-
gooddecisionashley liked this
-
smartmovesusi posted this
The one time I met him, at a reception before a reading, I spoke to him only to mumble stock phrases about “admire your work,” etc. But the visual impression has remained strong, because in that cocktail-party atmosphere (Tom Wolfe was ten feet away, in his white suit), Wallace was possibly the most physically uncomfortable-looking person I’ve ever seen. If you have, at any point in your life, been trapped in a room in a mountain house with a forest animal, a raccoon or a bobcat, that’s how Wallace seemed, frozen like that. He had a smile on his face like he was waiting for someone to punch him. Yet was polite and shoulder-shruggy when he spoke to you. Everyone was all dressed up except Wallace, who had on a kind of Russian-peasant’s shirt and was in a full-on “I have long hair like a lady but also a beard” phase. It gave him a homeless-person vibe, like he’d seen the food table and decided to join the party. Yet when he got up onstage in the end, alongside George Plimpton and Seymour Hersh among others, he not only held his own but held the theater spellbound and more than once had to stop and let laughter pass, enunciating those roundly nasal vowels.
— Too Much Information - John Jeremiah Sullivan reviewing DFW’s The Pale King
