Adam Levin Reads David Foster Wallace

Summary

Podcast Summary

The New Yorker: Fiction — Adam Levin Reads David Foster Wallace

Host: Deborah Treisman
Guest: Adam Levin
Episode Date: November 1, 2025
Story Discussed: “Backbone” by David Foster Wallace

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Episode Overview

This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast features writer Adam Levin reading and discussing David Foster Wallace's story "Backbone," originally published posthumously in the New Yorker in 2011 and later included as Chapter 36 of Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King. Fiction editor Deborah Treisman leads a deep conversation with Levin about Wallace's language, themes of ambition, faith, pain, and wholeness, as well as the story's complex narrative voice and autobiographical shadows.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Adam Levin’s Relationship to Wallace and "Backbone"

• Levin as a Wallace admirer:
  • Adam Levin shares he's been a devoted fan since reading Infinite Jest at 19, which he immediately reread out of admiration.

    “I freaked out for it. It's all I did until I finished it, and then I instantly reread it.” (03:34)

• Influences and comparisons:
  • Levin discusses how his early fascination with Wallace, Salinger, Vonnegut, and George Saunders shaped him—even if critics’ comparisons to Wallace focus too much on book length rather than style.

    “I don't think that that book (The Instructions) really resembles Wallace in any meaningful way other than maybe the length…” (04:18)

• Why "Backbone":
  • Levin chose "Backbone" because it was the “section that most blew my mind” from The Pale King, instantly assigning it in his workshop.

    “This was the section that most blew my mind in it… I taught it, like, I think the next day.” (05:42)

  • Draws parallels between “Backbone” and Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist.”

    “I think that there's a lot of conversation between the two stories, but mostly it's that the story just kind of blew me away. It still does. I'm not sure I fully understand it.” (06:21)

2. On "Backbone" — Story Content & Wallace’s Drafts

• Story Summary:
  • The protagonist is a boy obsessively devoted to the goal of touching every inch of his own body with his lips—an increasingly impossible feat requiring intense discipline, training, and pain.
• Elusive motivation and pain:
  • The story repeatedly notes that the boy’s purpose is never clear, even to himself.

    “Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal…” (02:01, 23:20)

• Parental absence and incompleteness:
  • Discussion highlights how the boy’s mother is absent or possibly dead (in earlier drafts, explicitly so).

    “There's all of this absence in the story, such as his mother. And we don't know what happened to his mother in this version.” (41:55)

  • The father is distant, physically and emotionally; the house is described as “half removed.”
• Ambitious yet isolating devotion:
  • The story uses intricate medical and anatomical terminology to emphasize the tedium and discipline—and possibly the narcissism—of the boy’s pursuit.

3. Themes Explored

• Wholeness vs. Incompleteness
  • The story’s first line, “Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals,” is picked apart for its boardroom/self-help tone and for the problematic notion of “wholeness.”

    “Every whole person. Like that construction… it sounds self helpy.” (41:24)

  • Treisman points out, “This boy seems very far from whole. You know, he's sort of tragically incomplete.” (41:55)
• Faith, Doubt, and Artistic Compulsion
  • Levin and Treisman read the boy’s relentless practice as a metaphor for faith or artistic drive, emphasized by the closing:

    “He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt inside.” (66:34)

  • The father is portrayed as lacking faith/constancy, while the boy is unwavering.
• Self-Containment and Parental Echoes
  • Treisman suggests the boy’s obsessive self-contact could be a substitute for absent parental affection—“on some level, I feel that the boy who doesn't really have parents… is becoming a parent. He's sort of being parent and child at the same time.” (49:14)

4. Religious and Historical Motifs

• Allusions to Saints and Mystics
  • The narrative threads in stories of saints and stigmata, juxtaposed against the boy’s physicality and ascetic discipline.

    “Why do you think those narratives are there?...I think that, again, this might be me…But the case that I think is being made is… faith in itself being the thing that's being stressed rather than what the faith is in.” (47:49)

• Veracity and Narrative Play
  • Some of these historical or mystical references are possibly invented, reflecting Wallace’s style of blending erudition, invention, and skepticism.

    “I couldn't find him. I couldn't find a reference [to the Indian mystic whose eyes left their sockets]…I love the idea that he might have.” (62:51)

5. Voice and Narrative Perspective

• Narrative Style:
  • The story flows in and out of perspectives—sometimes deeply immersed in the father, sometimes floating over the boy, sometimes distancing into historical exposition and medical jargon.

    “We actually don't really go in the boy's mind… but we don't get the same kind of emotional context that we do with the father.” (56:34) “Some of these survived the eventual fire…” (58:04)

  • The ambiguous narrative vantage point opens space for digression, reflection, and uncertainty.
• Long sentences and technical language:
  • Levin and Treisman note how Wallace’s learned, meticulous prose slows the reader and instills realism, while also reflecting the tedium that defines the boy’s journey.

    “In terms of the medical terminology, I think it gives the reader… a sense that the writer actually knows what he's talking about. That there's an objective reality to some of this.” (60:07)

6. Autobiographical Implications & Artistry

• Metaphor for Writing Perfection:
  • Treisman speculates the boy’s impossible project echoes Wallace’s own painstaking artistic standards and his struggle to compose The Pale King:

    “I just thought about how long he was working on this book and how painstaking it was and… how many pages he left behind. And… I think a little bit, there's a certain torture in that…” (64:10)

• Dignity in the Impossible
  • Both agree the story ends on a note that is “bittersweet,” lending dignity to the act of striving, even if fulfillment is impossible:

    “He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing… that anyone could ever call doubt inside.” (66:34)

  • “The attempt is dignified. And, like, that makes me less depressed, you know?” (66:03)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Compulsion vs. Motivation:

  “I think that the thing is, he is just… compelled like, it's the same way that, I don't know, I'm compelled to breathe or something… why people make art… It's actually unaccountable. It just is… They're compelled.” — Adam Levin (45:57)

• On the story’s final line:

  “He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt inside.” — (66:34)

• On the use of religious allusion:

  "Faith in itself being the thing that's being stressed rather than what the faith is in, what faith in itself really looks like and what it's… capable of doing. I say this as someone who's not a really a faithful person." — Adam Levin (48:51)

• On Parental Distance and Self-Nurturing:

  “Who wants to kiss every inch of a child is the mother… I feel that the boy who doesn't really have parents or doesn't have engaged parents who want to kiss him, is becoming a parent. He's sort of being parent and child at the same time. And perhaps that is also a form of wholeness.” — Deborah Treisman (49:14)

• On Artistic/Autobiographical Metaphor:

  “There's that line that the boy's goal becomes something that will require maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time… I just thought about how long he was working on this book and how painstaking it was…” — Deborah Treisman (64:10)

• On the value of striving:

  “Even if it's impossible to achieve whatever your version of perfection is, but it's also dignified. The attempt is dignified.” — Adam Levin (66:03)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Adam Levin on Wallace’s influence: 03:34–03:55
• Choosing “Backbone”: 05:42–06:28
• Discussion of “wholeness” and absence: 41:55–44:08
• Artistic compulsion and metaphor: 45:57–47:13, 64:10
• Religious references and faith: 47:49–49:14
• Voice and narrative technique: 56:34–61:13
• Autobiographical reading, perfectionism: 64:10–66:34
• Closing thoughts on the story’s dignity: 66:34–68:29

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Flow & Utility for New Listeners

This episode deftly weaves together a close reading of a challenging Wallace story with wide-ranging questions about art, faith, discipline, family, and what it means to strive for the impossible. Adam Levin, as a devoted and self-aware Wallace reader, brings insights into both Wallace’s process and legacy, while Deborah Treisman contextualizes the story’s evolution and deepens the discussion with her editorial experience. The episode is rich with literary references (Kafka, Larkin, mystic saints), sensitive to both emotional and structural undertones, and full of observations any writer or Wallace fan will find provocative and inspiring, even if they haven’t read “Backbone” or The Pale King.

