Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (33 page)

And that took through like May and June and July—no, May and June—more or less up to the present. I mean I worked on other shit
over the summer, I went to tennis tournaments for
Details
, I went to the U.S. Open. Oh, I did a long thing on Dostoyevsky for the
Village Voice
, that took most of July. So there was busywork all summer.

And then the copyediting came.

That was a
fucking, fucking
nightmare. That came in August.

Tell me: do you sometimes hate the copyeditors?

This—let me tell ya, Little, Brown was really good. Because I had told Michael, I’d had bad experiences with them before, like copyediting it like a freshman essay. And I told him that if this happens, it’s gonna be a total mess.

So they set me up with their head copyeditor. And
gave me his number
. And he and I would call back and forth about stuff. And they also—when it came time for the galleys, they hired
another
outside copyeditor. And gave me
his
number. And he and I edited the galleys like together and made sure that important shit cross-checked. Because there were enormous numbers of details to keep straight. But anyway, my understanding is that’s nonstandard. Not only hiring extra people but giving you access.

I mean, they were incredibly, I’ve just never—and I know this sounds very like, “I want to thank the Academy.” But I’ve just never had, I really liked Gerry, but I’ve never had everybody from like the copyeditors to Michael to these PR people at Little, Brown who are just (a) really smart, and (b) they’re just really nice to me. You know? And did—I think when I made clear that the stuff I wanted to do, like talking to the copyeditor, would result in a better book—they just did it.

There aren’t acknowledgments in the book because the list would be too long. And I had had a long list at the start of
Broom
and it looked very jejune to me. I wrote letters to—there were about ten people who were key on this. And said to them that there was just no way to do it, to thank them. And there were a lot of people around Boston, like in these halfway houses, that helped a lot who I just cannot, you know, thank.

So that was pretty much it.

The galleys were a fucking nightmare.

And then you had your sister copyedit the final part, the proofs
.

She is—my mother is the best proofreader in the world, Amy’s second, and I’m third, as far as I’ve seen. And um, paid Amy a dollar a page, and it was worth it. She bought a car.

Haven’t paid her the whole thing?

She’s gonna proofread the hardcover, to get mistakes for the paperback. She’s gonna do that, and I’m gonna pay her for it. Oh no, I paid her up front. You don’t stiff the proofreader.

How long did it take Bonnie to read it? A lot of reading
.

I don’t know, and I have never wanted to ask her, because I know that she would be embarrassed or feel like she had to say it was quicker. It’s
weird
—Bonnie’s a really good agent. Her cup of tea is not my cup of tea. I don’t think, she doesn’t vibrate on my frequency. She sort of goes, “Oh, I don’t know what it is with David, just let him do what he does.”

I send short stories to Bonnie—I trust her opinion on short stories.

I sent this to Charis Conn, sent it to Jon Franzen, sent it to Mark Costello. But also, I sent it to them—I mean, Michael was the reader on this. He did something real smart: he got me to trust him, somehow.

Publicity?

[David fully in teammate mode, wanting to get this right, switches the tape player on and off now as memories occur to him.]

There are a lot of things that if I’d been in charge I wouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t have done the postcard campaign. And I wouldn’t have had all white males on the back of the book. I wouldn’t have misspelled Vollmann’s
name
on the back of the book, that was kind of a boner.

But you know how this process works. Is that, once you’ve turned it in you just, they’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. But um, and I remember feeling really weird, because like, I’ve got a rule, I don’t blurb friends. I don’t blurb much anyway, but I don’t blurb friends. And when Jon said that Michael had sent him a bound galley, I told him I thought that if he didn’t want to blurb it, I sure wasn’t going to hold it against him. And I wouldn’t’ve blurbed his book. And, so, that’s the only thing on the back of the book that makes me uncomfortable. Like, it could be perceived as log-rolling. I mean, it’s not.

It just seems like they went after people who are pretty well known in our age group, and he’s …

Mark Childress—Bonnie is Mark’s agent too. And Rick Moody is Michael’s editee. And I mean Vollmann, I think Vollmann and I have been blurbing each other back and forth for years. It’s very odd because we’re so different, and we get lumped together. Well, our first books came out the same year.

Backwards a little bit; in six months while waiting to hear: were you nervous? Or pretty confident about this? Worry it wasn’t good?

It’s like I said: I worked real hard on this, and I like, there was a
weird
kind of calm that was a result of that. I was nervous because I knew it needed cuts, and I was terrified that it was gonna turn out that the cuts he wanted were gonna gut the book. And I was nervous about that. But it’s weird, the year after going to McLean’s, I developed this real habit of, at least for a period of a few months, I could
not
think about stuff.

I mean, I can really like, when thinking about it starts—you have
an interesting little stain on your pants. He specializes in that. [Dave laughs. Drone has been snout-resting on my thigh.] He specializes in makin’ you look like there’s been a horrible accident. It’s usually right before you go out on a date. You’re sittin’ there reading and you notice this.

[Drone is now licking my pocket.]

And it was a tough summer. It was very hard for me, because I would like to be married, and I would like to have children. And it was hard for me when my sister got married, who’s like
younger
than me. And there was a certain amount of stuff going on in the family. And I was also, I was just
tired
. I was tired, and I had a lot of nonfiction to do.

But when did someone come to you and say, “David, you really nailed it”?

It’s very odd, because Michael would say really nice stuff to me, and he’d say it in the context of having critical suggestions. So I could write it all off as you know, Well he, this is the sugar that’s making the medicine go down.

