“I’m really nervous, so you
don’t have to be nervous for me,” David Foster Wallace explains. “I’m nervous
enough for all of us.” He’s here, at Book People, to hype his new books. One,
Infinite Jest, set in a future unified Canada/U.S. and a tennis academy,
is a disjunctive, funny, chatty, impossibly long novel (over a thousand pages)
that makes wheelchair-ridden assassins and violent death seem funny. It could
also serve as a substitute for the verbal portion of the SAT (it has a lot of
big words.) The sort-of-main character, Hal, is a young tennis genius with a
serious marijuana problem. The other book, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never
Do Again is about how much fun Wallace didn’t have on a cruise he won, and
includes a collection of articles. It’s hilarious.
Wallace teaches college, but looks more like a grunge aficionado with
shoulder-length hair and Ben Franklin glasses. When he reads from A
Supposedly Fun Thing, everyone in the room roars with laughter the entire
time — everyone except the two guys I’m sitting between, who probably have a
humor deficiency, or perhaps were once abused by someone who resembles Wallace.
The article about cute little girls with batons accidentally debraining adults
at a twirling competition is the funniest.
Wallace continues to complain about being nervous and embarrassed, as if he
feels really alone at the podium, and probably in general. As he reads from
Infinite Jest, the audience is silent. This book isn’t as much of a
belly-laugh, and the excerpt is an account of a robbery that ends in accidental
death. When Wallace gets to the death part, a morbid account told humorously, a
girl in back giggles, and Wallace gives her the Teacher Look over his Ben
Franklins. Aha! He is a teacher!
Warning! Do not, under any circumstances, ask Wallace if he was
influenced by Thomas Pynchon! Apparently, too many people ask him this. He
threatened me with pepper spray (jokingly?) and growled at me (really) before
answering this question, “No.” Thank God I’m unlisted.
— Pam Crouch
This article appears in March 7 • 1997 and March 7 • 1997 (Cover).