Originally appeared in Cigale Literary Review in 2015
The Pot Calling the Kettle Narcissistic: The Lives and Works of John Updike and David Foster Wallace
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Written by David Foster Wallace. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. 356 pp. $27.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-670-02592-3.
Self-Consciousness. Written by John Updike. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990. 271 pp. $5.95. ISBN: 0-449-21821-X.
Consider the Lobster, a collection of David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction writing, contains his review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think.” In it, Wallace charges that Updike, among other faults, writes about the same protagonist over and over again—all “clearly stand-ins for Updike himself”—and that the protagonist is “always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying … and deeply alone, alone the way only an emotional solipsist can be alone.” Having just finished Wallace’s Infinite Jest, these claims struck me as more than a little hypocritical, so much so I wrote a review of Wallace’s review, calling him out for this incongruity and defending what I think is exemplary in Updike’s work.
I then continued my education in Wallace by working through D.T. Max’s biography of the author Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, and I also reread Updike’s memoir Self-Consciousness. The result of these excursions has me even more struck by the symmetrical relationship these two writers share. In particular, their lives and works seem like bookend reactions to the last half of 20th Century America, Updike wide-eyed and smitten with the possibilities of mass capitalism and culture, Wallace trapped by the knowledge of what such a system had done to his generation of writers, and to himself.
Anyone who takes a stroll through Self-Consciousness--especially its first long chapter “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington”—can’t help but be taken by Updike’s easy love for his hometown Shillington, Pennsylvania. America was on the cusp of one of its trademark corporate expansions, and with lines like “I was a devotee to packaging,” Updike may well have been the target market for forties-era companies looking for a foothold. There is almost no Updike novel where the protagonist doesn’t at some point marvel at the little things such a life brings: the sleekness of a car’s fender, the satisfying crunch of corn chips, the elastic band of underwear. To read Updike going off about the pleasure he got as a child from things like the local variety store is to read someone besotted. “There were cases of such bygone candy as coconut strips striped like bacon and belts of licorice with punch-out animals and imitation watermelon slices and chewy gumdrop sombreros.” As an adolescent, Updike loved to go to the movies, to fundraisers to help the war effort, even to the doctor. His feelings about public school seem to sum up his view of his childhood in general: “I could not understand how anybody could rebel against a system so clearly benign.”
It was a world view that encouraged a sort of entitlement, which the author reveals in comments like: “Since childhood I have been a late sleeper, preferring to let others get the world in order before I descend to it.” We’re left with the sense of someone who thinks the world will continue to spin in a way that will take care of him. Such comments also reveal a man who relies on the women in his life to deal with his domestic situation, to “wear the pants in the family,” as his own mother had. If Updike believed in a god giving order to things like his beloved hometown, as much of Self-Consciousness contests, that god may very well have been wearing a dress.
Updike was so under the spell of his country, he had a notorious blind spot for a time when its motivations may have been less than savory. I’m referring to his famous marginal support of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. In the Self-Consciousness essay “On Not Being a Dove,” Updike explores how he came to “such an awkward pass” that led to him being out of step with his colleagues, the crowd at Martha’s Vineyard, his then-wife. Seen through the context of Updike’s “benign” view of the place he called home, it’s not hard to imagine all this testiness over the war getting under his skin. “That, perhaps, was what angered me most about Vietnam; it made it impossible to ignore politics, to cultivate serenely my garden of private life and printed artifact.” Pulled out of his bucolic dream of his homeland, Updike had to wrestle with the disruption to his paradise. He even wonders, when remembering a man who’d suggested Updike’s photos showed evidence of a too-contented life, “Had I suffered enough?” Was his blind trust in the intentions of his country a sign that he really didn’t understand the plight of the South Vietnamese?
I had been lucky and, as the lucky will do, had become hardened. I had been the apple of my parents’ eyes. Our Shillington arrangements, precarious though they felt, had skirted disaster. I had avoided fighting in a war or incurring a fatal disease. I had not broken a bone until I was forty and could view it as a humorous exercise in machismo. I was spared appendicitis until I was fifty and could make an epiphanic short story out of it. I held the whip hand in the romantic relationships of my life and brought all heartbreak upon myself. No plane had crashed with me in it ...
