NO WIGGLE ROOM: Considering David Foster Wallace’s last work

On Monday, after reading “Wiggle Room,” the posthumously excerpted section of David Foster Wallace’s final—and unfinished—novel which the New Yorker published in its magazine this week, I had no choice but to wonder if Wallace, in his final years, had become something of an anachronism literarily. He seems, in this ultimate work, to be suffering from a malaise inspired by the 1990s, when the United States was a profitable company, on both the micro and macro scale, and ignoring one’s ambition was tantamount, if not to murder, at least to grand larceny.

Two weeks ago, we ran a two-part story on Richard Yates Revolutionary Road, a novel that, released in 1961, reflected the apparent horrors of the suburbs, but which, when Sam Mendes translated it onto celluloid (or electrons) in 2008, seemed hyperbolic. The film Revolutionary Road might have sat better with audiences if it hadn’t taken itself so seriously. Yates saw the Connecticut neighborhood where his Wheelers lived as a maximum security prison. Even the most cynical moviegoer in 2008, stuck at an office job after earning a Master’s degree in English Literature, saw it as little more than a quaint county jail. The rest of us thought it resembled a resort in the Catskills, and didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I bring up Yates again, though, not to prolong the discussion of his value as a novelist, or to continue arguing over whether Kate and Leo helped or hurt the novel’s legacy (go here if you want to join that fray). Instead I bring up Yates because his literary currency was dismay, without the possibility of happiness. Pessimism has value insofar as it can, if brandished early enough, expunge ignorance and prevent disasters. If a novel enumerates the shortcomings of capitalism (greed, exploitation, more greed), it is theoretically a valuable prophylactic: if read, it could prevent disease. But once the economy collapses, reading a novel about how bad some jobs are seems as reasonable as a Somali traveling to Mogadishu in 1993 to hear a lecture about the dangers of chemical fertilizers.

I don’t want to question how good a writer David Foster Wallace was. “Lane Dean summoned all his will and bore down and did three returns in a row, and began imagining different high places to jump off of. He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops.” This is very fine, compressed, concise, and very bleak, prose. But it isn’t compelling. I struggled to finish it, and it’s only six pages (my New Yorker comes on Thursdays, so I printed it off the website).

Mimetic prose—that is, prose mimetic of its theme—dates back at least to Laurence Sterne blacking out the page when Tristram Shandy mourns the death of Yorick. Sterne’s experiment is the simplest sort of mimesis (color both representing an emotion and inspiring one), and though certainly anomalistic in the 1760s, isn’t anymore repeatable than painting a white canvas white after Kazimir Malevich had. In “Wiggle Room,” Wallace is performing a more elaborate trick, but it’s still a trick. He’s approximating, in prose, the experience of being bored. This is, I fear, for all the success of its conceit, boring, and much easier to achieve than, say, what e.e. cummins accomplished in “she being Brand/ -new.” With the right concentration, that poem will give a man an erection.

But the problem with reading about Lane Dean completing tax returns is that the experience is as enjoyable as doing a tax return, with of course the additional displeasure of knowing that this is the subject that killed Wallace (not taxes, but writing about them carefully). Of course, I’m employing post hoc ergo propter hoc logic: the book then the suicide does not mean the suicide because of the book. But “Wiggle Room” is from the mind (not the heart, because the heart has already died) of a melancholic man. Deducing whether Wallace wrote this way because he was depressed or was depressed because he wrote this way is like wondering if an alcoholic drinks because of his family problems or has family problems because he drinks. They’re inextricably connected.

“Try as he might, [Lane] could not this last week help envisioning the inward lives of the older men to either side of him, doing this day after day. Getting up on a Monday and chewing their toast and putting their hats and coats on knowing what they were going out the door to come back to for eight hours. This was boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt.”

“Wiggle Room” casts a much longer shadow than it would were Wallace still alive. If he hadn’t killed himself in September it would be simple to say, if Deborah Treisman had excerpted The Pale King in this week’s magazine to promote the book, that once again the New Yorker had published poor work by a famous author rather than good work by an anonymous one. But presenting an author’s final work is the duty, always, of the editor who can get her hands on it. If Flatmancrooked had the manuscript, we’d have published it, too. But let me say something that will probably get me in trouble, even with members of my own staff: If Wallace were alive, I’d like to think (and I may be fantasizing) that I’d have turned “Wiggle Room” down.

The story itself is not without important literary forebearers. Think of the middle career of Samuel Beckett—specifically the centerpiece of the three novels, when Malone is in his bed, enumerating his possessions. Malone Dies is nothing if not a novel about boredom and tepidity. But I wonder if Beckett didn’t say everything that needed to be said about inactivity. In graduate school, when I was reading too much Beckett, and starting to sound like him, my professor, Ha Jin, told me, “Joyce and Beckett are writers without children.” Joyce, of course, had a daughter, but what he meant is that there are certain writers whom you cannot emulate without blatantly imitating.

This is not entirely true, of course. J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K is a sort of post-racial South African Molloy, more linear and less internal, but complete with a change in narrative perspective, and yet still a unique and wonderful short novel. “Wiggle Room,” though, without having had the luxury to read the entire manuscript, seems obsolescent to me, as if it were, not a thematic extension, but rather a thematic distension from Beckett, resembling more a tumorous growth than a new limb. When Clinton was president, a turgid, immobile narrative about working at the IRS might have resonated better. Now the story feels like an outmoded complaint, even if Wallace’s biography makes it a little more poignant.

By James Kaelan