Self and society
BOOKS surveys new titles by and about two of America’s more provocative writers of recent times.
THE THEME song for the iconic American television drama MASH, Suicide is Painless, might be an apt subtitle for D T Max’s masterful, moving and insightful deconstruction of the extraordinary life of the brilliant American ‘‘grunge’’ novelist, David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 at the relatively tender age of 46. It is always difficult for those who live in the shadow of such loss to understand why an individual of such vivacity and accomplishment can choose oblivion over destiny. Perhaps the excruciating pain of suicidal depression can only be understood by those who have wrestled with its strangling throes. The truth is that suicide is rarely an act of spontaneity but one of conscious forethought and is seemingly ‘‘painless’’ to its subject who believes that tomorrow will not be a better day, just the continuation of the same inescapable hell. Without hope, oblivion is preferable to the debilitating psychic pain that can render even the most tactile mind completely useless. It is in that context that Max succeeds in unravelling the complex academic, intellectual, personal and societal forces that drove Wallace’s burning ambition, intellectual adventurousness, sophomoric humour, insatiable lust and powerful self-loathing to create his unique incinerating flame.
In his preface to the British edition, Max aptly states that ‘‘Wallace was the foremost writer of his literary generation . . . Acclaimed in his mid-20s, burned out and hospitalised for depression and drug abuse before he was 30, he bounced back to write Infinite Jest, the 1079-page novel about a tennis academy and a halfway house . . . that remains the seminal American novel of the 1990s’’.
That success transformed Wallace into a cultish figure for rebellious, anarchic writing wannabes; exactly the object of reverence, adulation and envy that he was forever examining and deconstructing in his own fiction. This paradox became a form of imprisonment. Drawn to academia, he felt most at home with other recovering addicts who struggled with the same need to forgo harrowing temptation. With precision and empathy, Max carefully recreates the succession of relationships and the course of events which enabled Wallace to achieve his desired literary success that ultimately drew the trajectory of his descent. The same complexity which mesmerised his fiction often created paralysis in his own mind.
Wallace was the son of a philosophy professor and a mother who was such a strict grammarian she constantly corrected any conversational errors that he and and his beloved sister Amy slipped into casual conversation. From an early age, he was the class clown. His mind moved like a perpetual motion machine, questioning ad infinitum, juxtaposing ironic metaphors,
Wallace’s mind moved like a perpetual motion machine, questioning ad infinitum.
distancing himself from social and personal rejection through his gymnastic intellect. This cauldron of characteristics could be perceived as arrogance, but he was sincerely drawn to theoretical problems and logical analysis with the keen competitive edge of the great tennis player he might have been had his physical abilities matched his strategic genius.
What distinguishes Max’s breathtaking and heartbreaking biography is not only his intelligent insight into the familial and psychological factors that inspired and tormented Wallace, but his acute and careful reconstruction of the contemporary literary movements and technological forces that shaped and inspired Wallace’s ingenuity. Just as Wallace was influenced by his philosophical father and grammarian mother, his passionate desire to discover a realistic recursive narrative was a dialectical response to the minimalism of such authors as Raymond Carver and the postmodernism of Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme, whose work was the rage during his graduate student years.
Full disclosure – reading Max’s biography of Wallace felt like tracing my own graduate writing education as I was an MFA student at the same time as Wallace. His first residency at the creative artist’s retreat of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs occurred directly after mine ended. His stupefaction at the celebrity of some of his fellow residents resembled my own paralytic anxiety, though no-one said to him while walking around the lake, as they said to me, ‘‘You’re never going to make it here.’’
At his memorial service, Zadie Smith said that Wallace was ‘‘so modern he’s in a different timespace continuum from the rest of us’’. His literary nemesis and dear friend Jonathan Franzen spoke of Wallace’s ‘‘rhetorical virtuosity’’ and of the ‘‘crackling precision’’ of his prose. Truthfully, I was never a fan of Wallace’s literary exegeses. But in testimony to Max’s brilliant work, I’m eager to read his fiction with new reverence and compassion.
IF HENRY James had produced a child with the American Jewish comedienne Joan Rivers, they might have sired America’s own literary Tasmanian Devil, A M Homes. She has creatively explored the secret deviances, hilarious obsessions, insane neuroses and fiscal fixations of the idealised American households imagined by such popular sitcoms as The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver.
Homes has gone into the locked closets of every gated mansion and turned on the light. While such ‘‘shocking’’ subject matter is now almost de rigeur, Homes’ originally raised that literary bar.
The prayerful nature of the novel’s title is as intentional as many of the novel’s biblical tropes – the most central being the relationship between two unequal brothers – in this case, George and Harold Silver. George is a player, the bombastic and narcissistic self-made head of a television network, as despised as he is envied. His wealth has earned him all the necessary trappings – an elegant home in the wealthy suburbs with a television in every room, a beautiful and talented wife, a cat, a dog and two lovely pre-teens safely ensconced in Ivy League prep boarding schools.
His older brother Harold is the narrator of this tale. Harold is childless, wed to the extremely functional and independent Chinese-American businesswoman Claire. A historian by trade, Harold is a professor at a commuter college. Harold is as passive as George is aggressive and is what is known in Yiddish as a shlemiel, which means something like a failure who would be invisible if he wasn’t naturally attracted to disasters.
The action begins and ends on Thanksgiving, that lauded American holiday celebrated for its ecumenical tradition of food, giving, thankfulness, family reunion and watching sports. Personally, I have never known a family who hasn’t had a huge feud on Thanksgiving. This tacit secret does not go unnoticed by Homes. During the traditional feast, Harold imagines George’s children ‘‘dressed as Pilgrims in black-buckle shoes, doing Pilgrim children chores, carrying buckets of milk like human oxen. Nathaniel, 12, and Ashley, 11, sat like lumps at the table, huddled or more like curled, as if poured into their chairs, truly spineless, ever focused on their small screens, the only thing in motion their thumbs – one texting friends no -one has ever seen and the other killing digitised terrorists.’’
Homes not only deconstructs but decimates the mythology of the happy American nuclear family. George has caused a fatal car accident and is now in police custody. What happens afterwards involves adultery, murder, deception, endless visits to hospitals and ultimately, emotional and personal redemption.
In less capable hands, this could be a corny morality tale. But Homes’ intelligence, irony, humour, imagination and humanity transform this tale into a breathless, entertaining and uplifting adventure. So take a dramamine and start reading.