IJ study archive

History of Literature Ep. 181: David Foster Wallace Part 2 — the essays, Broom of the System, Mary Karr, and The Pale King (everything except Infinite Jest)

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TL;DR

Part two of a three-part DFW arc on a generalist literature podcast (part three, on IJ, became ep. 271), explicitly scoped to "everything other than Infinite Jest": the essays (cruise ship, Big Red Son, language), Broom of the System, the Mary Karr relationship (including the abuse allegations, plus a full on-air reading of Karr's "Suicide's Note: An Annual"), and a long Pale King segment. Datable to spring 2019 (Feedspot 2019 ranking; "headed to Scotland this summer"). The episode advances no IJ theories — the Theories section is omitted per the lens rule; its value is biographical color, essay-corpus framing for a lay audience, and one IJ-composition datum (Wallace saying he never worked harder than when editing IJ). ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Format note: essentially a Mike Palindrome monologue; the host (Jack Wilson) frames it and reads listener mail. IJ deferred to a promised part three. [00:13]
  • Christianity anecdote: Wallace at some point tried to convert to Christianity, taking instruction from a pastor at a nearby church; the pastor ended the religious training because Wallace "had too many questions" (ASR paraphrase). [00:15]
  • Cruise essay reading: extended excerpts from "A Supposedly Fun Thing"; Palindrome's frame is that Wallace mocks the passengers yet dines with and engages them — an empathy he builds and struggles against because his gut reaction is to default to irony. [00:14–00:17]
  • Language nerdery: the "way"-as-adverb defense via 19th-century usage; the "where's it at" anapest bit from the usage essay — presented as the signature highbrow/vernacular balance of his voice. [00:17–00:19]
  • Big Red Son: the AVN-awards piece retold at length (Max Hardcore's hotel room; the "complex erotic tension" passage; the porn-star-suicides paragraph with Alex Jordan's note addressed to her pet bird), read as Wallace consciously engineering the comic last line to succeed and fail at once — we shouldn't be able to consume these deaths as mere tragedy-shaped units. [00:20–00:24]
  • Biography via D.T. Max: his parents tolerated (even okayed) his smoking pot before doing homework in high school; the Amherst stories of yelling out his window to advertise the great time he was having — read as awkward-ironic but sincere wanting-to-belong. [00:24–00:27]
  • Lineage and Broom: Barth, Barthelme, and Pynchon as the admired forefathers ("taking a concept and exhausting it"); Broom of the System written as an Amherst undergrad, published during the Arizona MFA; Lenore's fear she exists only as a character; the three embedded bad-journal stories as the book's best parts; recommended as the fiction entry point (essays: start with Consider the Lobster). [00:27–00:30]
  • Mary Karr: her minimizing framing of the affair (a handful of times in bed, in her telling); her description of his mind shooting off sparks, running at a higher frame-rate than everyone else's (as aired); and the dark side — Palindrome recounts that Wallace tried to buy a gun (allegedly to kill Karr's husband), tried to push her out of a moving car, and tailed her five-year-old home from school to learn where she lived — while cautioning that only around two percent of what happened is known. [00:31–00:33]
  • Karr's poem: reads "Suicide's Note: An Annual" in full, including the "every suicide's an asshole" turn. [00:33–00:36]
  • Pale King composition: thousands of typed and handwritten pages left at his death; accounting classes, IRS-code self-education, site visits; assembled by Karen Green, Bonnie Nadell, and Michael Pietsch (ASR "Pitch"), with Pietsch doing most of the editing; crucially Wallace left no indicated plan for the book's overall structure — the assemblers could only assume he wanted an IJ-like non-linear structure. [00:36–00:39]
  • Pale King reading advice: read each chapter as a mini-story; ch. 25 ("turns a page") read aloud with James Lasdun's Guardian review quoted (boredom as subject; concentration as "the nearest thing to heroism left" — ASR rendering of the review's wording, unverified); ch. 9 "Author's Foreword" as his first authorial self-insertion in fiction; ch. 46 (Meredith Rand / Shane Drinion) held up as some of his finest writing, with long excerpts. [00:40 onward; tail of the transcript is untimestamped]
  • The one IJ-composition datum: Palindrome recalls Wallace saying in interviews that hard work had always been his habit, but that editing Infinite Jest demanded more of it than anything before — offered to contrast the unedited patches of Pale King. [untimestamped tail]
  • Reader stand-in readings reported, not adjudicated: "people have said" Drinion is the DFW figure in ch. 46; others say Meredith Rand is an idealized DFW, the conversation being two sides of his own personality. (Pale King, not IJ — recorded here, not as a theory block.) [untimestamped tail]
  • Karen Green anecdotes: she knew it was love when he agreed to fly to Hawaii despite fear of flying and sharks (he stood on shore yelling anecdotal shark-attack statistics at her while she swam); the prospect of his dogs dying was something he could not face, and he said "don't die" to her at night; and her remark, as aired, that tender things are hard to remember tenderly. [untimestamped tail]

Themes

Addiction (pot, biographically); depression and suicide (Karr's poem, the suicide motif Lasdun flags across the work); entertainment and boredom (the Pale King segment as the post-IJ inversion: attention as heroism); communication and connection (the Rand–Drinion conversation; the socializing struggle); irony vs. empathy (the cruise-essay frame).

Cross-references