David Foster Wallace claimed that people in the rural Midwest are alienated even from the land. They live, he said, enveloped by emptiness, marooned in a void that transcends the mere physical. “It is not just people you get lonely for,” the author explained in a 1993 essay on the Illinois State Fair. “You’re alienated from the very space around you, in a way, because out here the land’s less an environment than a commodity.” Wallace cautioned against a Marxist interpretation of this assessment. “So many IL farmers still own their own land,” he explained. “This is a whole different kind of alienation.”
Wallace came of age in Champaign, Illinois, where his father was a professor at the state university. With its elegant restaurants and lively bar scene, the college town acts as a commercial oasis in a pastoral sea. Wallace spent much of his adult life not far from Champaign, in Bloomington, another mid-sized city. It is here that he taught literature and creative writing at Illinois State University, and where he lived when he wrote many of his most profound stories, essays, and books, including his wild and gigantic masterpiece, Infinite Jest.
Bloomington is in central Illinois. Even if it’s only 130 miles from the bright Chicago lights, it could be in another sociological universe. Farms and barns decorate the landscape, as the highway slices through fields of grass and Indian plantain, and, as Wallace puts it, “the corn is as tall as a tall man”. Much like Champaign, Illinois State University gives Bloomington a separate identity from nearby villages, as does its status as a company town: it’s home to State Farm Insurance, which employs 67,000 people and brought in $5.7 billion last year.
The mid-Midwest contains contradictions, even in its appellative cliches. The region is the “Heartland”: where everyone from culture-war reactionaries, to nostalgic Leftists dreaming of the resurrection of the manufacturing base, locate their hopes for the country. Yet these vast flatlands are also “flyover country”: not so much politically, as both parties pander for its votes, but culturally. In the Midwest, and especially its rural hinterland, it is easy to feel as if New York and Hollywood, the cultural capitals of the republic, rotate in separate solar systems.
Taken together, this contradiction creates what Wallace referred to as a “brotherhood of loneliness” — detachment from the dynamism of American society, detachment from what one imagines as the discourse that directs social progress or societal decline. Despite his eventual return to the Midwest, the author confessed to resenting his “physical place in the great schema” when leaving for New England. Those who remain can feel a wide range of emotions, from bitterness to pride, but they are either bitter or proud about, as Wallace put it in his 1993 essay, “being away from it all”.
The vast barrenness, oceanic flatness, and dot-on-a-map desolation was overwhelming when my wife and I, on a recent road trip to Bloomington, stopped 20 miles away in Pontiac for lunch at a Burger King. Aside from a few gas stations and fast food competitors, the windows of the restaurant offered angles on nothing. A couple of steps down from the soda fountain and waste basket, there was a table fit for one with an unused chair. Adorned in a white tablecloth, and decorated with an empty plate, clean silverware, and a folded American flag, it was a tribute to the “members of our Armed Forces missing from our ranks.” “The Missing Man Table,” as it is called, “symbolizes that they are with us here in spirit.”
It was like an image out of a David Foster Wallace story — a sad expression of deep, human loneliness, but as so often, not without a counterpoint. It is inside a franchise of an industry not exactly revered for its social conscience, and smack dab in the middle of garish advertisements for sugary and high-cholesterol food products, paper Burger King crowns, and palpable boredom and dread of low-wage workers. “The Missing Man Table” is an attempt at sincere, human connection, something Wallace cared and worried about, in an environment of commercialised entertainment, something he feared would devour the decency of his country and the dignity of his countrymen.
Wallace’s prescient concerns were clear in Infinite Jest. The novel’s biggest threat is something called “The Entertainment”, a video so hypnotically entertaining that it reduces even passive spectators to a catatonic state. Social media and smartphone addiction have degraded human life and community in ways that make “The Entertainment” sound plausible. More than that, though, Wallace wrote many essays and stories, on topics ranging from pornography to John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, about how our bottomless appetite for entertainment, and technology’s ability to feed it, would transform the social compact, civic virtue — and any idea grander than momentary self-interest — into punchlines. The Pale King, his posthumously published novel about the IRS, which is mostly set in Peoria not far from Bloomington, presents public accounting as heroic: precisely because it is so boring. To overcome boredom, the novel suggests, is to open possibilities of sacrifice and service in the name of ideals that transcend momentary fixations of pleasure.
Given that everything has become entertainment, the social compact has been butchered by individualism and tribalism, and Donald Trump, a more vicious version of Infinite Jest’s ignorant lounge-singer-turned-president, is in the White House once more, the timing was perfect to visit Wallace country. After all, it is right in the middle of Trump country.
McLean County, home to Bloomington and its university, barely went for Kamala Harris, with the Democratic nominee earning 50.9% of the vote. Sections of Bloomington itself, however, supported Harris by margins ranging from 27 to 52 points.
But around the town is a sea of red. Its bucolic villages supported Trump by equally large margins as Harris’s support in the heart of the college town. The inversion of the vote captures the extremity of American division, making Barack Obama’s bromide regarding the “purple states of America” look like a bruise on the country’s fractured psyche.