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Summary Table

| Segment | Timestamp | Content | |----------------------------------|------------|--------------------------------------------------------| | Adam Levin’s Wallace fandom | 03:34–03:55| How Wallace’s work inspired and overwhelmed Levin | | Why “Backbone” was chosen | 05:42–06:28| Its shocking originality, use in teaching | | Discussion: Wholeness & absence | 41:55–44:08| Debating the meaning of “whole,” mother’s absence | | Artistic compulsion | 45:57–47:13| The inexplicability of certain lifelong quests | | Religious/saintly references | 47:49–49:14| Faith, stigma, and divine wounds—a motif in the story | | Parental-Child self-containment | 49:14–50:34| The boy as both child and surrogate parent | | Wallace’s technical narration | 56:34–61:13| Narrative voice, omniscience, medical language | | Wallace’s methods as metaphor | 64:10–66:34| Boy’s goal as echo of Wallace’s own perfectionism | | Dignity in futile striving | 66:34–68:29| The bittersweet, hopeful closing |

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Final Thoughts

The episode stands as not only an introduction to “Backbone” and Wallace’s methods, but a meditation on the nature of striving, the complexity of family, and the artistry of telling what cannot truly be resolved. The conversation’s layered close reading, its questioning of motivation and narrative, and its bittersweet optimism will resonate for listeners well beyond this individual story.

Transcript

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[Deborah Treisman]

This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month we're going to hear Backbone by David Foster Wallace, which appeared in the New Yorker in March of 2011.

[Adam Levin]

Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of the goal as an achievement.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

In any conventional sense.

[Deborah Treisman]

The story was chosen by Adam Levin, who is the author of four books of fiction, including the novels Bubblegum from 2020 and Mount Chicago from 2022. Hi Adam.

[Adam Levin]

Hi Deborah.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

So tell me about you and David Foster Wallace. Are you a longtime admirer?

Yes, I would say very much so. I decided I wanted to, you know, write seriously before I read him.

[Adam Levin]

But.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

But I think he was one of the first two or three writers who.

[Adam Levin]

After I had decided that I really went to.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

It was like I came at fiction kind of in out of order. I wasn't an English student, really, and I sort of came to him and.

[Adam Levin]

Philip Roth at the same time.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Interesting combination.

[Adam Levin]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Yeah. It was really, you know, it was like, when I was young, I think, the writers that got me interested in being a writer, I think actually David.

[Adam Levin]

Foster Wallace, his work contains both of them in a way, which is like, J.D. salinger and Kurt Vonnegut.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Like, when I was a kid, that's what I fell in love with in fiction. And I sort of saw kind of both of those things in Wallace and George Saunders. And George was the third one of those.

So you were obviously a reader, even if you weren't an English student.

Yeah, I was very much a reader. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And a rereader. And so, yeah, so I read. I read Infinite Jest for the first time when I was 19. I think it was like, it came out in paperback and. Yeah, and I freaked out for it. It's all I did until I finished it, and then I instantly reread it. So after that, I was pretty much a giant fan.

And I think your first novel, the Instructions, had a lot of comparisons to Wallace in the reviews and so on. Did you feel that you were, you know, emulating him, trying to absorb a bit of his energy?

[Adam Levin]

Well, you know, I thought it was like there was like, an obvious reason that they were.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

That they were comparing it, because it's like the Instructions is quite long.

[Adam Levin]

It's like over a thousand pages.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Infinite Jess is, you know, quite long.

[Adam Levin]

And. But.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

But I actually, I. I think it was. It was a marketing thing, largely because I don't think that that book really resembles Wallace in any meaningful way other than maybe the length of one of his books and the length of one of mine. But, you know, if it had been, you know, the 1600s or 1700s, people would have, you know, said, it's like Don Quixote, you know, if that. Like, it's. It's like, I think I kind of know on a sentence level. I don't think I was doing much Wallacey stuff.

[Adam Levin]

But, you know, what.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

You know, what does one know about what one did?

And the story you're reading, Backbone, was part of the unfinished manuscript that David Foster Wallace was working on when he died in 2008, which later was shaped into book form as the novel the Pale King by Wallace's book editor, Michael Peach. But I know that David had been working on this story for on and off for years, because he'd sent me a version of it in 1999, and he read another version at the Lannan foundation in 2000. So it was something he kept going back to. This final version that was in the book and that was in the magazine was different than the two earlier ones. So I'm wondering what it is about this story that made you choose it for the podcast.

Well, there's a couple kind of big things. One is mainly that the moment it was published, it struck me. I read it, and I am, as I said, I'm a big fan of David Foster Wallace, but I'm not the biggest fan of Pill King. There are sections of it I loved, and basically this was the section that most blew my mind in it. And I read it in the New Yorker before Pale King was out, and I taught it, like, I think the next day it was, that week in workshop. It was.

[Adam Levin]

And it was. It was pretty instant.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

And I think part of it, you know, and maybe we'll talk about this after the reading, but, like, I think.

[Adam Levin]

I had just taught A Hunger Artist by Kafka.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

And I think that there's a lot of conversation between the two stories, but mostly it's that the story just kind of blew me away.

[Adam Levin]

It still does. I'm not sure I fully understand it.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

I think I understand why it blows me away personally. And I did think, well, I would really like to talk to the editor of this story about this story, because she probably has some insights.

Yeah. Yeah. I wish I'd been able to work on it with David. So I don't have. I don't have. Well, I have maybe a few insights from him, but not as many as I would have.

[Adam Levin]

Do you recall the earlier versions?

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Well, I still have the 1999 version.

Okay.

And, in fact, I looked at it today, and I was reading the note he sent with it, which said, I'll just read it to you. Said, Dear DT Pursuant to our phone conversation of last fry, here is as much of the fragment as I can render readable in time to have this to you by week's end. In the wildly unlikely event that this fragment does not meet your publication needs at this time, I would ask that you dispose of it thoroughly and irremediably. Some combination of shredder and flame in that order is usually sufficient. And, of course, you know, I didn't dispose of it, so. Excellent.

[Adam Levin]

Excellent. Well, yeah.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Do you.

[Adam Levin]

I guess what I would ask is, do you recall the major differences then?

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Yeah, we should talk about that after, after people hear the story, because I can tell you some of the things that are gone and some of the things that weren't there then would be great. So let's go to the story now, and we'll talk some more after the reading. Now here's Adam Levin reading Backbone by David Foster Wallace.

[Adam Levin]

Backbone Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy's goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child's play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six. There's little to say about the original animus or motive cause of the boy's desire to press his lips to every.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Square inch of his own body.

