Purity and The End of the Tour point toward an imbalanced relationship between two of our generation’s greatest male novelists.
Will Varner / BuzzFeed
In March of 1997, David Foster Wallace appeared on Charlie Rose to discuss his recently published collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. It was the writer's second time on the program in less than a year: He'd reluctantly agreed to be part of a fiction roundtable the previous May with the authors Jonathan Franzen and Mark Leyner. Franzen, a close friend to Wallace, had convinced him that appearing on TV was a necessary step in promoting his work. Wallace, in turn, expressed anxiety about "staying on my side of the screen." He believed "I'd fuck up future work if I didn't."
Now, alone with Charlie Rose, it was clear what he meant. Wallace spent a significant portion of his nationally televised interview obsessing over the very concept of being interviewed. The irony he grappled with — of espousing a worldview critical of television in front of millions of viewers — seemed inescapable, all-consuming.
It's uncomfortable to watch. At one point, Rose tries to pose a question about Wallace's use of endnotes. The author begins to answer, cringes, and frets aloud that he might sound pretentious. "Quit worrying about how you're going to look," Rose exclaims, "and just be!"
"I have got news for you," Wallace replies. "Coming on a television show stimulates your What am I going to look like? gland like no other experience."
Will Varner / BuzzFeed
Wallace, of course, is on screens all across the country at the moment. The End of the Tour, a film adaptation of the journalist David Lipsky's But Then of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, recounts three claustrophobic days Lipsky and Wallace spent together near the conclusion of 1996's Infinite Jest tour. Franzen, meanwhile, has just released Purity, a stirring fifth novel that sprawls across decades and continents, its characters' stories braiding intricately and unexpectedly.
Comparing these two works seven years after Wallace's death is a way of better understanding certain Very Big Questions about greatness, pain, and authorship. Watching Wallace, interpreted by others and hiccupping over his own discomforts, is a very different experience from reading through some of Franzen's sharpest work to date. Taken together, the film and novel present a striking (if imbalanced) portrait of two of our generation's most celebrated male writers, close friends in life, locked in an unending rivalry.
At its core, The End of the Tour is an attempt to understand the Wallace laid bare in the Charlie Rose interview — the one who armored his private torments with verbal dexterity. When Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenberg, first sets out to meet the older author (Jason Segel), he sees him, as many of us do, only through a kaleidoscope of bombastic prose. Lipsky's just completed Infinite Jest and convinced his editors at Rolling Stone to let him travel to Illinois for a profile. Awed by Wallace's talent, he hopes to surf its ripples toward his own success.
But the man he finds is decidedly un-great: sloppy, anxious, obsessed with controlling the cadence of their interactions. Within five minutes of meeting, Wallace makes Lipsky promise to erase and re-record all botched quotes or errant thoughts he may let slip. Later, when they're out to eat, he tells Lipsky that he'd love writing a profile on the people sent to profile him: "I think I would like to shape the impression of me that's coming across," he says.
Much of End of the Tour plays out this way, with both writers wrestling for control of the very narrative they're creating. Wallace is the more forceful angler: He instructs Lipsky to use a quote "in a context where I don't sound like a total dweeb," and he's quick to correct a misperception about his bandana (it's more of a "foible" than a "weakness"). At a book signing midway through the film, he offers to put Wite-Out on a smiley face he drew in a fan's copy of Infinite Jest after she mistakes it for a computer.
We are meant to feel something for this Wallace — stubbly, protective, insecure — that we are unaccustomed to feeling while reading his fiction: pity. As a dissection of the author's persona, The End of the Tour is convincing. It shows us a vulnerable yet manipulative man, fumbling over his own whipcrack intelligence, then apologizing for the fumble. But this realism has a handicapping effect, too. There's something halting about an author extracted from his natural habitat, unable to summon the proper words. In fiction, characters play these roles for us: Their anxieties can be rendered with elegance; their agonies double as our agonies. In Wallace's work in particular, the act of choking over one's self-definition — manifest in Infinite Jest's Hal Incandenza, as well as "The Depressed Person," from the story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men — is done with flamboyant erudition. The End of the Tour gives us the exact opposite: the literary master as gasping fish.
This all matters because there's very little gasping in Purity. Franzen's characters, though starved for information about their own identities, are nonetheless impeccably etched. Pip Tyler, a debt-burdened 23-year-old, does not know her birthdate, her father, or her mother's real name. In searching, "She'd entered every conceivable combination of keywords into every commercial search engine and ended up with nothing but an acute appreciation of the limits of search engines." Thousands of miles away, Andreas Wolf, the charismatic German behind the Wikileaks-like "Sunshine Project," is similarly adrift. He has only a vague idea of who his father is, and he, like Pip, is a compulsive searcher:
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