-remarkable writer. It is a Greatest Hits collection of novel excerpts, short fiction, and essays that we hope will delight readers who know Wallace’s work already and show those new to him the amazing breadth of subjects, characters, ideas, interiors, landscapes, emotions, and human interaction in his writing. We also believe that teachers will find here an ideal introduction for students.

  Assembling this book was a collaboration between the executors of the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust and Wallace’s editor at Little, Brown and Company. We agreed on a core group of excerpts, stories, and essays that were essential to any collection of Wallace’s work, argued over others, and sought broader suggestions from writers, critics, and colleagues. Those who kindly aided in the process are listed below. A few took the further step of writing an afterword to a piece they recommended. Brief biographies of these contributors appear at the book’s end.

  Nearly everything in this Reader has been published previously in Wallace’s novels, story collections, and essay collections, and the versions here are the original, full texts, rather than the shortened versions that were sometimes created for magazine publication. There are two new works. One is the first story in the book, “The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” which was published in the Amherst Review when Wallace was an undergraduate there. It is an astonishing exploration of psychological pain and self-consciousness. The other is a selection of teaching materials. Wallace taught undergraduate creative writing classes at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and poured enormous care into creating syllabi, reading lists, and pop quizzes to help his students learn to write well. This section is introduced by his mother, Sally Foster Wallace, with whom he shared a boundless love of grammar and linguistic rigor.

  We hope we have gathered here a representation of the range, depth, and layers of Wallace’s creations—the complexity of thought and emotion, and the desire to disturb and tickle and demolish and annoy, even to break hearts, that lived alongside his intent to astonish and entertain. This collection could easily have been two or three times as long as it is, and we forced ourselves to leave out many excellent works in an effort to keep to a manageable length. There is writing in all of Wallace’s books that is every bit as powerful as what’s included here, and we hope you will be moved to read those books in full.

  We would like to take this opportunity to thank Sam Freilich, Victoria Matsui, and Mario J. Pulice for their work and care in creating this book, and Marlena Bittner for her kindness and support in everything connected with David and his books.

  —Bonnie Nadell

  —Karen Green

  —Michael Pietsch

  Advisers

  Matthew Baldwin

  Jo Ann Beard

  Sven Birkerts

  Tom Bissell

  Stephen Burn

  Blake Butler

  Mark Costello

  Kevin J. H. Dettmar

  Anne Fadiman

  Jonathan Franzen

  Rivka Galchen

  Gerald Howard

  Malcolm Knox

  Hari Kunzru

  Nam Le

  Nick Maniatis

  Lorrie Moore

  Simon Prosser

  James Ryerson

  George Saunders

  Mike Schur

  Deborah Treisman

  David L. Ulin

  Sally Foster Wallace

  FICTION

  The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing

  I’VE BEEN ON antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old Earth, obviously. I haven’t been on Earth now for almost a year, because I wasn’t doing very well on Earth. I’ve been doing somewhat better here where I am now, on the planet Trillaphon, which I suppose is good news for everyone involved.

  Antidepressants were prescribed for me by a very nice doctor named Dr. Kablumbus at a hospital to which I was sent ever so briefly following a really highly ridiculous incident involving electrical appliances in the bathtub about which I really don’t wish to say a whole lot. I had to go to the hospital for physical care and treatment after this very silly incident, and then two days later I was moved to another floor of the hospital, a higher, whiter floor, where Dr. Kablumbus and his colleagues were. There was a certain amount of consideration given to the possibility of my undergoing E.C.T., which is short for “Electro-Convulsive Therapy,” but E.C.T. wipes out bits of your memory sometimes—little details like your name and where you live, etc.—and it’s also in other respects just a thoroughly scary thing, and we—my parents and I—decided against it. New Hampshire, which is the state where I live, has a law that says E.C.T. cannot be administered without the patient’s knowledge and consent. I regard this as an extremely good law. So antidepressants were prescribed for me instead by Dr. Kablumbus, who can be said really to have had only my best interests at heart.