[Adam Levin]

He had been housebound one day with asthma on a rainy and distended morning, apparently looking through some of his father's promotional materials. Some of these survived the eventual fire. The boy's asthma was thought to be congenital. The outside area of his foot beneath and around the lateral malleolus was the first to require any real contortion. The young boy thawed at that point of the lateral malleolus as the funny knob thing on his ankle. The strategy, as he understood it, was to arrange himself on his bedroom's carpeted floor, with the inside of his knee on the floor and his calf and foot at as close to a perfect 90 degree angle to his thigh as he could manage. Then he had to lean as far to the side as he could, bending out over the splayed ankle and the foot's outside, rotating his neck over and down and straining with his fully extended lips. The boy's idea of fully extended lips consisted, at this point, of the exaggerated pucker that signifies kissing in children's cartoons toward a section of the foot's outside that he had marked with a bullseye of soluble ink. He struggled to breathe against the dextro rotated pressure of his ribs stretching farther and farther to the side very early one morning, until he felt a flat pop in the upper part of his back and then pain beyond naming somewhere between his shoulder blade and spine. The boy did not cry out or weep, but merely sat silent in this tortured posture until his failure to appear for breakfast brought his father upstairs to the bedroom's do. The pain and resultant dyspnea kept the boy out of school for more than a Month. One can only wonder what a father might make of an injury like this in a six year old child. The father's chiropractor, Dr. Cathy, was able to relieve the worst of the immediate symptoms. More important, it was Dr. Cathy who introduced the boy to the concepts of spine as microcosm and of spinal hygiene and postural echo and incrementalism inflection. Dr. Cathy smelled faintly of fennel and seemed totally open and available and kind. The child lay on a tall padded table and placed his chin in a little cup. She manipulated his head very gently, but in a way that seemed to make things happen all the way down his back. Her hands were strong and soft and when she touched the boy's back, he felt as if she were asking it questions and answering them all at the same time. She had charts on her wall with exploded views of the human spine and the muscles and fascia and nerve bundles that surrounded the spine and were connected to it. No lollipops were anywhere in view. The specific stretching exercises that Dr. Cathy gave the boy were for the splenius capitis and longissimus cervicis and the deep sheaths of nerve and muscle surrounding the boy's T2 and T3 vertebrae, which were what he had just injured. Dr. Cathy had reading glasses on a cord around her neck and a green button up sweater that looked as if it were made entirely of pollen. You could tell she talked to everybody the same way. She instructed the boy to perform the stretching exercises every single day and not to let boredom or a reduction in symptomology keep him from doing them in a disciplined way. She said that the long term goal was not relief of present discomfort, but neurological hygiene and health and a wholeness of body and mind that he would someday appreciate very, very much. For the boy's father, Dr. Cathy prescribed an herbal relaxant. Thus was Dr. Cathy the child's formal introduction both to incremental stretching and to the adult idea of quiet daily discipline and progress toward a long term goal. This proved fortuitous during the five weeks that he was disabled with a subluxated T3 vertebrae, often in such discomfort that not even his inhaler could ease the asthma that struck whenever he experienced pain or distress. The heady enthusiasm of childhood had given way in the boy to a realization that the objective of pressing his lips to every square inch of himself was going to require maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time that he could not then, because of his age. Imagine one thing. Dr. Cathy had taken time out to show the boy was a freestanding 3D model of a human spine that had not been taken care of in any real or significant way. It looked dark, stunted, necrotic and sad. Its tubercles and soft tissues were inflamed and the annulus fibrosis of its discs was the color of bad teeth. Up against the wall behind this model was a hand lettered plaque or sign explaining what Dr. Cathy liked to say were the two different payment options for the spine and associated nervosa which were now and later most professional contortionists are in fact simply persons born with congenital atrophic dystrophic conditions of major recti or with acute lordotic flexion of the lumbar spine or both. A majority display kvostek sign or other forms of ipsilateral spasticity. Very little effort or application is involved in their art. Therefore, in 1932 a pre adolescent Ceylonese female was documented by British scholars of Tamil mysticism as being capable of inserting into her mouth and down her esophagus both arms to the shoulder, one leg to the groin and the other leg to just above the patella, and is thereupon able to spin unaided on the orally protrusive knee at rates in excess of 300 rpm. The phenomenon of swephagia, that is self swallowing, has subsequently been identified as a rare form of inanitive pica, in most cases caused by deficiencies in cadmium and or zinc. The insides of the small boy's thighs up to the medial fork of his groin took months even to prepare for. Daily hours spent cross legged and bowed slowly and incrementally stretching the long vertical fascia of his back and neck, the spinalis thoracis and levator scapulae, the iliocostalis lumborum all the way to the sacrum and the interior thigh's dense and intransigent gracilis pectineus and adductor longus which fuse below Scarpa's triangle and transmit sickening pain through the pubis whenever their range of flexibility is exceeded. Had anyone seen the child during these two and three hour sessions bringing his soles together and in to train the pectineus, bobbing slightly and then holding a deep cross legged lean to work the great tight sheet of thoracolumbar fascia that connected his pelvis to his dorsal costae, he would have appeared to that person either prayerful or catatonic or both. Once the thigh's anterior targets were achieved and touched with one or both lips. The upper portions of his genitals were simple and were protrusively kissed and passed over even as plans for the ilium and outer buttocks were in conception. After these achievements would come the more difficult and neck intensive contortions required to access the inner buttocks, perineum and extreme upper groin. The boy had turned seven. The special place where he pursued his strange but newly mature objective was his room, which had wallpaper with the jungle motif. The second floor window yielded a view of the backyard's tree. Light from the sun came through the tree at different angles and intensities at different times of day and illuminated different parts of the boy as he stood, sat, inclined, or lay on the room's carpet, stretching and holding positions. His bedroom's carpet was white shag with a furry polar aspect that the boy's father did not think went well with the wall's repeating scheme of tiger, zebra, lion, and palm. But the father kept his feelings to himself. Radical increase of the lip's protrusive range requires systematic exercise of the maxillary fascia, such as the depressor septi orbicularis, oris, depressor anguli, oris, depressor labi inferioris and the buccinator, sucimoral and risorius groups. The zygomatic muscles are superficially involved. A fixed string to weatherly button of at least 1 1/2 inch diameter, borrowed from father's second best raincoat. Place button over upper and lower front teeth and enclose with lips. Hold string fully extended at 90 degrees to face his plane and pull on end with gradually increasing tension, using lips to resist pull. Hold for 20 seconds. Repeat. Repeat. Sometimes the boy's father sat on the floor outside his bedroom with his back to the door, listening for movement in the room. It's not clear whether the boy ever heard him, although the wood of the door sometimes made a creaky sound when the father sat down against it or stood back up in the hallway or shifted his position against the door. The boy was in there, stretching and holding contorted positions for extraordinary periods of time. The father was a somewhat nervous man, with a rushed, fidgety manner that always lent him an air of imminent departure. He had extensive entrepreneurial activities and was in motion much of the time. His place in most people's mental albums was provisional, with something like a dotted line around it. The image of someone saying something friendly over his shoulder as he heads for an exit. Often clients found that the father made them uneasy. He was at his most effective on the phone. By the time the child was eight, his long term goal was beginning to affect his physical development. His teachers remarked on changes in his posture and gait. The boy's smile, which appeared by now constantly because of the effect of circumlabial hypertrophy on the circumoral musculature, looked unusual, also rigid and overbroad and seeming in one custodian's evaluative phrase, like nothing in this round world. The Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried wounds that penetrated both hands and feet medially throughout his lifetime. The Umbrian Saint Veronica Giuliani presented with wounds in both hands and feet as well as in her side, which wounds were observed to open and close on command. The 18th century holy woman Giovanna Soleimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys in her hands wounds and to turn them, reportedly facilitating the pilgrim's own recovery from rationalists despair. According to both Saint Bonaventura and Tomas de Celano, Saint Francis of Assisi's manual stigmata included baculiform masses of what presented as hardened black flesh extruded from both volar planes. If and when pressure was applied to a palm's so called nail, a rod of flesh would immediately protrude from the back of the hand exactly as if a real so called nail were passing through the hand. And yet fact hands lack the anatomical mass required to support the weight of an adult human. Both Roman legal texts and modern examinations of a first century skeleton confirm that classical crucifixion requires nails to be driven through the subject's wrists, not his hands. Hence the quote necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata that the existential theologist E.M. soren explicates in his 1937 Lacrimi si Sinti, the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as God's open wound. Areas of the boy's midsection from navel to xiphoid process at the cleft of his ribs alone required 19 months of stretching and postural exercises, the more extreme of which must have been very painful indeed. At this stage further advances in flexibility were now subtle to the point of being undetectable without extremely precise daily record keeping certain tensile limits in the flava capsule and process ligaments of the neck and upper back were gently but persistently stretched, the boy's chin placed to his solubly arrowed and dotted chest at mid sternum and then slid incrementally down 1, sometimes 1.5 millimeters a day and this catatonic and or meditative posture held for an hour or more in the summer during his early morning routines, the tree outside the boy's window became busy with grackles coming and going, and then as the sun rose, filled with the bird's harsh sounds, tearing sounds which, as the boy sat cross legged with his chin to his chest, sounded through the pain like rusty screws turning some complexly stuck thing coming loose with a shriek. Past the southern exposures tree were the foreshortened roofs of neighborhood homes and the fire hydrant and street sign of the cross street and the 48 identical roofs of a low income housing development. Beyond the cross street and past the development just at the horizonthe edges of the verdant cornfields that began at the city limits in late summer the field's greens became more sallow, and then in the fall there was merely sad stubble, and in the winter the field's bare earth looked like nothing so much as just what it was. At his elementary school, where his behavior was exemplary and his assignments completed and his progress charted at the medial apex of all relevant curves, the boy was among his classmates, the sort of marginal social figure who was so marginal he was not even teased. As early as grade three, the boy had begun to develop along unusual physical lines as a result of his commitment to the objective. Even so, something in his aspect or bearing served to place him outside the bounds of schoolyard cruelty. The boy followed classroom regulations and performed satisfactorily in group work. The written evaluations of his socialization described the boy not as withdrawn or aloof, but as calm, unusually poised, and self containing. Sick. The boy gave neither trouble nor delight and was not much noticed. It is not known whether this bothered.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Him.