America, for Updike, was a safe haven, and to defend her, even in her atrocious moments—especially!—was only to pay back in kind.
After reading Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max, the first published biography of David Foster Wallace, it’s not hard to imagine Wallace’s frustration with Updike’s brand loyalty. Max pulls from a Wallace letter the pique Wallace felt while reading Updike’s prose, that it, in Wallace’s memorable trope, “paws … at the reader’s ear like a sophomore at some poor girl’s bra.” Updike’s comfort with his country, his work, within his own skin, bugged the younger author deeply. Having committed suicide at 46, they were comforts Wallace would never know.
Wallace wasn’t always so torn. In fourth grade, he wrote in an autobiographical sketch, “Likes underwater swimming football, TV reading.” It was television, that staple of Wallace’s generation of Americans, that would lead to a lifelong addiction and a great deal of conflicted feelings for the writer. His childhood involved spending hours watching shows like Star Trek, Guiding Light, and The Price is Right. By the time Wallace went to college at Amherst in Massachusetts, the mixed feelings television brought with it for him had set in. In his dorm’s communal TV room, Max writes Wallace “enjoyed Hawaii Five-O reruns and … Hill Street Blues,” though “In general he did not like being watched watching, and if others were there he’d pass by.” Later, in his twenties, amidst a deep depression after becoming a creative writing instructor at Amherst, Wallace admitted to watching six to eight hours of television a day. TV was no doubt a slightly less damaging form of indulgence than the alcohol and drugs Wallace consumed at the time, but, he seemed to suspect, no less depleting of his soul.
In his long essay “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” written not long after his Amherst teaching days, Wallace began to understand the debilitating force TV had on him and his generation of American writers. “For us ... TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We quite literally cannot ‘imagine’ life without it.”
But TV was more than just a barrier to original thought for Wallace. It was analogous to the booze he drank or the marijuana he smoked. Max writes, “America was, Wallace knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied.” Wallace’s classic novel Infinite Jest divides the brunt of American culture between the novel’s two main settings: the Enfield Tennis Academy, where, Max writes, “the best players are trained to satisfy, through their tennis games and commercial endorsements, the appetite of the consumerist culture they came from”; and the halfway house Ennet House, where “addicts are not being cultivated to feed America’s obsessions; they are the people who’ve OD’d on them.” Wallace’s America was a machine that created two kinds of people: those who could tranquilize through entertainment, and those tranquilized. Despite his own commercial success, Wallace quickly found he wanted nothing to do with the former. Even before the successful Infinite Jest came out, the author had already bowed out of the spotlight as much as possible. He wrote to a student at the time, “[Celebrity life is] not for me, simply because it’s low-calorie and unstimulating and also highly narcotic.”
Wallace was as committed as he could be to combatting his nation’s addiction to addictions. Around the time of Infinite Jest’s publication, he championed a more moral fiction, one that didn’t rely solely on dramatizing “how dark and stupid everything is.” He continues: “In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and grow despite the times’ darkness.”
These difference between Updike’s and Wallace’s light and dark points of view could easily be written off as differences in emotional makeup—and they were distinct in this regard—but others could have been more circumstantial. While neither writer went into the military (Updike was 4Fed for psoriasis, to his dismay; it’s hard to imagine Wallace ever seriously entertaining the idea of the military), their respective eras’ prevailing attitudes toward war were quite different. Updike was a boy when World War II started, and echoing that time, seemed never to doubt the goodness and rightness of his country’s participation. Wallace’s infancy took place in the sixties, and gone was the sense that America’s participation in a war was beyond reproach. While Wallace might not be the first person we think of as espousing sixties ideals, his condition seems a natural intellectual reaction to the decade, rejecting what his culture gave him on instinct, trusting little but what he could come up with on his own, as outside of his country’s insidious forces as possible.
It wasn’t until well after the sixties that Updike could, in the essays of Self-Consciousness, admit some fallacy in his own knee-jerk sentiments about the era. As the world has only gotten more dominated by screens that fill viewers with neurotic need, it’s hard to imagine Wallace recanting his skepticism of American mass culture as expressed in Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. One can be grateful he’s not around for its latest escalation, and that his work is still here to help combat it.
