He picks up the phone as I'm leaving a message on his machine, and immediately starts laying down ground rules for the interview. "Then some weird thing happens where I end up getting calls from people that I don't want to get calls from."
"My number has a shelf life of one year," he says. He warns me that his unlisted telephone number will be good for only another month, when he'll have it changed. Journalists even waxed rhapsodic about his publicity photo, as if it were the very picture of his age - an unshaven young man lost in thought, a bandanna wrapped around his long hair like a bandage protecting a head wound.Īll this attention must carry a cost, so the 37-year-old Wallace, a professor at Illinois State University in Bloomington-Normal, is protective of his privacy. Wallace followed his celebrated epic with an excellent collection of nonfiction "essays and arguments," A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and for the next two years he continued to show up regularly in magazines as mainstream as Elle and Spin. But that reaction may only be part of an expected backlash against the author, who has been described as "remarkable" (Newsweek), "brilliant" (Kirkus Reviews), "a genius" (Chicago Tribune), and "the funniest writer of his generation" (Village Voice). Sarcasm has become an increasingly common response to Wallace's self-conscious work in the years following the success of his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, a 1,079-page social satire and human tragedy with 388 footnotes. The single-sentence missive was reinforced by five footnotes, which went on to detail the disgruntled reader's obsessions with such personal problems as insomnia, grammar, and an identifying scar on his right index finger, caused by a broken drinking glass. "I am tired of David Foster Wallace," said a letter to the editor of Harper's last November.
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