[Adam Levin]

Nor was it ever established precisely why this boy had devoted himself to the goal of being able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. It is not clear even that he conceived of the goal as an achievement in any conventional sense. Unlike his father, he did not read Ripley and had never heard of the McWhirters. Certainly it was no kind of stunt nor any sort of self evection. This is verified. The boy had no conscious wish to transcend anything. If someone had asked him, the boy would have said only that he'd decided he wanted to press his lips to every last micrometer of his own individual body. He would not have been able to say more than this. Insights into or conceptions of his own physical inaccessibility to himself, as we are all of us self inaccessible and can, for example, touch parts of one another in ways that we could not even dream of touching our own bodies, or of his complete determination, apparently, to pierce that veil of inaccessibility, to be, in some childish way self contained and sufficient. These were beyond his conscious awareness. He was, after all, just a little boy. His lips touched the upper areolae of his left and right nipples in the autumn of his ninth year. The lips by this time were markedly large and protrusive. Part of his daily discipline was tedious button and string exercises designed to promote hypertrophy of the orbicularis muscles. The ability to extend his pursed lips as much as 10.4cm had often meant the difference between achieving part of his thorax and not. It had also been the orbicularis muscles, more than any outstanding advance in vertebral flexion, that had permitted him to access the rear areas of his scrotum and substantial portions of the papery skin around his anus. Before he turned nine, these areas had been touched, tagged on the four sided chart inside his personal ledger, then washed clean of ink and forgotten. The boy's tendency was to forget each site once he had pressed his lips to it, as if the establishment of its accessibility made the site henceforth unreal for him, and the sight now in some sense existed only on the four faced chart. Fully and exquisitely real for the boy in his 11th year, however, remained those portions of his trunk that he had not yet attempted, areas of his chest above the pectoralis minority and of his lower throat between clavicle and upper platysma, as well as the smooth and endless planes and tracts of his back, excluding lateral portions of the trapezius and rear deltoid, which he had achieved at eight and a half extending upward from the buttocks. Four separate licensed bonded physicians apparently testified that the Bavarian mystic Therese Neumann's stigmata comprised corticate dermal structures that passed medially through both her hands. Therese Newman's capacity for aenedio was attested to by four Franciscan nuns who attended her in rotating shifts in 1927. She lived for almost 35 years without food or liquid. Her one recorded bowel movement, March 12, 1928, was determined by laboratory analysis to comprise only mucus and empirheumatic bile. A Bengali holy man, known to his followers as Pran Saatha ii, underwent periods of meditative chanting during which his eyes exited their sockets and ascended to float above his head, connected only by their dura matter cords, and thereupon performed, that is, the floating eyes did rhythmically stylized rotary movements described by Western witnesses as evocative of dancing four faced Shivas, of charmed snakes, of interwoven genetic helices of the counterpointed Figure 8 orbits of the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies around each other at the perimeter of the Local Group, or of all four supposedly at once. Studies of human algesia have established that the musculoskeletal structures most sensitive to painful stimulation are the periosteum and joint capsules. Tendons, ligaments, and subchondral bone are classified as significantly pain sensitive, while muscle and cortical bone sensitivity has been established as moderate and articular cartilage and fibrocartilages. As mild pain is a wholly subjective experience and thus inaccessible as a diagnostic object. Considerations of personality type also complicate the evaluation. As a general rule, however, the observed behavior of a patient in pain can provide a measure of a the pain's intensity and b the patient's ability to cope with it. Common Fallacies About Pain People who are critically ill or gravely injured always experience intense pain. The greater the pain, the greater the extent and severity of the damage. Severe chronic pain is symptomatic of incurable illness. In fact, patients who are critically ill or gravely injured do not necessarily experience intense pain, nor is the observed intensity of pain directly proportional to the extent or severity of the damage. The correlation depends also on whether the pain pathways of the anterolateral spinothalamic system are intact and functioning within established norms. In addition, the personality of a neurotic patient may accentuate felt pain, and a stoic or resilient personality may diminish its perceived intensity. No one ever did ask him. His father believed only that he had an eccentric but very limber and flexible child, a child who'd taken Kathy Kessinger's homilies about spinal hygiene to heart, the way some children will take things to heart, and now spent a lot of time flexing and limbering his body, which, as the queer heart craft of children went, was preferable to many other slacker.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Damaging fixations the father could think of.