The Pot Calling the Kettle Narcissistic: The Lives and Works of John Updike and David Foster Wallace
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Written by David Foster Wallace. New York: Viking Penguin, 2012. 356 pp. $27.95. ISBN-13: 978-0-670-02592-3.
Self-Consciousness. Written by John Updike. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990. 271 pp. $5.95. ISBN: 0-449-21821-X.
Consider the Lobster, a collection of David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction writing, contains his review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think.” In it, Wallace charges that Updike, among other faults, writes about the same protagonist over and over again—all “clearly stand-ins for Updike himself”—and that the protagonist is “always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying … and deeply alone, alone the way only an emotional solipsist can be alone.” Having just finished Wallace’s Infinite Jest, these claims struck me as more than a little hypocritical, so much so I wrote a review of Wallace’s review, calling him out for this incongruity and defending what I think is exemplary in Updike’s work.
I then continued my education in Wallace by working through D.T. Max’s biography of the author Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, and I also reread Updike’s memoir Self-Consciousness. The result of these excursions has me even more struck by the symmetrical relationship these two writers share. In particular, their lives and works seem like bookend reactions to the last half of 20th Century America, Updike wide-eyed and smitten with the possibilities of mass capitalism and culture, Wallace trapped by the knowledge of what such a system had done to his generation of writers, and to himself.
Anyone who takes a stroll through Self-Consciousness--especially its first long chapter “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington”—can’t help but be taken by Updike’s easy love for his hometown Shillington, Pennsylvania. America was on the cusp of one of its trademark corporate expansions, and with lines like “I was a devotee to packaging,” Updike may well have been the target market for forties-era companies looking for a foothold. There is almost no Updike novel where the protagonist doesn’t at some point marvel at the little things such a life brings: the sleekness of a car’s fender, the satisfying crunch of corn chips, the elastic band of underwear. To read Updike going off about the pleasure he got as a child from things like the local variety store is to read someone besotted. “There were cases of such bygone candy as coconut strips striped like bacon and belts of licorice with punch-out animals and imitation watermelon slices and chewy gumdrop sombreros.” As an adolescent, Updike loved to go to the movies, to fundraisers to help the war effort, even to the doctor. His feelings about public school seem to sum up his view of his childhood in general: “I could not understand how anybody could rebel against a system so clearly benign.”
It was a world view that encouraged a sort of entitlement, which the author reveals in comments like: “Since childhood I have been a late sleeper, preferring to let others get the world in order before I descend to it.” We’re left with the sense of someone who thinks the world will continue to spin in a way that will take care of him. Such comments also reveal a man who relies on the women in his life to deal with his domestic situation, to “wear the pants in the family,” as his own mother had. If Updike believed in a god giving order to things like his beloved hometown, as much of Self-Consciousness contests, that god may very well have been wearing a dress.
Updike was so under the spell of his country, he had a notorious blind spot for a time when its motivations may have been less than savory. I’m referring to his famous marginal support of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. In the Self-Consciousness essay “On Not Being a Dove,” Updike explores how he came to “such an awkward pass” that led to him being out of step with his colleagues, the crowd at Martha’s Vineyard, his then-wife. Seen through the context of Updike’s “benign” view of the place he called home, it’s not hard to imagine all this testiness over the war getting under his skin. “That, perhaps, was what angered me most about Vietnam; it made it impossible to ignore politics, to cultivate serenely my garden of private life and printed artifact.” Pulled out of his bucolic dream of his homeland, Updike had to wrestle with the disruption to his paradise. He even wonders, when remembering a man who’d suggested Updike’s photos showed evidence of a too-contented life, “Had I suffered enough?” Was his blind trust in the intentions of his country a sign that he really didn’t understand the plight of the South Vietnamese?
I had been lucky and, as the lucky will do, had become hardened. I had been the apple of my parents’ eyes. Our Shillington arrangements, precarious though they felt, had skirted disaster. I had avoided fighting in a war or incurring a fatal disease. I had not broken a bone until I was forty and could view it as a humorous exercise in machismo. I was spared appendicitis until I was fifty and could make an epiphanic short story out of it. I held the whip hand in the romantic relationships of my life and brought all heartbreak upon myself. No plane had crashed with me in it ...
America, for Updike, was a safe haven, and to defend her, even in her atrocious moments—especially!—was only to pay back in kind.