  If someone tells about a trip he’s taken, you expect at least some explanation of why he left on the trip in the first place. With this in mind perhaps I’ll tell some things about why things weren’t too good for me on Earth for quite a while. It was extremely weird, but, three years ago, when I was a senior in high school, I began to suffer from what I guess now was a hallucination. I thought that a huge wound, a really huge and deep wound, had opened on my face, on my cheek near my nose… that the skin had just split open like old fruit, that blood was seeping out, all dark and shiny, that veins and bits of yellow cheek-fat and red-gray muscle were plainly visible, even bright flashes of bone, in there. Whenever I’d look in the mirror, there it would be, that wound, and I could feel the twitch of the exposed muscle and the heat of the blood on my cheek, all the time. But when I’d say to a doctor or to Mom or to other people, “Hey, look at this open wound on my face, I’d better go to the hospital,” they’d say, “Well, hey, there’s no wound on your face, are your eyes OK?” And yet whenever I’d look in the mirror, there it would be, and I could always feel the heat of the blood on my cheek, and when I’d feel with my hand my fingers would sink in there really deep into what felt like hot gelatin with bones and ropes and stuff in it. And it seemed like everyone was always looking at it. They’d seem to stare at me really funny, and I’d think “Oh God, I’m really making them sick, they see it, I’ve got to hide, get me out of here.” But they were probably only staring because I looked all scared and in pain and kept my hand to my face and was staggering like I was drunk all over the place all the time. But at the time, it seemed so real. Weird, weird, weird. Right before graduation—or maybe a month before, maybe—it got really bad, such that when I’d pull my hand away from my face I’d see blood on my fingers, and bits of tiss
ue and stuff, and I’d be able to smell the blood, too, like hot rusty metal and copper. So one night when my parents were out somewhere I took a needle and some thread and tried to sew up the wound myself. It hurt a lot to do this, because I didn’t have any anesthetic, of course. It was also bad because, obviously, as I know now, there was really no wound to be sewn up at all, there. Mom and Dad were less than pleased when they came home and found me all bloody for real and with a whole lot of jagged unprofessional stitches of lovely bright orange carpet-thread in my face. They were really upset. Also, I made the stitches too deep—I apparently pushed the needle incredibly deep—and some of the thread got stuck way down in there when they tried to pull the stitches out at the hospital and it got infected later and then they had to make a real wound back at the hospital to get it all out and drain it and clean it out. That was highly ironic. Also, when I was making the stitches too deep I guess I ran the needle into a few nerves in my cheek and destroyed them, so now sometimes bits of my face will get numb for no reason, and my mouth will sag on the left side a bit. I know it sags for sure and that I’ve got this cute scar, here, because it’s not just a matter of looking in the mirror and seeing it and feeling it; other people tell me they see it too, though they do this very tactfully.

  Anyway, I think that year everyone began to see that I was a troubled little soldier, including me. Everybody talked and conferred and we all decided that it would probably be in my best interests if I deferred admission to Brown University in Rhode Island, where I was supposedly all set to go, and instead did a year of “Post-Graduate” schoolwork at a very good and prestigious and expensive prep school called Phillips Exeter Academy conveniently located right there in my home town. So that’s what I did. And it was by all appearances a pretty successful period, except it was still on Earth, and things were increasingly non-good for me on Earth during this period, although my face had healed and I had more or less stopped having the hallucination about the gory wound, except for really short flashes when I saw mirrors out of the corners of my eyes and stuff.

  But, yes, all in all things were going increasingly badly for me at that time, even though I was doing quite well in school in my little “Post-Grad” program and people were saying, “Holy cow, you’re really a very good student, you should just go on to college right now, why don’t you?” It was just pretty clear to me that I shouldn’t go right on to college then, but I couldn’t say that to the people at Exeter, because my reasons for saying I shouldn’t had nothing to do with balancing equations in Chemistry or interpreting Keats poems in English. They had to do with the fact that I was a troubled little soldier. I’m not at this point really dying to give a long gory account of all the cute neuroses that more or less around that time began to pop up all over the inside of my brain, sort of like wrinkly gray boils, but I’ll tell a few things. For one thing, I was throwing up a lot, feeling really nauseated all the time, especially when I’d wake up in the morning. But it could switch on anytime, the second I began to think about it: if I felt OK, all of a sudden I’d think, “Hey, I don’t feel nauseated at all, here.” And it would just switch on, like I had a big white plastic switch somewhere along the tube from my brain to my hot and weak stomach and intestines, and I would just throw up all over my plate at dinner or my desk at school or the seat of the car, or my bed, or wherever. It was really highly grotesque for everyone else, and intensely unpleasant for me, as anyone who has ever felt really sick to his stomach can appreciate. This went on for quite a while, and I lost a lot of weight, which was bad because I was quite thin and non-strong to begin with. Also, I had to have a lot of medical tests on my stomach, involving delicious barium-drinks and being hung upside down for X-rays, and so on, and once I even had to have a spinal tap, which hurt more than anything has ever hurt me in my life. I am never ever going to have another spinal tap.