[Adam Levin]

The father, an entrepreneur who sold motivational tapes through the mail, worked out of a home office, but was frequently away for seminars and mysterious evening sales calls. The family's home, which faced west, was tall and slender and contemporary. It resembled one half of a duplex townhouse from which the other half had been suddenly removed. It had olive colored aluminum siding and was on a cul de sac, at the northern end of which stood a side entrance to the county's third largest cemetery, whose name was woven in iron above the main gate, but not above that side entrance. The word that the father thought of when he thought of the boy was dutiful, which surprised the man, for it was a rather old fashioned word and he had no idea where it came from when he thought of the boy.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

In his room from outside the door.

[Adam Levin]

Dr. Cathy, who sometimes saw the boy for continuing prophylactic adjustments to his thoracic vertebra facets and anterior rami, and was not a loon or a huckster in a shopping center office, but simply a DC who believed in the interpenetrating dance of spine, nervous system, spirit and cosmos as totality in the universe, as an infinite system of neural connections that it evolved at its highest point an organism that could sustain consciousness of both itself and the universe at the same time, such that the human nervous system became the universe's way of being aware of and thus accessible to itself. Dr. Cathy believed the patient to be a very quiet, inner directed boy who had responded to a traumatic T3 subluxation with a commitment to neurospiritual integrity that might well signal a calling to chiropractic as an eventual career. It was she who had given the boy his first comparatively simple stretching manuals as well as the copies of B.R. fawcett's famous Neuromuscular Diagrams copyright 1961 Los Angeles College of Chiropractic, out of which the boy had fashioned the freestanding four sided cardboard chart that stood as if guarding his pillowless bed while he slept. The father's belief in attitude as the overarching determinant of altitude had been unwavering since his own adolescence, during which awkward time he had discovered the works of Dale Carnegie and of the Beecher foundation and had utilized these practical philosophies to bolster his own self confidence and to improve his social standing. This standing, as well as all interpersonal exchanges and incidents that served as evidence thereof, was charted weekly and the charts and graphs displayed for ease of reference on the inside of his bedroom's closet door. Even as a provisional adult, the father still worked tirelessly to maintain and improve his attitude and so influence his own altitude and personal achievement to the medicine cabinet's mirror in the home's bathroom, for instance, where he could not help but reread and internalize them as he tended to his personal grooming or taped such inspirational maxims as no bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings. Blake if we abdicate our initiative, we become passive, receptive victims of oncoming circumstances. Beecher Foundation Dare to achieve Napoleon Hill. The coward flees even when no man pursueth the Bible. Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now and so forth. Dozens, or at times even scores of inspirational quotes and reminders, carefully printed in block capitals on small fortune cookie sized slips of paper and taped to the mirror as written reminders of the father's personal responsibility for whether he soared boldly, sometimes so many slips and pieces of tape that only a few slots of actual mirror were left above the bathroom sink, and the father had to almost contort himself even to see the shave. When the boy's father thought of himself, on the other hand, the word that came unbidden first to mind was always tortured. Much of this secret torture, whose causes he perceived as impossibly complex and protean and involving both normal male sexual drives and highly abnormal personal weakness and lack of backbone, was actually quite simple to diagnose. Wedded at 20 to a woman about whom he'd known just one salient thing, this father to be had almost immediately found marriage's conjugal routines tedious and stifling, and that sense of monotony and sexual obligation as opposed to sexual achievement had caused in him a feeling that he thought was almost like death. Even as a newlywed he had begun to suffer from night terrors and to wake from nightmares about some terrible confinement feeling unable to move or breathe. These dreams did not exactly require a psychiatric Einstein to interpret, the father knew, and after almost a year of inner struggle and self analysis he had given in and begun seeing another woman sexually. This woman, whom the father had met at a motivational seminar, was also married and had a small child of her own, and they had agreed that this put some sensible limits and restrictions on the affair. Within a short time, however, the father had begun to find this other woman kind of tedious and oppressive as well. The fact that they lived separate lives and had little to talk about made the sex start to seem obligatory. It put too much weight on the physical sex, it seemed, and spoiled it. The father attempted to cool things off and to see the woman less, whereupon she in return also began to seem less interested and accessible than she had been. This was when the torture started. The father began to fear that the woman would break off the affair with him, either to resume monogamous sex with her husband or to take up with some other man. This fear, which was a completely secret and interior torture, caused him to pursue the woman all over again, even as he came more and more to despise her. The father, in short, longed to detach from the woman, but he didn't want the woman to be able to detach. He began to feel numb and even nauseated when he was with the other woman, but when he was away from her, he felt tortured by thoughts of her with someone else. It seemed like an impossible situation, and the dreams of contorted suffocation came back more and more often. The only possible remedy that the father, whose son had just turned four, could see was not to detach from the woman he was having an affair with, but to hang in there with the affair, but also to find and begin seeing a third woman in secret and, as it were, on the side, in order to feel, if only for a short time, the relief and excitement of an attachment freely chosen. Thus began the father's true cycle of torture, in which the number of women with whom he was secretly involved and to whom he had sexual obligations steadily expanded, and in which not one of the women could be let go or given cause to detach and break it off, even as each became less and less a source of anything more than a sort of dutiful tedium of energy and time and the will to forge on in the face of despair. The boy's mid and upper back were the first areas of radical, perhaps even impossible, unavailability to his own lips, presenting challenges to flexibility and discipline that occupied a vast percentage of his inner life in grades four and five. And beyond, of course, like the falls at a long river's end, lay the unimaginable prospects of achieving the back of his neck, the 8cm just below the chin's point, the gallia of his scalp's back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose, and eyes, as well as the paradoxical ding on zeek of his lips themselves, accessing which appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself, these sights occupied a near mythic place in the overall project. The boy revered them in such a way as to place them almost beyond the range of conscious intent. This boy was not by nature a warrior, unlike himself, his father thought. But the inaccessibility of these last sights seemed so immense that it was as if their cast shadow fell across all the slow progress up toward his clavicle in the front and lumbar curvature in the rear that occupied his 11th year, darkening the whole endeavor. A tenebrous shadow that the boy chose to see as lending the enterprise a somber dignity rather than futility or pathos he did not yet know how, but he believed, as he approached pubescence, that his head would be his. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt. Inside.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

That was Adam Levin reading Backbone.

[Deborah Treisman]

By David Foster Wallace.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

The story was published posthumously in the New Yorker in March of 2011 and became Chapter 36 of Wallace's novel the Pale King, which was published by Little Brown later the same year.

[Critics at Large Host]

If you're a reader, or even an.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Aspirational reader, I hope you'll join us.

[Critics at Large Host]

On Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

[Deborah Treisman]

Each week on this show we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

And because we're culture critics, we just love to go back to the text, yes?

So if books are for you, Critics at Large just might be for you as well.

[Deborah Treisman]

Join us on Critics at Large from.

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[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

So Adam, I want to just start by talking about the first sentence Every whole person has Ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. The last four words. Four words for the same thing. Kind of corporate speak and more about a boardroom than a first grader's bedroom. Which might make sense in the context of the Pale King, where the book has several chapters showing the childhoods of people who. Characters who grow up to work for the irs. But every time I read that first sentence, I stop on the word whole.

Me too.

You know, every whole person.

[Adam Levin]

Yep.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Why do you think that word is there?

