“Writing fiction takes me out of time,” he explains. “I sit down and the clock will not exist for me for a few hours. That’s probably as close to immortal as we’ll ever get.
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The writers I know, there’s a certain self-consciousness about them, and a critical awareness of themselves and other people that helps their work. But that sort of sensibility makes it very hard to be with people, and not sort of be hovering near the ceiling, watching what’s going on. One of the things you two will discover, in the years after you get out of school, is that managing to really be an alive human being, and also to do good work and be as obsessive as you have to be, is really tricky. It’s not an accident when you see writers either become obsessed with the whole pop stardom thing or get into drugs and alcohol, or have terrible marriages. Or they simply disappear from the whole scene in their thirties or forties. It’s very tricky.
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But there are a few books I have read that I’ve never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world.
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I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer along in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less along inside. It might be just that simple. But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art–which just means art whose primary aim is to make money–is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pan. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.
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One thing TV does is help us to deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of form. The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much along, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.
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There is the anecdote about all Jane Austen’s friends being terrified to talk around her because they knew they would end up in a book. I’m not sure how fiction and poetry work, but part of it is that really we notice a lot more than we notice we notice. A particular job of fiction is not so much to note things for people but rather to wake readers up to how observant they already are, and that’s why for me as a reader the descriptions or just toss offs that I like the most are not the ones that seem utterly new but the ones that have that eerie “good Lord I’ve noticed that too but have never even taken a moment to articulate to myself.”
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Probably all jobs are the same and they’re filled with horrible boredom and despair and quiet little bits of fulfillment that are very hard to tell anyone else about. That’s just a guess.
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He told me a joke: What does a writer say after sex? Was it as good for me as it was for you? There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be,” he said. “It’s a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely.
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Fiction’s job used to be to make the strange familiar, to take you somewhere and let you feel that this was familiar to you. It seems that one of the things now is that everything presents itself as familiar, so one of the things the artist has to do now is take a lot of the familiarity and remind people that it’s strange.
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Success can be as difficult to recover from as failure. “You know the tic big-league pitchers have,” his mother says, “when they know that they’ve pitched a marvelous game–but gee, can they do it again, so they keep flexing that arm? There was some of that. Where he said, ‘OK. Good, that came out well. But can I do it again?’ That was the feeling I got. There was always the shadow waiting.”
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In late 2001, Costello called Wallace. “He was talking about how hard the writing was. And I said, lightheartedly, ‘Dave, you’re a genius.’ [DWF won the MacArthur genius award.] Meaning, people aren’t going to forget about you. You’re not going to wind up in a Wendy’s. He said, ‘All that makes me think is that I’ve fooled you, too.”
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