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Biographical Essay: David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was born in 1962 to James Donald Wallace, a
philosophy professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Sally
Foster Wallace, an English and grammar teacher. After a childhood as a regionally
prominent tennis player, Wallace enrolled in Amherst College and studied English
and philosophy, graduating summa cum laude in 1985. He then pursued a Master’s
in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. During this time, Wallace began
to send out short stories to different magazines for publication, as well as grapple
with depression that he kept under control through medication. Wallace’s writing
gained him national attention, and he published his first novel, The Broom of the
System, in 1987 while still in graduate school. Girl With Curious Hair followed in
1989, and in 1996 he published Infinite Jest, his most well known and acclaimed
novel that satirizes American consumerism, drug culture, and obsession with
entertainment. Following these fictional triumphs, Wallace pursued work with
magazines such as Harper’s and the Atlantic, where he wrote journalistic pieces that
covered everything from John McCain’s 2000 presidential run to lobsters to Roger
Federer. Many of these nonfiction pieces were collected in his works A Supposedly
Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) and Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
(2005). Wallace’s newfound celebrity exacerbated the depression he’d struggled
with since college, however, and he committed suicide on September 12th, 2008,
leaving behind a manuscript for his final novel The Pale King and a legacy as one of
the greatest writers of the modern era.
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Sources
Weber, Bruce. "David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46." The New York
Times Books. The New York Times , 14 Sep 2008. Web. 17 Mar 2014.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html>.
"David Foster Wallace Biography." Bio.com. A and E Television Networks, LLC, n.d.
Web. 17 Mar 2014. <http://www.biography.com/people/david-foster-wallace507641?page=2>.
Three Summaries from Girl With Curious Hair
Little Expressionless Animals, the first story, tells the story of two women who
meet and fall in love while working on the show Jeopardy! in the eighties. Faye
Goddard is a fact-researcher who works for her distressed mother, a TV executive,
while Julie Smith is the troubled reigning champion of the show. Alex Trebek and
the show eventually jeopardize this relationship by using Julie’s autistic brother as a
way to increase ratings (and advertising) as well as dethrone her from her
championship.
The second story, John Billy, is told from a small town in Oklahoma’s diner. It
is a tall tale that describes the rise and fall of a larger-than-life local boy, Chuck Nunn
Junior. Another rancher, T. Rex Minogue, destroys Nunn Junior’s health and ranch,
and Chuck Nunn Junior then pursues revenge against T. Rex in a tale that becomes
increasingly supernatural and wild. He becomes a small-town demi-god whose
furious temper nearly destroys the town he lives in during his quest for vengeance.
The third story, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, is also the
longest. This novella describes the meeting of two shotgun-married writing
students, Mark Nechtr and Drew-Lynn Eberhardt, and their attempts to attend a
reunion of former McDonald’s commercial actors in rural Illinois orchestrated by an
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ad executive, J.D. Steelritter. Their journey in with Steelritter’s son’s car, along with
Steelritter, the hopefuly actor Tom Sternberg, and Magda Ambrose-Gatz, a
mysterious stewardess, seemingly takes forever. This metafictional piece satirizes
many aspects of American culture, such as advertising and commercialism, and
Wallace ultimately stretches out the plot to the point where the ultimate fate of the
characters is unclear.
Craft Analysis: Girl With Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
I had never read any David Foster Wallace before undertaking this
assignment but I had heard a great deal about his works. I knew that he was
considered to be one of the absolute finest modern American writers, and that his
subjects and characters were deep and broad and complex to the absolute core,
almost to the point of confusion. Upon reading Girl With Curious Hair, I can safely
confirm this: David Foster Wallace is undoubtedly one of the finest writers that I
have ever encountered, but his works are so complex and labyrinthine that each
page demands the reader’s rapt attention and allegiance to the coherence of the
plot. None of the three stories I highlight, Little Expressionless Animals, John Billy,
and Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, could be considered light reading.
There are meanings and subtleties in each story that cannot be realized in one or
two readings and that demand the reader’s attention at all times. At some point at
one time or another, each of these stories hurt to read.
The collection begins with Little Expressionless Animals, a fairly
straightforward narrative concerning the relationship between two women on the
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set of the game show Jeopardy! Faye Goddard is a fact-researcher for the show,
whose mother is her alcoholic boss, and Julie Smith is a deeply troubled reigning
champion with a secret autistic brother who is brought in to defeat her on the show.