Well, I've thought about that kind of a lot and come to no conclusion. But I suspect, I think that through throughout the story. You know, we're mostly focused on the boy, but. But the father, he's in, he does self help stuff.

[Adam Levin]

Basically he's into self help and he.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Promotes self help and I think he.

[Adam Levin]

Sells self help pamphlets.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Right. And, and every whole person like that construction.

[Adam Levin]

It sounds self helpy, as does to me.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Ambitions, objectives, initiatives and goals sounds as self helpy as it does corporate to me. But.

[Adam Levin]

But the whole. Also, it's maybe in earnest.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

There's a lot of stuff in, I think the story on the whole that is, it's playing around with the language that gets used in sort of new agey ways versus actually like, you know, sort of die hard religious ways.

The one reason that it throws me is that this boy seems very far from whole. You know, he's sort of tragically incomplete. There's all of this absence in the story, such as his mother. And we don't know what happened to his mother in this version. And this is one place where Having seen the 1999 version helps me because in that version she had died of septic shock after giving birth to the boy. And this was due to the fact that he had had intrauterine meconium, which had poisoned her, essentially. So, you know, maybe David didn't want that actually to be the cause of death, but he leaves it completely ambiguous in this version where the mother is. And you know, in a sense the father is also quite absent. He can't really connect with a boy. Like the closest he comes is sitting with his back to his bedroom door, you know, on the other side of the door. And even the house looks like half of it has been removed. So I just, I feel like that idea of wholeness, or not wholeness, incompleteness is threaded through the story.

[Adam Levin]

No, that's quite interesting. It's also the fact that his mother is dead in the original version that.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Makes it, I think, very different from this.

[Adam Levin]

I wonder what the father's role is in that, because here his whole thing.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Is that he is continually cheating on this woman and cheating on the women that he is cheating on her with. And that seems kind of essential to the story. So if she is, is the father.

[Adam Levin]

Just not very much in that 1999 version.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

The father is in there in the same way. He takes. Takes the boy to Dr. Kathy and so on. What's interesting is that in the birth scene, he's unusually absent. He's not in the room. And the doctors or nurses who are assisting with the birth don't tell anyone how she got sepsis because it was somewhat their fault, I suppose. So he never knows, and the boy never knows that it was due to something that happened in utero.

That definitely throws my perspective a little.

But you know what? You're reading this story. You're reading this story as it was when David left it. So that's a. That may not be relevant.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wonder, because I think, like. Yeah, to me, it seemed that Wallace was trying to say something about faith, because we have that first line, and you also have the. The last line of the story. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt inside. And I was like, well, nothing. You know, Wallace is a very deliberate writer. So I think, well, if you possess no doubt, then what do you have? And I. I think what you have is faith. And I think that prior to that, like, maybe again, this might be me.

[Adam Levin]

Having read this story too many times. But the father, he is not faithful.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

To anyone, and he seems to not be faithful in anything. Whereas the boy is faithful to this practice of his that no motive is. Is ever located for it. Right. He just one day decides he's gonna push his lips to every score inch of his body, and he practices at this. And, you know, he. It's painful, it's not joyful, but he doesn't doubt that he should be doing that.

[Adam Levin]

And furthermore, he doesn't even seem to.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Doubt that he will be able to do some of the impossible things that this would require, such as kissing the back of his own head or kissing his own lips, or he doesn't at least sweat it. Which is curious to me.

Going back to the beginning, just this, you know, announcement. What he wants to do is, you know, kiss every inch of his body. And do you think we aren't given a cause? We aren't given his motive, cause, or his driving force? What would you guess it might be?

Well, I honestly would guess that there isn't fun. I think that it's said, you know, it's a couple times, it's like right at the start, he says, we don't know the motive, cause, and then later he goes back to that and repeats it. And I think that the thing is, he is just. He's just compelled like, it's the same way that, I don't know, I'm compelled to breathe or something. And I. I think that maybe something there is also being said about, you know, why people make art. Right. Or why artists make art. And you could say, well, you know, one account, a common account, is they were surrounded by artists or people who loved art, and they gave them, you know, know, paints or they gave them a typewriter or whatever, and then they were. They were kind of okay at it or they were praised for it. But I feel like my whole generation, for instance, or half my generation, that was the case, and most of them didn't come out to be artists and writers. So it's like, what makes someone stick with it, I think is actually unaccountable. It just is they. They want to do this thing. They're. They're compelled. You know, when we're talking about characters, it's weird to think about a character that. That not only does a thing, but the main thing they do doesn't have a legible motivation. But I think that was what he was doing with the story. Maybe that's what compels me to keep rereading it. I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that we have threaded through the story, these stories of saints, people who have experienced great pain, torture, haven't eaten, have, you know, have these stigmata in their hands. And you'd think the reason those stories are there is to draw some kind of, you know, comparison or illusion, and that yet we're also told, well, this child doesn't want to transcend anything. You know, that's, that's not so. Why do you think those, those narratives are there?

Well, I think because, again, like, this.

[Adam Levin]

This has to do.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

This is stuff that, you know, I'm not. I'm not super, you know, conversant in philosophy, but to me, it seems like. So one of the other things that, when, when we're hearing about the saints and the. The stigmatics and stuff is that that stigmata is, like, always through the center of the palm. And that this is, you know, Jesus was not crucified through the center of his palms, almost certainly. Right. And so he was. It was through the wrists. And so these people who. I, I, I don't have a particularly hard time believing that strange physical phenomenon happened to people. I don't know if it's caused by physical faith or whatever, but the case that I think is being made is. Is something like, you know, it's not the thing that the stigmatics have Faith in that gives them stigmata. It's just the faith itself. Because if it were the thing, if it were, you know, they're embodying Jesus to such a degree that, you know, God gives them stigmata so they can be recognized as saints. God would do it right? You would put it through their. And so I think that that's, again, that's this like. Of getting to, you know, faith in itself being the thing that's being stressed rather than what the faith is in, what faith in itself really looks like and what it's, you know, capable of doing. I say this as someone who's not a really a faithful person.

I guess I also look at the boys project or art or faith through the eyes of a mother myself. And when I think about, you know, who wants to kiss every inch of a child is the mother. You know, you just. You get your little baby, you want to kiss it all over. And on some level, I feel that the boy who doesn't really have parents or doesn't have engaged parents who want to kiss him, is becoming a parent. He's sort of being parent and child at the same time. And perhaps that is also a form of wholeness.

Yeah, I mean, no, I like that a lot. I mean, especially that doesn't even rely on the mother being dead either. That just relies on her being absent, as you said at the beginning. Like, it's. Yeah, he's. Because, I guess, yeah. The other question that comes up with all this, it's not just that maybe there's a part of the boy that's missing, but you start thinking about the mechanics of just like daily life. And the father sitting outside his door with his back to the door while his kid is inside contorting himself in these extremely bizarre ways that they. That they don't have. Ever have a conversation about it or that the father doesn't come in and say, dude, stop that. Like, let's go get a burger, is pretty bizarre, right? Like, this is a, you know, it's a. It's a cold kind of distant. At least home.

And the father doesn't even really know what he's doing. He thinks he's just, you know, doing the exercises that Dr. Kathy told him to do.

[Adam Levin]

Right.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Which.

