On the Road with David Foster Wallace

David Lipsky’s "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself" documents a weeklong road trip taken in 1996 with David Foster Wallace. The work is available at Buffalo Street Books. Photo by Marion Ettlinger

THE ROAD TRIP holds a special place in the language of American literature and film, and in the lived experience of those of us whose country landscape is riddled and marred by highways. Two important things to keep in mind on the subject: first, the destination is secondary at best. Second, the choice of companion is crucial. Steinbeck took his French standard poodle and that went well. Kerouac took Neal Cassady and they had their moments. Breckin Meyer took Tom Green and a bunch of people suffered horribly for ninety minutes.

David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself promises a road trip with David Foster Wallace. What it delivers feels more like a road trip with Wallace riding shotgun and the literary equivalent of a French standard poodle yapping in the back seat. The book is a full transcript of an interview conducted by David Lipsky for Rolling Stone, an entire conversation that took place on the last leg of Wallace’s book tour for Infinite Jest in 1996. This was a moment in which Wallace was enough of a rock star to be interviewed by Rolling Stone, although not, Wallace disappointedly informs his interviewer, enough of a rock star to get laid on tour. The fact that the interview was never published owes less to Lipsky’s failings as an interviewer than to Wallace’s untenable status as rock star: his answers, like his prose, tend to sprawl out and veer through high philosophy and low culture and require unpacking by an attentive reader.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first, because there’s a lot of good here. The most frustrating aspect of the book is born out of the very moment that precipitates its publishing. Had Wallace lived to a ripe old age and produced a series of critically well-received books, chances are this interview (call it Portrait of the Artist as a Post-Adolescent), would have never seen the light of day, or at best, would have shown up in PDF on Howling Fantods, the website devoted to all things Wallace.  But Wallace’s suicide created an instant market which ultimately would only be satisfied (or dissatisfied) by the publication of The Pale King, the monolithic manuscript Wallace was working on when he died that will be published by Little, Brown by the end of the year. Into this gap steps Lipsky’s interview.

Two words I’d like to put on the table at this point: “troubled” and “opportunistic”. Any writer who hangs himself in his garage is going to get smacked with the label “troubled”. Matter of understatement. The problem comes when the market demands images of the writer as troubled. In the aftermath of Wallace’s death, critics scoured his books to find references to suicide. He’s no Sylvia Plath, but they managed to come away with a couple. In preparing his transcript for publication within this market atmosphere, Lipsky can hardly be blamed for reading Wallace’s remarks through the lens of his suicide; it’s a routine response to search for answers in the words left behind by someone so highly articulate who chose to punctuate his life with one big question mark.

But Lipsky’s commentary, served up mostly in brackets and in a series of forewords I opted not to read, is so at odds with the tone of the interview that it becomes jarring. In 1996, Wallace is far from troubled: he’s just coming off a literary triumph and is working on many of the essays that will become A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, some of the most incisive writing he ever produced. He talks openly about his time in a mental institution, but clearly makes the point in a discussion on his aversion to shock treatment, “I’m not Elizabeth Wurtzel [author of Prozac Nation]. I’m not biochemically depressed.” Lipsky’s interjections (like pointing out that Infinite Jest, with its obfuscated chronology, was meant to be set the year after Wallace’s death) feel like someone throwing a funeral shroud over James Brown while he’s still on stage.

Lipsky also continually tries to unmask Wallace’s attempts at humility and shyness as artifice, although they ring true enough for a reader.

Enough bashing. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself does a number of things well. At times it works as a director’s commentary for Infinite Jest, allowing Wallace to ruminate on the massive novel while it’s still somewhat fresh in his mind. It allows insight to how Wallace worked through a lot of the ideas that crystallized in later essays, particularly ideas about television and its effect on readership. Wallace’s essay “E Unum Pluribus” goes into detail on this, outlining the complex insider/outsider dynamic played upon by advertising, but here in a discussion of his goals with Infinite Jest, a novel he had wanted to title A Failed Entertainment, Wallace makes a point that seems to underlie all of his work:

“You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was. I think one of the insidious lessons about TV is the meta-lesson that you’re dumb. This is all you can do. This is easy, and you’re the sort of person who really just wants to sit in a chair and have it easy. When in fact there are parts of us, in a way, that are a lot more ambitious than that. And what we need, I think—and I’m not saying I’m the person to do it. But I think what we need is seriously engaged art, that can teach again that we’re smart.”

Most importantly, it gives fans of the writer, myself included, just a little more time with him. When my grandfather died, my grandmother refused to erase the answering machine message with his voice on it, clinging to these thirty more seconds she could have with him. Maybe it’s not the conversation he and I would have had, and maybe these aren’t the questions I would have asked, but Although Of Course feels like a letter lost in the mail for too long, arriving after the body’s been buried and life has moved on, if slightly lessened. It’s not the long-awaited last manuscript, nor is it the undergrad philosophy thesis currently being annotated to be published in the fall (really), but even if the engine’s running loud and sputtery and the radio’s heavy with static, it’s a long and pleasant ride.

Tagged as: Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Bob Proehl, books, Buffalo Street Books, David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky, Review