After reading Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max, the first published biography of David Foster Wallace, it’s not hard to imagine Wallace’s frustration with Updike’s brand loyalty. Max pulls from a Wallace letter the pique Wallace felt while reading Updike’s prose, that it, in Wallace’s memorable trope, “paws … at the reader’s ear like a sophomore at some poor girl’s bra.” Updike’s comfort with his country, his work, within his own skin, bugged the younger author deeply. Having committed suicide at 46, they were comforts Wallace would never know.
Wallace wasn’t always so torn. In fourth grade, he wrote in an autobiographical sketch, “Likes underwater swimming football, TV reading.” It was television, that staple of Wallace’s generation of Americans, that would lead to a lifelong addiction and a great deal of conflicted feelings for the writer. His childhood involved spending hours watching shows like Star Trek, Guiding Light, and The Price is Right. By the time Wallace went to college at Amherst in Massachusetts, the mixed feelings television brought with it for him had set in. In his dorm’s communal TV room, Max writes Wallace “enjoyed Hawaii Five-O reruns and … Hill Street Blues,” though “In general he did not like being watched watching, and if others were there he’d pass by.” Later, in his twenties, amidst a deep depression after becoming a creative writing instructor at Amherst, Wallace admitted to watching six to eight hours of television a day. TV was no doubt a slightly less damaging form of indulgence than the alcohol and drugs Wallace consumed at the time, but, he seemed to suspect, no less depleting of his soul.
In his long essay “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” written not long after his Amherst teaching days, Wallace began to understand the debilitating force TV had on him and his generation of American writers. “For us ... TV’s as much a part of reality as Toyotas and gridlock. We quite literally cannot ‘imagine’ life without it.”
But TV was more than just a barrier to original thought for Wallace. It was analogous to the booze he drank or the marijuana he smoked. Max writes, “America was, Wallace knew, a nation of addicts, unable to see what looked like love freely given was really need neurotically and chronically unsatisfied.” Wallace’s classic novel Infinite Jest divides the brunt of American culture between the novel’s two main settings: the Enfield Tennis Academy, where, Max writes, “the best players are trained to satisfy, through their tennis games and commercial endorsements, the appetite of the consumerist culture they came from”; and the halfway house Ennet House, where “addicts are not being cultivated to feed America’s obsessions; they are the people who’ve OD’d on them.” Wallace’s America was a machine that created two kinds of people: those who could tranquilize through entertainment, and those tranquilized. Despite his own commercial success, Wallace quickly found he wanted nothing to do with the former. Even before the successful Infinite Jest came out, the author had already bowed out of the spotlight as much as possible. He wrote to a student at the time, “[Celebrity life is] not for me, simply because it’s low-calorie and unstimulating and also highly narcotic.”
Wallace was as committed as he could be to combatting his nation’s addiction to addictions. Around the time of Infinite Jest’s publication, he championed a more moral fiction, one that didn’t rely solely on dramatizing “how dark and stupid everything is.” He continues: “In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and grow despite the times’ darkness.”
These difference between Updike’s and Wallace’s light and dark points of view could easily be written off as differences in emotional makeup—and they were distinct in this regard—but others could have been more circumstantial. While neither writer went into the military (Updike was 4Fed for psoriasis, to his dismay; it’s hard to imagine Wallace ever seriously entertaining the idea of the military), their respective eras’ prevailing attitudes toward war were quite different. Updike was a boy when World War II started, and echoing that time, seemed never to doubt the goodness and rightness of his country’s participation. Wallace’s infancy took place in the sixties, and gone was the sense that America’s participation in a war was beyond reproach. While Wallace might not be the first person we think of as espousing sixties ideals, his condition seems a natural intellectual reaction to the decade, rejecting what his culture gave him on instinct, trusting little but what he could come up with on his own, as outside of his country’s insidious forces as possible.
It wasn’t until well after the sixties that Updike could, in the essays of Self-Consciousness, admit some fallacy in his own knee-jerk sentiments about the era. As the world has only gotten more dominated by screens that fill viewers with neurotic need, it’s hard to imagine Wallace recanting his skepticism of American mass culture as expressed in Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. One can be grateful he’s not around for its latest escalation, and that his work is still here to help combat it.