[Adam Levin]

Which makes it. Which.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Which is almost even kookier, right? Because if. If you thought, well, my kid has this weird goal and, you know, I believe in my kid, I'm going to help him do it, okay? But, you know, it's maybe too much. Too much spinal exercise, really. If you're just doing it, you know, like.

So, yeah, I feel like. I feel like David Wallace planted a little clue or maybe just an allusion in his second paragraph when he says, after these areas of his body. However, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf, and that this may just be me because I have read Philip Larkin endlessly. But his most famous poem, this be. The verse ends, man, hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself. And so whenever I see coastal shelf, which is very rarely, I don't know if I've seen it anywhere other than in the story, I think of that poem. And the poem begins, they fuck you up, your mom and dad. They don't mean to, but they do. So I feel like there's a real indictment of parenting in that second paragraph.

[Adam Levin]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

No, no, I love that. I mean, you know, the Larkin poem. I only knew the first. You know, the first two lines, and. Yeah, that's remarkable.

[Adam Levin]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

I think it would be strange if that weren't deliberate on Wallace's part. So, yeah, I think that's. That's something that's going on. That has to be the. That it's a kid parenting himself, that we're meant to think of these things. But at the same time, there's also. I think there is this. This. This Hunger Artist thing. I mean, like, I'm. I'm really curious what you think about that. Like, because when I read the story, like, I'm always seeking, you know, arc. I always trust that there is an arc to any story that I love. Right. That nothing is just straight up kind of experimental, like a bunch of cool lines, like, slapped together. And I somehow am bl. Like that there is some arc that was intended by the author. And so with this one, it's a little.

[Adam Levin]

It's harder to find than usual, but.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

I do feel like I get the.

[Adam Levin]

End of the story.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Certainly feels like the end of the story. I don't think I'm bringing my own arc. That's not the way I read. So it's, yeah, Hunger Artist. The arc's kind of clear, and here it's less so, but it still shakes me up.

Yeah, though the boy, you know, he starts with the easy spots to reach, and then we see the process of him getting to the harder and harder places. And along the way, we hear these other stories of self torture or self deforming.

I mean, I suppose, you know, like, one thing where I'm always caught out as a reader with this story. Not this last time I read it, but the first eight times is Wallace actually, like, stays ahead of me somehow, in terms of coming up with the impossible thing. Like, I always have ended up surprised by the thought of lips kissing themselves as being the ultimate thing. And so maybe that's part of what's arcing, too, is this person who has thought this through to its absurd end. And that was further than I would get on my own.

I mean, on one level, there may be a kind of practical reason for this chapter in the book, which is that the children we see in the book are going to grow up to be at the IRS doing the most tedious job imaginable. And this is what the boy is doing is continually referred to as tedious and requires enormous wells of patience because he has to sort of sit in a position for three hours, not moving. And that he has the sort of devotion to do that. Doesn't get bored, or he likes the boredom, or it's worth it for him. So I suppose it may be, on one level, just paving the way for whoever the adult character will be, which I don't think we ever see the adult version in the Pale King.

Yeah, I don't recall that being as clear with this one as to who would have been the adult. I recall conversations about people supposing which one it might be, which of the guys in the tax office. But I don't think there were any of them were quite convincing. I do think I was really kind of happy to hear that. You said in 99 he presented to you, although the letter he sent, he called it a fragment. Correct. So was he talking about it as a fragment of a novel?

He was talking about it as something he was still working on that he thought he could sort of pull a story like fragment out of. And what he sent me then did not have the last few paragraphs of this version. So I think it stopped on the image of the blade trying to cut itself.

[Adam Levin]

Okay.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Okay. I mean, you know, one other question I have for you, Deborah, is like, you know, when we're looking at this again, it's like we have, like, this sort of.

[Adam Levin]

There's the.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

There's a way to think about it in terms of the novel, which is, as I remember, the narrator of the novel is David Foster Wallace. I think that's correct.

[Adam Levin]

But in here it's not clear.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

And, you know, it could be, but it does seem at times like we're heavily in the point of view of the father. Out of nowhere we're not just being told what the father thinks of things, but we're being told as though that first line, every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. It did occur to me that this is maybe the father's thought, right. That this does sound like the start of a self help lesson. And who, who's the one that would give. That is father. But. And I wonder how much that has to do with, with the story and the way that it arcs, like. Cause we obviously we go outside of him in a large part of the story, but at some points I think we delve right in. There's not much announcement about who we're moving between, which I think is pretty exciting.

Yeah. Whereas we actually don't really go in the boy's mind. I mean, we know what he wants to do or is trying to do on a practical level, but we don't get the same kind of emotional context that we do with the father.

Right. We get like, yeah, like the DC doesn't have lollipops. Right. Like that's it. It's like, you know, like, just like, just like a couple quick ones to show us. You know, I can go into his head. I'm not going into his head.

Yeah. I mean, let's talk about the voice of the story because, you know, in the book there are chapters that are told by David Foster Wallace. And you know, it's a first person thing and that's not true in these chapters about the children. And this voice. It's very strange when you think about it because this voice is able to tell us a lot of things that only the boy could know. No one else is in the room. And he's also very clear that there are certain things that aren't known, aren't verifiable. You know, however one might verify what's happening in the boy's mind. So there's, you know, this isn't an omniscient narrator. It's not a personalized narrator. Really know who it is.

Yeah, I mean, and it makes. Yeah, I mean, I agree and I kind of love that. Like, I think it makes these really interesting moves really early. So that I think the first one, the first one I've marked is in that, like, third paragraph. We get to some of these survive the eventual fire regarding the father's promotional materials.

[Adam Levin]

So it does seem a bit all seeing.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

This is a fire we never hear about again. Right. And it's delivered. It's so non sequitur, but it's very quick and it's sort of charming. It's because it's exciting, because it's a fire, right? You're like, there's gonna be a fire. And then, you know, by the end, you know, you. You forgot about the fire. You know, like, you're not like, where's the fire? At the end of the story? And I think it creates a lot of space for Wallace to do stuff like describe the stigmatists or just jump to the father or, you know, sort of jump around. And so it isn't omniscient, but it. But in a way. Like, you know, I don't think really there are omniscient narrators. You know, I mean, like, not to, Like a wonky conversation about it, but it's like, there's no evidence that any narrator sees. All right? And it's like that a narrator can look at anything. Like, that's the. I feel like Wallace, like, sort of gets himself that kind of freedom in this story. And it's. And I think he does an infinite jest as well, but it's by different means. But this is, like, so much space gets opened up like that. Some of these survive the eventual fires. Really exciting to me because of that. Because I think that's. Once you read that sentence and then you go, okay. And then you read the next one and the next one, you've sort of implicitly agreed that he can do that when he wants and he doesn't abuse it. He. You know, he'll. He'll. The next. The next times he does it. Yeah. He'll tell you some interesting thing about stigmatists and. Yeah. You. You know, who doesn't want to hear about.

[Adam Levin]

Yeah. Contortion.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Self swallowing.

Yeah, the self swallowing. Yeah. Doing the spinning on her. On her patella.

[Adam Levin]

Yeah.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

And this voice also knows a whole lot of scientific language. It knows the correct names for every body part that's being. You know, mysteriously. This narrator has done a lot of reading in medical textbooks, and we get a lot of, you know. You know, from having just read this aloud, we get a lot of long sentences with scientific names for things which aren't on the same level, exciting as written text. As, you know, some of these survived the fire. So why do you think we get those long tracts?