  Also, there was this business of crying for no reason, which wasn’t painful but was very embarrassing and also quite scary because I couldn’t control it. What would happen is that I’d cry for no reason, and then I’d get sort of scared that I’d cry or that once I started to cry I wouldn’t be able to stop, and this state of being scared would very kindly activate this other white switch on the tube between my brain with its boils and my hot eyes, and off I’d go even worse, like a skateboard that you keep pushing along. It was very embarrassing at school, and incredibly embarrassing with my family, because they would think it was their fault, that they had done something bad. It would have been incredibly embarrassing with my friends, too, but by that time I really didn’t have very many friends. So that was kind of an advantage, almost. But there was still everyone else. I had little tricks I employed with regard to the “crying problem.” When I was around other people and my eyes got all hot and full of burning saltwater I would pretend to sneeze, or even more often to yawn, because both these things can explain someone’s having tears in his eyes. People at school must have thought I was just about the sleepiest person in the world. But, really, yawning doesn’t exactly explain the fact that tears are just running down your cheeks and raining down on your lap or your desk or making little wet star-puckers on your exam papers and stuff, and not too many people get super-red eyes just from yawning. So the tricks probably weren’t too effective. It’s weird but even now, here on the planet Trillaphon, when I think about it at all, I can hear the snap of the switch and my eyes more or less start to fill up, and my throat aches. That is bad. There was also the fact that back then I got so I couldn’t stand silence, really couldn’t stand it at all. This was because when there was no noise from outside the little hairs on my eardrums or wherever would manufacture a noise all by themselves, to keep in practice or something. This noise was sort of a high, glittery, metallic, spangly hum that really for some reason scared the living daylights out of me and just about drove me crazy when I heard it, the way a mosquito in your ear in bed at night in summer will just about drive you crazy when you hear it. I began to look for noise sort of the way a moth looks for light. I’d sleep with the radio on in my room, watch an incredible amount of loud television, keep my trusty Sony Walkman on at all times at school and walking around and on my bike (that Sony Walkman was far and away the best Christmas present I have ever received). I would even maybe sometimes talk to myself when I had just no other recourse to noise, which must have seemed very crazy to people who heard me, and I suppose was very crazy, but not in the way they supposed. It wasn’t as if I thought I was two people who could have a dialogue, or as if I heard voices from Venus or anything. I knew I was just one person, but this one person, here, was a troubled little soldier who could withstand neither the substance nor the implications of the noise produced by the inside of his own head.

  Anyway, all this extremely delightful stuff was going on while I was doing well and making my otherwise quite worried and less-than-pleased parents happy school-wise during the year, and then while I was working for Exeter Building and Grounds Department during the following summer, pruning bushes and crying and throwing up discreetly into them, and while I was packing and having billions of dollars of clothes and electrical appliances bought for me by my grandparents, getting all ready to go to Brown University in Rhode Island in September. Mr. Film, who was more or less my boss at “B and G,” had a riddle that he thought was unbelievably funny, and he told it to me a lot. He’d say, “What’s the color of a bowel movement?” And when I didn’t say anything he’d say. “Brown! har har har!” He’d laugh, and I’d smile, even after about the four-trillionth time, because Mr. Film was on the whole a fairly nice man, and he didn’t even get mad when I threw up in his truck once. I told him my scar was from getting cut up with a knife in high school, which was essentially the truth.

  So I went off to Brown University in the fall, and it turned out to be very much like “P.G.” at Exeter: it was supposed to be all hard but it really wasn’t, so I had plenty of time to do well in classes and have people say “Outstanding” and still be neurotic a
nd weird as hell, so that my roommate, who was a very nice, squeakingly healthy guy from Illinois, understandably asked for a single instead and moved out in a few weeks and left me with a very big single all my very own. So it was just little old me and about nine billion dollars worth of electronic noise-making equipment, there in my room, after that. It was quite soon after my roommate moved out that the Bad Thing started. The Bad Thing is more or less the reason why I’m not on Earth anymore. Dr. Kablumbus told me after I told him as best I could about the Bad Thing that the Bad Thing was “severe clinical depression.” I am sure that a doctor at Brown would have told me pretty much the same thing, but I didn’t ever go to see anyone at Brown, mainly because I was afraid that if I ever opened my mouth in that context stuff would come out that would ensure that I’d be put in a place like the place I was put after the hilariously stupid business in the bathroom.

  I really don’t know if the Bad Thing is really depression. I had previously sort of always thought that depression was just sort of really intense sadness, like what you feel when your very good dog dies, or when Bambi’s mother gets killed in Bambi. I thought that it was that you frowned or maybe even cried a little bit if you were a girl and said “Holy cow, I’m really depressed, here,” and then your friends if you have any come and cheer you up or take you out and get you ploughed and in the morning it’s like a faded color and in a couple days it’s gone altogether. The Bad Thing—which I guess is what is really depression—is very different, and indescribably worse. I guess I should say rather sort of indescribably, because I’ve heard different people try to describe “real” depression over the last couple years. A very glib guy on the television said some people liken it to being underwater, under a body of water that has no surface, at least for you, so that no matter what direction you go, there will only be more water, no fresh air and freedom of movement, just restriction and suffocation, and no light. (I don’t know how apt it is to say it’s like being underwater, but maybe imagine the moment in which you realize, at which it hits you that there is no surface for you, that you’re just going to drown in there no matter which way you swim; imagine how you’d feel at that exact moment, like Descartes at the start of his second thing, then imagine that feeling in all its really delightful choking intensity spread out over hours, days, months… that would maybe be more apt.) A really lovely poet named Sylvia Plath, who unfortunately isn’t living anymore, said that it’s like having a jar covering you and having all the air pumped out of the jar, so you can’t breathe any good air (and imagine the moment when your movement is invisibly stopped by the glass and you realize you’re under glass…). Some people say it’s like having always before you and under you a huge black hole without a bottom, a black, black hole, maybe with vague teeth in it, and then your being part of the hole, so that you fall even when you stay where you are (… maybe when you realize you’re the hole, nothing else…).