A few times in life, someone’s work hits you so hard it changes how you think. This is how David Foster Walleye are born.
The most popular way it happens is via “This is Water,” a commencement speech in which a sweaty David Foster Wallace doles out capital-T Truth to graduates as they molt into new beings, letting fresh air touch the raw nerves of their budding adulthood. He starts with self-deprecation: “If anybody feels like perspiring, I’d invite you to go ahead because I’m sure going to.” Then he delivers what becomes, for many, an annual ritual — a yearly touchstone that describes life as, mostly, a string of dull and ordinary moments that take deliberate attention to appreciate.
The second way a Walleye is born is via the essay “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise.” Harper’s Magazine paid Wallace to enjoy (or at least observe) a seven-night Caribbean cruise. Hilarity ensues. He describes a cruise ship as a floating wedding cake — a description that would be the centerpiece of something I’d write — and stashes it in a footnote.
You set his stuff down and just think, wow. Didn’t know you could do that with words. Didn’t know you could wield a sword’s length of razor-sharp intellect with such lax ‘aw shucks-ness’ that completely disarms. Didn’t know you could be charming while hammering on the absurdity of mass culture, the futility of existence, and, paradoxically, the inexplicability of it all with devastating precision. But you also sense a trap…
In “Little Expressionless Animals,” Wallace describes a character like this: “You know those ultra-modern rifles, where the mechanisms of aiming far outnumber those of firing? Dee’s like that. God am I scared of being like that.” But Wallace is exactly like that. Ever so calculating. Especially in essays and interviews, you’re never quite sure how much of his coyness, nervousness, pandering, is affected versus real. Some readers likely find his posturing deliberate, manipulative, immediately off-putting.
But if you’re into it, there is more. Vastly more.
There is the whiplash awaiting you in the short story “Good Old Neon.” There is frequent and vigorous brilliance to behold in his first novel, “Broom of the System.” There is the steep ascent of “Infinite Jest,” a doorstop novel that means so damn much to me, yet remains totally unrecommendable. Not because others couldn’t handle it, but because it’s slow torture one endures to pick a handful of bleak, yet beautiful lessons. You must enjoy feeling the leash snap as things pass just beyond your reach.
Know how you only want to listen to sad music when you’re sad? The Blues when you’re blue? Wallace’s fiction is a similar kind of emotional echo chamber. It resonates with those already prone to buzzing at his frequency of apartness, loneliness, otherness.
“One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.”
~David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Book)
After I started reading Wallace, I spent years trying to write like David Foster Wallace Jr. Long sentences. Nested parentheticals. Footnotes as needless and unimpressive as somersaults at the Olympics. Even these words feel different. They are being influenced by his proximity. This isn’t my usual style. I don’t write long sentences. My syntax isn’t this overwrought. Reading Wallace can induce you to want to be a writer in the same way psychoactive drugs can trigger full-blown mental breaks in certain predisposed people. His words rewire the way you use yours.
Hence, “David Foster Walleye” as a playful descriptor for those who have been irreconcilably changed by Wallace’s work. The Walleye has read the books, the essays, the biographies. Listened to the interviews, seen the movie “The End of the Tour” (and will admit it was better than they expected).
The Walleye finds Wallace and thinks, Wow! This is a higher definition and therefore superior lens through which to view the world. But, in time, the Walleye pockets that lens. Instead, the Walleye reads Wallace and feels sort of… happy? Happy it’ll never be as capable of articulating despair so acutely, because surely it would take constant firsthand encounters to be so fluent. Happy it gets to read the most beautiful extrapolations of banality, longing, and loneliness that, through Wallace’s telling, somehow make them less radioactive. Happy that, if at times the Walleye is insufferable, it’s not because it’s insufferable to itself.
Wallace swam out there, in the deep and cold water we can’t handle. He described what he saw with excruciating vividness so we could apprehend it from the safer, warmer intellectual shallows.
The Walleye is grateful to have a chance to swim in the water of genius without drowning.
