Read Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace for Free Online Page A

embarrassed: the myth of his capability had been shattered. He was elusive about what had happened—among his close friends only Costello knew the truth. The two friends had agreed to live together again, adding Nat Larson to their group. Just before the start of school, they went on a camping trip to Maine and Nova Scotia. “We stuffed ourselves with fresh seafood from buffets and lay around on the beach,” remembers Fred Brooke, who also went along. For Wallace, all-male dynamics were often the most comfortable, but he was also so agitated by the bugs, he chose to sleep in the car. The rest were amused by the slapping noises they heard through the night, though to Costello, who knew him best, Wallace’s behavior was as frightening as it was funny. He knew that Wallace when he was under stress or fragile acted out his full complement of phobias.
    In the housing lottery the group was awarded a room in Stone, one of the “social dorms,” as they were called. The social dorms were designed with bedrooms radiating off a common room and were much more pleasant than the rooms in Stearns or Moore. Wallace, his friends noticed, looked different now. He no longer wore the generic clothes—the corduroys and White Sox and Bears T-shirts of the Midwest—choosing instead worn thrift-shop T-shirts and torn shorts, often with his beloved hoodie. He liked untied Timberland boots and double socks. The sartorial change was representative of an interior one. He was beginning to distance himself from the culture of the Midwest that had formed him, where one could be radical but never rude. Adopting the “dirt bomb” look, as it wascalled, was one small way of saying he was done trying to be Joe College. His inchoate political hopes were gone too. “No one’s going to vote for someone who’s been in a nuthouse,” he told Costello, and mentioned Thomas Eagleton, the senator and Amherst graduate who had briefly been a vice presidential candidate before the news that he’d had electroconvulsive therapy for depression forced him to withdraw in 1972.
    Wallace took no chances with his classes on his return. His first semester back he enrolled in logic, Christian ethics, and ancient and medieval philosophy with Kennick. The only nonphilosophy course he took was French, which was necessary if he wanted to get a degree in the department. He aced all four classes, taking particular pleasure in logic. The course description promised to cover “the categorical, hypothetical, alternative and subjunctive syllogism,” as well as the “concepts of consistency, completeness and decidability.” In logic, you were either right or you were wrong, and the things that could keep you from always being right—lassitude, sloppy thinking—with Wallace’s enormous focus he could always overcome. He would later talk about the “special sort of buzz” logic gave him, how after “a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions,” you almost heard a “click.” In no time he was a self-described “hard-core syntax wienie.”
    Wallace’s father thought little of the discipline, objecting that logicians tended to replace important questions—free will, beauty—with technical discussions about the language behind those questions, but this was work of the sort that made Wallace’s mind hum. It replaced the ambiguity of actual life with clarity. And as he would later tell an interviewer, highly abstract philosophy gave Wallace both the pleasure of being in his father’s field with the “required thumbing-the-nose-at-the-father thing.” (Another interpretation is that he was still trying to please both parents—grammar is another logical system, after all.)
    Kennick’s ancient and medieval philosophy was a class that gave Wallace pleasure for a different reason. His father had taken the course some thirty years before, and much as he wanted to escape his father’s shadow, he also