As the endless bloviation about the severity of America’s political divisions imply, the ideological voter is himself creeping towards loneliness. Like no other period in recent history, political arguments sour friendships, tear apart families, and “sort communities”, in the words of Texas journalist Bill Bishop, into Left and Right. In a classic chicken-or-egg conundrum, one could ask if the loneliness that Wallace identified at the heart of the Midwest, and America more broadly, is responsible for this polarisation, or is the polarisation enhancing the loneliness?
Wallace’s diagnosis did not spare his own kind, the highly educated middle and upper classes of Gen X. He often wrote about the poisonous influence of the ironic detachment as a response to nearly everything. Those whose first instinct is to smirk and drop a witty one-liner in the face of tragedy or scandal will also find themselves unable to form deep social bonds, while also rendering themselves incapable of investing in a story or political project that transcends their own short-term desires.
In an essay about 9/11, written from Bloomington, Wallace describes walking over to an elderly woman’s house to watch “the Horror” on television. He feels a “sad” and “lonely” separation from “Mrs Thompson”, crying and praying in her modest ranch home. She has an innocence, Wallace writes, that he cannot himself entertain. He soon notices, for instance, some of the media’s cynical marketing ploys — every anchor has rolled up his sleeves — whereas Thompson and her prayerful friends take everything as presented. “Part of the horror of the Horror,” he explained, “was knowing deep in my heart that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America… than it was these ladies’.”
Even on 9/11, Wallace was able to intuit that national tragedy would fail to unite people whose experiences and beliefs so vastly differ. The quiet separation that Wallace depicted would eventually morph into foaming-at-the-mouth hostility during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Even on 9/11, Wallace was able to intuit that national tragedy would fail to unite people”
There is no way of knowing where the falsely named Mrs Thompson lived. Wallace identified her as a woman from his church — but by “church” he was obscuring the fact that he belonged to Alcoholics Anonymous. Their meetings took place around the corner from his house, at St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, a small house of worship with a fountain and flag outside. As for Wallace’s own home, it certainly doesn’t look like the place where someone would write one of the greatest American novels of the last century. It is currently occupied, but there is no acknowledgement that Wallace once lived inside. The same is true of his former office at ISU, which even now lacks a sign, photo or plaque commemorating his memory.
In a sense, that anonymity feels appropriate. “David felt safe here,” says Victoria Harris, a retired ISU English professor who was close friends with Wallace. Harris tells me that the author liked being close to his parents, and establishing good relationships with his students, but also that he enjoyed “being away from it all”. She adds that he preferred living in a quiet, “middle class” neighbourhood — as opposed to more luxurious subdivisions nearer the city centre. “I don’t pull an aw-shucks-regular-guy thing,” Wallace himself once told an interviewer, “[but] I treasure my regular guy-ness. I’ve started to think it’s my biggest asset as a writer.”
Wallace was in a unique position to use art and journalism to make sense of Middle America’s collapse into partisan rage and a mindless addiction to scrolling. The fact that he wrote a masterfully experimental novel from a tiny home in a normal Midwest neighbourhood captures yet another duality in his work. Unlike most contemporary literary fiction, he didn’t write about the insect politics of Brooklyn, further pulling the art form out of the window of relevance of most Americans. At the same time, though, he enjoyed the reverence of the New Yorker set, giving him the potential to communicate to two different audiences.
Yet as his absence at ISU implies, there is always the possibility that, had he not taken his own life in 2008, his country would now ignore him. America’s lack of cultural memory, and its continual erasure of history, creates a fragmented present where shared meaning is impossible to cultivate, and the dull hum of loneliness resonates from college campuses to roadside restaurants.
In recent years, journalists, scholars, and even Hillary Clinton have become worried about America’s “loneliness epidemic”, arguing that it fuels political militancy, undermines social cohesion, and contributes to violence. It feels utterly appropriate, therefore, that one of Wallace’s most popular ideas was that literature can and should make readers feel the spark of human connection. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” he once told an interviewer, “but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely.”
This, then, was a prophet of that deep American predicament, writing in his novels, stories, and essays about people, real and imagined, who separate from those around them and even the best parts of themselves. He linked their loneliness to misplaced priorities of attention, whether “The Entertainment” in Infinite Jest or the talk radio of the Nineties that attracted millions of listeners throughout the US, and was particularly popular in the rural Midwest — a medium of political infotainment that he ridiculed as “deeply, totally populist” but also “completely fake”.
As for Wallace himself, campus invisibility might also be explained by posthumous domestic violence allegations from his ex-girlfriend, Mary Karr, who claims that he stalked and once threw a coffee table at her. Because he is dead, of course, Wallace can’t offer his side of the story. One of his best books, a collection of short stories, mainly about misogyny, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, inevitably leads one to wonder if he battled his own demons, demons that brought pain to others, and would surely have made himself and others lonelier. Yet another irony, in a town and region full of them. In any event, now that Wallace is missing from our collective table, we’ve merely left room for more corporate chow, and fragile paper crowns.