The story characterizes these two women as bright and needful of companionship to
overcome their dark pasts. Faye’s father divorced her mother, Dee, when Faye was
young and married a woman who is strikingly similar to Dee, while Julie’s mother
abandoned her, along with her autistic brother, when she was young. Her only
entertainment, an encyclopedia that she read to her brother, gave her an immense
command of factual knowledge. Her appearances on the show paint her as a nearsavant that hates being objectified by Alex Trebek: “She ends with $45,000. Alex
pretends to genuflect. The audience applauds…and in a closing moment that Faye
Goddard owns, captured in a bright glossy that hangs over her iron desk, Julie Smith,
on television, calmly and deliberately gives Alex Trebek the finger” (pg. 19). A third
subtle character is the TV network, personified by Trebek and the icon Merv Griffin,
that decides to bring in Julie’s autistic brother to defeat her and end her reign as
queen. In Little Expressionless Animals, the business interests that power the media
are a very real and active character.
Wallace makes great use of his technical skill in constructing this story. He
establishes a wonderful sense of place in Los Angeles right from the beginning in
Faye’s apartment: “California’s night sky hangs bright and silent as an empty
palace…they stand naked at a glass wall and look at Los Angeles. Little bits of Los
Angeles wink on and off, as light gets in the way of other light” (pg. 4). Point of view
remains in third-person, yet it switches its focus from character to character,
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providing each with a span of time to describe feelings and build character. In a
memorably scene with Alex Trebek and his psychiatrist, Trebek reveals his
distasteful feelings on Julie’s unfair loss: “…she lost to her own brother, after Janet
and Merv’s exec snuck the damaged little bastard in with a rigged five audition and a
board just crawling with animal questions” (pg. 19). Through this, we gain some
fresh sympathy for Trebek, as he seems sympathetic towards Julie’s situation but
fairly unwilling to do anything about it. Dialogue plays a key role, particularly in a
scene between Julie and Faye where they tell each other initially fictional stories
about why they might hate men: ‘“You’re in love with a man”, said Julie, “who insists
that he can only love you when you’re standing in the exact center of whatever room
you’re in,”’ (pg. 36), but it eventually segues into a discussion of their horrible, lifealtering encounters with men that shaped them into the fragile people they are
today. The language is also flowing and narrative, strikingly different from others of
the stories in the collection. The sentences flow well, the word choices are
accessible, and the writing is poetic in many places: “The dark drifts down around
them and fits like a gardener’s glove. It is incredibly romantic” (pg. 4). Little
Expressionless Animals is a searing critique of the television industry that still
manages to tell a heart-rending love story about two people in a novel circumstance.
John Billy is very much the opposite. It is a tall tale set in Minogue, Oklahoma,
a small town where the eponymous narrator is telling the story in a diner to a
mysterious ‘Simple Ranger’ who arrives from out of town. The story concerns Chuck
Nunn Junior, a boy of prodigious strength and luck that is undone by the
machinations of a local rancher, T. Rex Minogue, who nearly kills Nunn Junior and
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ruins his health. Nunn Junior, filled with rage, takes his revenge on Minogue and
unleashes a demigod-like wrath on him that is only resolved in a supernaturally
tinged finale.
John Billy’s most notable aspect is its novel use of language. The story is told
from the first-person perspective of a local man who often misuses words or invents
new ones up on the spot as he tells his tale. The style is set with the first line: “Was
me supposed to tell Simple Ranger how Chuck Nunn Junior done wronged the man that
wronged him and fleen to parts unguessed” (pg. 121). He paints Nunn Junior as a
superhero force through the use of exaggeration and hyperbole: ‘He got alone and
surrounded by VCR’s (Viet Cong Regulars) in ’71, and through sheer force of
personality and persuasion convinced the whole battalion of sly slanted Charlies to
turn their own guns on their selves’ (pg. 123). Throughout the entire story, Wallace
plays with rustic language and has the reader enjoy deciphering John Billy’s tall-tale
descriptions, however, many of his word choices have a cerebral edge. The style is
rustic, but it is not completely realistic.
It becomes clear that John Billy is a biased narrator that wants to set a tone of
a righteous battle between good and evil. He establishes Minogue as a small, dusty
town transfixed by the battle between Nunn Junior and T. Rex, rallies the audience
to Chuck Nunn Junior’s side and paints T. Rex (“the antique and hermitically
reclusive, also malignant and malevolent, Minogue Oklahoma sheep mogul” (pg. 125))
as evil, but turns the tall-tale genre on its head when Minogue and Nunn Junior meet
in John Billy’s diner to resolve their fight through a supernatural battle of wills.
