I’m dipping into ‘Infinite Jest’ by D.F. Wallace and at the same time reading ‘Every Love Story is a Ghost Story’ the bio by D.T. Max. Of the two I like the latter more which is paradoxical given that it is the writing fame that evokes the bio, that makes the man biographable. Everybody is that of course, that’s the one true story or based on a true story story. With Wallace the disjunction between the knowing author persona and the man is startling. So far in the book only one Eng. Lit. colleague has offered a clue to his personality which struck me as correct. He was a high functioning Aspergers. His parents particularly his mother also veered that way. His obsessiveness, his anxiety, the inability to sustain relationships, the multiple addictions all feed into the novel and makes it work where it works and cause it to splutter and die where they don’t. The jokes he runs into the ground that make your fingers itch to skip or to hurl are balanced by the truth of the ruin of addiction coming out in the rehab clinic details.
As the biography goes one I sense Max getting laconic ironic. There was trouble with the dogs and the woman he was living with, separately and together. They went to couple counselling. I wonder if they broke it down logically, woman and DFW; DFW and Dogs; woman and dogs; DFW, woman, and dogs, dog 1 and dog 2, the Alpha and Beta and interspecies ramifications. I think I’ve just made that up. It’s the sort of thing Wallace did so it must be contagious.
The biography is excellent. I recommend it. The novel: ‘I can’t go one, I’ll go on.’
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