And Charis liked it, but Charis likes everything I do. There was some stuff—because Mark is really good friends with Nan Graham, who knows more about the publishing industry than anybody. She’s really good, I think. She was DeLillo’s editor, which as far as I’m concerned does it for me. So I can remember—when they did this postcard thing, and when they wanted to do signed bound galleys and sent me boxes full of paper—my thinking, my not knowing what to make of it. And calling Mark and having Mark find out, I presume from Nan, although I don’t know from whom, that this meant that they were gonna support the book, and that they were into the book or whatever. Which given that the book is a thousand pages made me think that they thought it was a pretty good book.

Relieved? Remember, this is only about four years from McLean’s
.

I really don’t want to pump it up. It could be embarrassing, it could seem like it was entirely an emotional breakdown, and a lot of it had to do with the work, too. I guess as long you don’t …

Um, it’s hard to explain. But I sort of like, um, that book didn’t get written for any of the reasons the other books did. I mean, I decided that I wanted to think of myself as a writer, which meant whether this got published or not, I was gonna write it.

Which four years ago, when I was all thinking, “Oh no, what if the next thing I do isn’t as good as …” I mean, it would’ve been unthinkable. I’d really sort of
given up
, in a certain way. Given up a lot of … Hush, Jeeves. …

Became a writer while writing this, then?

Yeah. I thought, yeah. I mean, this was different in a lot of ways. This was the first thing that I ever said, “All right, I’m gonna try to do the very best I can.” Instead of doing this, “All right, I’ll work at like three-quarter speed, and then I can always figure that if I just hadn’t been a fuckup, the book coulda been really good.” You know that defense system? You write the paper the night before, so if it doesn’t get a great grade, you know that it could’ve been better.

And this—I worked as hard as I could on this. And in a weird way, you might think that that would make me more nervous about whether people would like it. But there was this weird—you know like when you work out really well, there’s this kind of tiredness that’s real pleasant, and it’s real sort of placid …?

[Hamlet quote about buzzing …]
“There was in my head a buzzing that would not let me rest …”

I guess … Yeah. So anyway. So no, I wasn’t that nervous.

Like I said, it never really
felt
finished. Because it felt finished and then I had to reprint it. And it felt finished and then I spent a few months waiting for Michael’s cut and then working on the cuts.
And then it felt finished but then a few months later hearing that there were more cuts. And then right after the cuts—I mean, the copy editor must have been on speed, because a month later it came in. So it just, it hadn’t felt finished. And then the bound galley was such a
mess
.

Here’s the deal: Is one reason I want this phase over. It’s gonna feel finished when this is over. Because this has been part of a whole like unending stream, that started when I started the book. Like this feels like part of it. And when you go, and I unplug the phone for two days, that’s when it’s gonna to be over. And then I’ll let you know. Because I think it’s going to take me a day to just sort of stop quivering.

Any moment of euphoria you can give me?

I’m not sure. [Long pause]

I know we probably disagree—I think Sven’s really smart, and I was really nervous. I knew two months ahead of time, but there’s a last paragraph of the review that’s something about … And I just realized that for me Sven’s a big deal, and I was very scared. And I remember that last paragraph feeling, having to go
way
up into the stacks to get the magazine out. And reading it and then taking the stairs down two at a time, and walking out with this kind of wonderful … yeah, it felt done then. …

[Birkerts: “Wallace is, clearly, bent on taking the next step in fiction. He is carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit in a world gone as flat as a circuit board; he is tailoring that richly comic idiom for its new-millennial uses. … It is resourceful, hilarious, intelligent, and unique. Those who stay with it will find the whole world lit up as though by black light.”]

[Dave checks the tape.] We work real differently, man—I would never be able to boil all this down. Maybe I’m a minimalist, in a perverse way.

We’re almost out. You have tapes around here?

[I check my watch.]

It’s twelve ten
.

That’s what your watch says? It’s two
twenty
, dickbrain.

[I read parts of the book to him: LaMont Chu and Lyle.]

You know how this works: sure, in one way. There’s also fifty other ways.

“The obsession with future-tense fame makes all else pale.” Does that …

Who says that?

The narrator. What does it remind you of?

I think what it reminds me of is the way that the fall of ’89 felt … feeling like, that I was washed up, and what was painful about that is never gettin’ a chance to you know be felt about the way LaMont feels about those players. And then also realizing how pathetic that was.

“To get compared to M. Chang, lately expired
[He’s killed off all old stars.]
… He confesses it to Lyle: he wants the hype … A couple times this year the cold clenched fear of losing has itself made him lose …”

I make of that that it’s very hard to talk about coherently—at ages twelve, thirteen, fourteen, when I was young and starting out and had promise, it looked like I could be very very very good. And some of that was literally how I would feel. And I remember clipping action shots of players out of tennis magazines and envying them. And you know, so there’s a whole bunch of not real interesting …

And it seems to me that it’s somewhat true of everybody from, you know, grim eighteen-year-old premeds who know that they’re gonna be a leading podiatrist at thirty, and have a trophy wife and $200,000, to nine-year-old ice skaters who are skipping
Beverly Hills 90210
to practice their compulsories. That there’s something real American about it.

Shut that off for one second …

[On the PR campaign, his fears—David: “It would get the same response hype gets from you, which is like a derisive curl of the lip …” If the book came to him that way, with postcards.]

The end of that reasoning—there’s no such thing as bad attention, which I strongly disagree with. That was Tama Janowitz’s battle cry—“no such thing as bad attention.” Attention that seems to shut you down as a writer is arguably bad attention, isn’t it? That’s under your game show attention to it.

(More reading)
“You burn to have your photograph in a magazine …”

In fact, I sort of think that’s probably one facet of the great theme of sadness that’s going on.

“After the first photograph … the famous men do not enjoy their photographs so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.”

Sounds like a fuckin’ good little bit of dialogue to me.

Extremely intelligent
.

I’ll tell ya, the thing that it reminds me of, is that it took me a long time to figure out what was so sad about the cruise. Have you read the thing about the cruise?

Of course
.