Dialogue is often sparse, as John Billy tells the story in the past tense, but it emerges
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toward the end when Minogue and Nunn Junior meet in the diner for a final
confrontation. This style works well, as it preserves the tall-tale flavor while still
allowing for action to occur at the end ‘outside’ of John Billy’s story.
Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way is the final (and longest) story
in Girl With Curious Hair, and it is undoubtedly the most complex. Westward tells the
story of Mark Nechtr and Drew-Lynn (D.L.) Eberhardt, two married writing students
who are on a trip to a reunion of former McDonalds’ commercial actors in Illinois.
They are joined by Tom Sternberg, a fearful and claustrophobic aspiring actor, J.D.
Steelritter, the ad magnate putting the reunion on, his son DeHaven, and a
stewardess (former actress) named Magda. When Mark, D.L, Tom, and Magda miss
their helicopter flight, Steelritter and his son arrive at the local airport to drive them
to the event. What should be a quick drive is prolonged for hours, and as the
passengers, stuck in the car, wax philosophic about the meaning of advertising, postmodernism, and the ultimate fate of American consumerism, the reader begins to
get a sneaking suspicion that this prolonged unnecessary narrative is a conscious
attempt by Wallace to remind the reader that they are reading a metafictional piece
of work that is fictional and completely controlled by Wallace as both character and
author.
Wallace spends an immense time establishing character. Mark is an archer,
writer, and solipsist who feels that he is alone in the world, while D.L. is a somewhat
unlikeable, a naïve cynic who refuses to make major decisions without the approval
of her psychic. Sternberg is desperate to be an actor and wildly fearful, and his sad
fate to become a nobody in life is revealed towards the story’s end. J.D. Steelritter
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vehemently believes that he can control the future and ultimate end of advertising.
His burnout son, DeHaven, feels that his father is a blowhard and quite possibly
disturbed as the story progresses. Magda is a quieter character, though it later
becomes apparent that she is a great observer and can infer each character’s
ultimate future, telling Mark that he will one day write an immense book, a storywithin-a-story (which he does, by the novella’s end). These characters are complex
and filled with desires and fears and motivations, and Wallace indulgently and
luxuriously builds their characters throughout the course of the story. It becomes
almost tricky to maintain an image of each character. They have so many facets and
inner monologues that they are hyper-realistic portraits of real people.
The sense of place is powerful and provides a good backdrop to the story’s
action. Set in rural Illinois, the car trip from the airport takes place in immense fields
of corn, “so much corn that it’s literally worthless”, as Magda explains (pg. 299). They
spend hours driving in the fields to ensure the only real action takes place in the car.
The point of view switches frequently, going from character to character as they
flesh out their flaws and discover truths about each other. The dialogue is rich, and
the conversations run from musical minimalism (pg. 306) to the Vietnam parallels
of ‘Hawaii Five-O’ (pg. 318) to the future of advertising as a product of fear (pg.
338). The characters, through dialogue, grow and build on each other and learn
sometimes-horrifying truths.
Westward is a difficult story to critique because its themes and subtletiessolitude, modern fiction, advertising, consumerism, fear- branch out in so many
directions, yet it has the feel of a self-indulgent game that Wallace is playing with the
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reader (a ‘Look Dad, No Hands’ quality that D.L. recognizes on pg. 329). It is
endlessly self-referential and drags the reader out of the action: Wallace kindly
points out to the reader where the climax of the story is (pg. 345), and tells the
reader that the story is not fiction, but ‘real and true and right now’ (pg. 334). He
makes it difficult to get lost in the story, which I believe is his grand point. He is
showing the reader the story as a form of art, an stage play that should not be
confused as a window into a fantasy world. It is a piece to be studied to grasp its
greater meanings. He shares climactic moments and realizations with the reader
and then drags them away to look at something else. It may be fiction, but Westward
is not a traditional narrative like Little Expressionless Animals, or a fantasy story like
John Billy. It is a look at fiction as an art, and invites the reader to observe the
characters as dolls in a dollhouse, living their lives as Wallace’s playthings, and
coming to terms with fears and flaws that are universal among mankind.
Works Cited
Wallace, David Foster. Girl with Curious Hair. 1st Edition. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 1989. Print.