Of course, the arguments that might be employed w/r/t reading in this way are deeply unreasonable, entirely experiential, and impossible to objectively defend. [67] In the end, all that can be said is that the difficult gift is its own defense, the deep rewarding pleasure of which is something you can only know by undergoing it. To appreciate Wallace, you need to really read him-and then you need to reread him. For this reason-among many others-he was my favorite living writer, and I wrote this piece to remember him by, which, in my case, is best done by reading him once again.
1. BREAKING THE RHYTHM THAT EXCLUDES THINKING
The story “Forever Overhead” is Brief Interviews at its most open, and for many readers, its most beautiful. Wallace disliked it, thinking it juvenilia-maybe it was its very openness he suspected. So many of the dense themes of the book are here laid out with an unexpected directness. At first glance, it’s simple: a boy on his thirteenth birthday in an “old public pool on the western edge of Tucson,” resolving to try the diving tank for the first time. The voice is as blank as a video game, as an instruction manual, [68] and yet, within it, Wallace finds something tender: “Get out now and go past your parents, who are sunning and reading, not looking up. Forget your towel. Stopping for the towel means talking and talking means thinking. You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking. Go right by, toward the tank at the deep end.” To this he then adds a layer of complication: a sparsely punctuated, synesthetic compression, like a painter placing another shade atop his base. A remembered wet dream does not yet know its own name, it is “spasms of a deep sweet hurt”; the pool is “five-o’clock warm,” its distinctive odor “a flower with chemical petals.” The noise of the radio overhead is “jangle flat and tinny thin,” and a dive is “a white that plumes and falls” until once more “blue clean comes up in the middle of the white.” Throughout, the expected verb-is-is generally omitted: sensations present themselves directly on the page, as they present themselves to the boy. The unmediated sensory overload of puberty overlaps here with a dream of language: that words might become things, that there would exist no false gap between the verbal representation of something and the something itself. [69]
Then, with the base coat down, and the wash laid on top, comes another layer. Concrete details so finely rendered they seem to have been drawn from the well of our own memories: your sister’s swim cap with the “raised rubber flowers… limp old pink petals” and the “thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in paper cups”; that SN CK BAR with the letter missing and the concrete deck “rough and hot against your bleached feet.” Isn’t everything just as you remember it? The big lady in front of you on the ladder: “Her suit is full of her. The backs of her thighs are squeezed by the suit and look like cheese. The legs have abrupt little squiggles of cold blue shattered vein under the white skin.” The ladder itself: “The rungs are very thin. It’s unexpected. Thin round iron rungs laced in slick wet Safe-T felt.” And now, fueled by nostalgia, by the pressing in of times past, the concrete seems to mix with the existentiaclass="underline" “Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone and disappears.” And again, on that ladder: “You have real weight… The ground wants you back.” Haven’t you been in this terrible queue? Aren’t you in it now? A queue from which there is no exit, in which everyone looks bored and “seems by himself,” in which all dive freely and yet have no real freedom, for “it is a machine that moves only forward.”
The difference is awareness (this is always the difference in Wallace). The boy seems to see clearly what we, all those years ago, felt only faintly. He sees that “the pool is a system of movement,” in which all experience is systematized (“There is a rhythm to it. Like breathing. Like a machine.”) and into which, as the woman in front of him dives, he must now insert himself:
Listen. It does not seem good, the way she disappears into a time that passes before she sounds. Like a stone down a well. But you think she did not think so. She was part of a rhythm that excludes thinking. And now you have made yourself part of it, too. The rhythm seems blind. Like ants. Like a machine.
You decide this needs to be thought about. It may, after all, be all right to do something scary without thinking, but not when the scariness is the not thinking itself. Not when not thinking turns out to be wrong. At some point the wrongnesses have piled up blind: pretend-boredom, weight, thin rungs, hurt feet, space cut into laddered parts that melt together only in a disappearance that takes time. The wind on the ladder not what anyone would have expected. The way the board protrudes from shadow into light and you can’t see past the end. When it all turns out to be different you should get to think. It should be required.
Now we see what the board is and feel our own predicament: sentient beings encased in these flesh envelopes, moving always in one inexorable direction (the end of which we cannot see). Bound by time. Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you. This, Sartre’s dictum, hangs over these passive people who “let their legs take them to the end” before coming down “heavy on the edge of the board and mak[ing] it throw them up and out.” Thrown into the world, condemned to be free-and hideously responsible for that freedom.
It strikes me when I reread this beautiful story how poor we are at tracing literary antecedents, how often we assume too much and miss obvious echoes. Lazily we gather writers by nations, decades and fashions; we imagine Wallace the only son of DeLillo and Pynchon. In fact, Wallace had catholic tastes, and it shouldn’t surprise us to find, along with Sartre, traces of Philip Larkin, a great favorite of his. [70] Wallace’s fear of automatism is acutely Larkinesque (“a style/ Our lives bring with them: habit for a while/Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got” [71]), as is his attention to that singular point in our lives when we realize we are closer to our end than our beginning. When Wallace writes, “At some point there has gotten to be more line behind you than in front of you,” he lends an indelible image to an existential fear, as Larkin did memorably in “The Old Fools:” “The peak that stays in view wherever we go / For them is rising ground.” Then there’s the title itself, “Forever Overhead”: a perfectly accurate description, when you think about it, of how the poems “High Windows” and “Water” close. [72] That mix of the concrete and the existential, of air and water, of the eternal submerged in the banal. And boredom was the great theme of both. But in the great theme there is a great difference. Wallace wanted to interrogate boredom as a deadly postmodern attitude, an attempt to bypass experience on the part of a people who have become habituated to a mediated reality. “It seems impossible,” the boy thinks, arranging his face in fake boredom to match the rest, “that everybody could really be this bored.” In this story, the counterweight to automatism is sensation, expressed here as human reality in its most direct and redemptive form: “Your feet are hurt from the thin rungs and have a great ability to feel.” It’s no accident that we are in a swimming pool, at fiery sunset, with a high wind blowing and the ground hot enough to remind of us of its solidity. The four elements are intended to work upon “you”; for no matter how many times this queue has formed, no matter how many people have dived before, or have watched other people dive, in life or on TV, this is you, diving now, and it should be thought about, and there should be a wonder in it. For Larkin, on the other hand, boredom was real (“Life is first boredom, then fear./Whether or not we use it, it goes” [73]), and the inexorability of time made all human effort faintly ludicrous. There is some of this despair in Wallace, too (whatever splash the divers make, the tank “heals itself” each time, as if each dive had never been), but much less than is popularly ascribed to him. Time has its horrors in Wallace but it’s also the thing that binds us most closely to the real and to one another: without it we would lose ourselves in solipsism (which, for him, was the true horror.) When the boy, in a meditative state, dares to hope that “no time is passing outside,” he is soon proven wrong:
[67] Wallace’s most attentive mainstream critic, Wyatt Mason, made this point in his 2004 review “You Don’t Like It? You Don’t Have to Play.” There he asks and answers the question-“Why should [the reader] grant Wallace any of his demands… when the reader feels, not unreasonably, that Wallace is making unreasonable demands?”-with the only honest response available, that is, an account of Mason’s own pleasure: “having read the eight stories in
[68] The second person present tense imperative-a fashionable conceit of the ’90s.
[69] Maybe writers have this dream more than most.
[70] I once asked Wallace, in a letter, for a list of favorite writers. Larkin was the only poet mentioned.
[71] From “Dockery and Son.”