I was excited to read it but intimidated to write about it.
I mean, it's DFW – so much has been written about this guy, and he continues to draw love and hate from the lit world. My encounters with him have been mostly positive. I bring him up in conversations at least a couple of times a year, and his famous commencement speech/book has caused me to become more empathetic in traffic and grocery lines.
This story hit at the right time. Getting here has been a
long slog, but it aligned perfectly, as far as I can tell. The story was
enjoyable, and some passages hit home. It's a fast read that pulls you in.
I've mentioned before that I find the contributor's notes of
this anthology so rewarding, and this is another that I feel delivers.
As the months drifted past between my first thoughts about
this story and my thoughts about commenting on his Contributor’s notes, I
decided to place them below and leave them – without spoiling them with my
amateur musings.
His reflections are fun and very different from most BASS
anthologies' notes. If they weren’t…I suppose I’d have more to say about it.
I was happy to have this insight into the story and again
grateful that these little windows into the writers exist.
DAVID
FOSTER WALLACE is the author of a novel, The Broom of the System; a story
collection, Girl with Curious Hair; and, with Mark Costello, a book-length
essay on race and music called Signifying Rappers. He lives in Boston and is at
this very moment restructuring his whole c.v. around inclusion in this
anthology.
•
This is a bit embarrassing, and I'd rather not discuss it, but will, since
certain authorities have been polite but firm about these little post-story
discussions being strongly encouraged, and I'd probably submit with cheer to
way more embarrassing requirements if it meant getting the old snout into the
B.A.S.S. trough.
The
embarrassing issue here is I'm not all that crazy about this story. It's one of
very few autobiographically implicated things I've ever tried. I did, like
probably lots of kids, have a high-dive trauma. My real trauma was much more
plain-old-sphincter-loosening-fear-based than the existential conundra this
story's kid encounters. I basically got to the top, with a long line of jaded
souls behind me, and changed my mind about going off. It was excruciatingly
shaming, but in no way deeply or exceptionally shaming. I think it wasn't the
memory of the shame so much as current shame that allowed so pedestrian a shame
still to haunt my esteem-centers, prompting me to make the story so heavy,
meditative, image-laden, swinging for the fence on just about every pitch. The
thing seems to me a performative index of every weakness I have as a writer and
as a person. And God knows why I let my desire for an Alienated Narrative
Persona lead me to use the second-person point of view; now I'm scared people
will read this and think I'm just a McInerney imitator in a black turtleneck, a
copy of Kierkegaard under my arm.
The
thing went through dozens of drafts, the first of which still sits in the pages
of my undergraduate "Stories That'll Prove I'm a Genius" notebook. I
went to grad school in Tucson, which is where I guess the thing picked up its
setting: you can't spit in Tucson without hitting a pool, though darn few are
public like this one is public.
I
completely deny ever once kissing any part of my sister's feet at any time
whatsoever.
I'm noticing that, with respect to any piece of fiction, my dissatisfaction with the final draft is directly proportional to the excitement that precedes the first draft. I remember doing the tortured artist thing back in school, all ego and caffeine, and thinking I had a genuine Big Idea for this story here, and seeing it finished, Big, published, lauded as Important by bearded titans. This was before I even bothered to start to try writing the thing. I preconceived it as deeply moving and imposingly cerebral at the same time, at once tender-psyche'd and tough-minded, just the sort of thing Eminences would pluck out of the glabrous herd by choosing for a prestigious anthology. By the second draft, my head was more or less permanently attached to the wall I'd been pounding it on. In black-lit contrast to the timelessly Big thing I'd preconceived, the actual ink-on-paper story seemed pretentious and trendy and jejune and any number of bad things: it seemed like the product of a young writer who was ashamed of a personal trauma and who was straining with every fast-twitch fiber to make that trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be. And here I mean "true" both artistically and historically.
I don't know why I kept putting the thing through drafts. I
kept getting late-night twinges of that original preconceptual excitement. I
kept seeing the thing as maybe just one image or two epiphanies away from
blossoming, from honoring its entelechy of Bigness. Six years and many other
completed projects later, I sent this story out in the old brown envelope. I
sent it out for the same reason most young writers I know send stuff out: to
have an excuse to quit thinking about it. My surprise when Fiction International
took the thing was nothing compared to my feelings about the august endorsement
that occasions this wordy little confession. Do not get me wrong: qualms about
the story's failure to be anything more than a lumpy ghost of what I remain
convinced was its initial promise of Bigness have not inhibited me from calling
pretty much everybody I know and casually working in the B.A.S.S.-selection
news. I'm extremely and yet of course also humbly grateful and moved and etc.
I'm just coming to realize that I have very little personal clue about whether
the stuff I do is good or bad or successful or not successful* which like most
bits of self-knowledge is both mortifying and kind of a relief. It makes me
glad I have opinionated critical friends and politely firm editors, not
necessarily in that order.
*Is "successful" the same as "good," here? Does inclusion in B.A.S.S. render a story de facto "good" the way a human reverend's pronouncement effects a legally binding union?
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