I mean, I think they establish, like, some kind of. When we're talking. I don't know about the long sentences. About the sentences being long. I think that's like more of a. I don't know. I want to say styley kind of thing, for lack of a better term, but in Terms of the medical terminology, I think it gives the reader, or at least this reader, a sense that the writer actually knows what he's talking about. That there's an objective reality to some of this sense of that. And I think, you know, that's another thing, I guess, that some of these survive the eventual fire does is it makes it seem like there's. Well, there's this whole reality in which all of this takes place, in which of course, I can't tell you all about because there's no time, but there will be a fire. And similarly, the medical stuff, it makes it sound like when we're hearing about the self swallowing woman, for instance, like this. It's such an outlandish thing that's being described. And to describe it using anatomical, like the proper anatomical terms somehow makes it seem more possible. Right. Or maybe it.

Right. More real. Yeah.

[Adam Levin]

And maybe it's that just the words.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Are so unfamiliar that it actually slows you down a bit. And you don't miss the fact that this is a woman purportedly spinning on. I think it's her. Her knee, which is the only thing sticking out of her mouth, that, you know, the rest of her, like everything else is stuffed into her mouth. And if it takes you a little longer to read the sentence, that actually builds toward this image, which is easier to picture, which is a person spinning on one. One knee. That is self swallowed.

Yeah. I think, I think actually all of those factors, I mean, sort of the. It. It lends verisimilitude to what we're learning. You think if. Well, you know, if this person telling us this story knows every word for every body part, then they must actually know what this boy went through and why he was, what he was seeing on the charts and so on. And second of all, it does embody a little bit of the tedium because you're like, okay, okay, I got it. There's some body parts involved. Let's get to the next interesting moment. And also, the story's a little bit educational, I suppose, like in its. It gives us history, it gives us anatomy. You feel the voice of the story perhaps trying to teach us something.

[Adam Levin]

Although I did have a question for.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

You about the mystics.

[Adam Levin]

Did you look all of them up at any point?

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Not all of them, but some. Yeah.

Yeah, so me too.

[Adam Levin]

And it was like I looked up the first few.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

I looked at the woman with an idea who, you know, who said she hadn't eaten for 40 years. This woman existed?

Yeah, sure, yeah.

And there were a couple of Saint Francis Of Assisi.

[Adam Levin]

Sure.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

And like.

[Adam Levin]

But. But there's the.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

I believe he's Indian. The guy who makes his eyes, like, leave his head and then, you know, spin around on chords. And I couldn't find him. I couldn't find a reference. Like, it was just, you know, quick Googling. But I was like, oh, did Wallace actually make some of these up? Which I kind of love the idea that he might have. So it's like. So the educational thing is sort of funny. It bends in on itself. It's like, well, that should exist. I really want to believe in this.

You know, the man who made his eyes dance.

Yeah, the man who made his eyes dance. Yeah, that would be great.

Yeah, it's funny. And that's one area where the earlier version, instead of. I think it actually had most of these stories, but in the earlier sections, it had two very long passages about happenings in the Roman empire in, like, A.D. 54 or something, which didn't really fit. So I wondered, perhaps his goal changed, you know, what he was trying to give as the background. So I think he was a good self editor in that sense. And, you know, I have one other theory, which is probably a stretch really, but it's something that I felt, especially reading this soon after he. After David died, was that there's something in here, something in this boy that resembles the way he approached writing. This sort of quest for absolute perfection. Because he was so, you know, attuned to every comma and every apostrophe and every contraction and whether it should be a contraction. Working with him was really a very, very close read for any kind of editing. And he would change things and he would go back to them and rework them. And, you know, there's that line that the boy's goal becomes something that will require maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time that the boy could not then imagine. And I just thought about how long he was working on this book and how painstaking it was and how many pages he left behind. And, you know, this giant web of chapters and narratives that had to fit together somehow. And I think a little bit, you know, there's a certain torture in that for him. And there was a certain. Also narcissism which, you know, I mean, wanting to kiss oneself in every part of one's body is in a way like perhaps wanting to get every aspect of oneself down on paper. You know, as a writer, it's sort of a glorifying of the self or a devotion to the self.

No, I agree with it. That's. Yeah, I do think that. I think there's a lot there. And I think, too, there's, like, this thing that this other line toward the end is. He talks about how impossible it is to imagine how you would get every, you know, kiss every part of your own body, and that it seems to.

[Adam Levin]

Cast a shadow over the whole endeavor. A tenebrous shadow that the boy chose.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

To see is lending the enterprise a somber dignity rather than futility or pathos. So I think there's the very upsetting version where it's like, you know, if we're to read it as this is, you know, Wallace's struggle to finish the Pale King, or just to become, you know, a certain kind of writer, where it's like. It's. That it's impossible to achieve whatever your version of perfection is, but it's also dignified. The attempt is dignified. And, like, that makes me less depressed, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's go back to those last, very last lines. And, you know, we've had this story that is kind of heartbreaking because we know what this boy wants to do is impossible unless he, you know, somehow dismembers himself. And then we get to that paragraph. He would find a way to access all of himself. He possessed nothing that anyone could ever call doubt inside. And it's kind of gleeful. There's so much confidence. There's so much optimism. And I sort of. You end it on this high note, which is so unexpected for me.

Yeah, I mean, I like that you see it that way, that you see that last part as a high note. Cause I feel like this is where my point of view problem gets.

Well, at the same time, it's bittersweet, obviously, because we know he's not gonna kiss the back of his head, because we know he's not right. But the fact that he has that confidence.

Well, yeah, I think what it does, at the very least, it doesn't make him seem like a sort of walking tragedy. Right.

[Adam Levin]

He's not going into anything blindly, I.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

Think, even though he's being said to have pure faith or something.

Yeah.

But the whole thing is, is the. The Declaration of. He would find a way to access all of himself, whether that is, like, carried forward from, what, the boy. Are we in the boy's head or are we in Wallace's? Because the line in previous is, yeah, he did not yet know how, but he believed as he approached pubescence that his head was. Be his. Now, is it that he believed he would find a way to access all of himself, which, as you said, that's not gonna happen.

[Adam Levin]

But was it?

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

He believed it, or was it. Wallace is telling us this, our narrator is telling us this, because they're two very different things. And I think, yeah, we get to that bittersweet place. I like a bittersweet place. So, yeah, I trust it. I trust it more than a simply sweet place. And I definitely prefer it to a bitter place. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is the one moment that makes me, you know, makes the story for me, because otherwise it's grim. Well, thank you so much, Adam.

Thank you.

[Deborah Treisman]

David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008 at the age of 46, was the author of three essay collections and six books of fiction, including the story collection Oblivion and the novels Infinite Jest and the Pale King, which was published posthumously in 2011 and was a finalist for the Police Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Adam Levin, a winner of the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, is the author of the story collection Hot Pink and three novels, the Instructions, Bubblegum and Mount Chicago. He's been publishing fiction in the New Yorker since 2020. You can download more than 220 previous episodes of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free in Apple Podcasts. On the Writer's Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. This episode of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast was produced by John Lamay. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening.

[Interviewer/Co-host (possibly a literary critic or editor)]

From PRX.