Celebrity and Success

I have been reading Although of Course You End up Being Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.

It is a trying book. These two men talking at each other for most of the recorded interviews. There are snippets of it that are worth having spent the time with them, but overall, if you can avoid it, avoid it. I happen to like Wallace’s essays much more than his fiction. The persona of the essays is someone I enjoy being with for limited periods of time because the voice is interesting and the insights are as well.

Yet, within this new release of an interview that never ran in Rolling Stone, and now is of interest because Wallace committed suicide in 2008, there is this tedious and embarrassing focus on things like celebrity and success that don’t add much to this story at all. David Lipsky, Wallace’s faithful Boswell, seems as obsessed with success as Wallace could be. Those pages should have been deleted. Though of course they are in reference to the outsized book, Infinite Jest, the book that caused Wallace to become a celebrity and a star.

But there are some interesting and illuminating moments when Wallace discusses his generation and the fate of it. How the times in which he and his cohort grew up and the fact that they didn’t have a war, a depression or a major focus that highlighted how bad things could be, made his generation, in his opinion, very accustomed to pleasure, to having the good life. One should add that only a small percentage of that age group experienced life that way. For a greater percentage, that wasn’t the case, but Wallace seems not to have assumed that the world consisted of the poor and disadvantaged.

Returning to the moments of clarity about how the world was about to change (these talks took place in 1996), what Wallace saw did come true in many ways. Though the hopes he had for his generation, that they would become altruistic, didn’t come true.

And because of that lack of insight, much of what the two men discussed sounds a good deal like what a stockbroker or an investment banker might have been worried about. The two of them see/saw success as some kind of measurable commodity. Their egos were so tied up in the cornering of the market, on being the best, the most successful in terms of numbers of books sold, etc., that had either of them been interested in working on Wall Street, they would have been successful there too.

Success is a transitory business. And a truly incoherent way of measuring one’s work. It can lead us down that path where we need to see where our books are on the list of Amazon.com bestsellers or to see how many comments, reviews, criticiques, our work has garnered. Why is that interesting and necessary? Or more precisely: what is interesting and necessary in the launching of a new book?

Wallace had little understanding of who his readers were. This is the world of writing that capitalism has bred. It fosters (no pun intended), a self-regard that is at work in the way writing programs teach, in the way publication is touted above art, in the way having a platform from which to speak is more essential than actually having something to say.

While I have been studying on various websites the discussions people have been having about getting their books reviewed (paid versus unpaid, using assistants to set up all things digital for the busy author) so much else gets left out of all discussions. For example, in almost all the threads I have read, no one mentioned what their books were about. Not even if they published fiction or nonfiction.

This leads me to the following comment about writing in general and publishing in particular: If you are committed to being a writer, as I am, but not to the ways in which the web has changed how we market our books to each other, then you have to learn to be as creative in getting your book in front of people as you were in creating the book in the first place.

And my second observation is this: If you can’t enjoy both equally even though they are very different activities, then this new world where the paradigms of marketing and promotion have changed radically may not be the world you want to enter. Just wait a bit, things change so fast, who knows what the next iteration will be?