Which Side Are You on Boy?: David Foster Wallace's "Good People"

David Foster published "Good People" in the New Yorker in 2007, four years before his death. It's arguably his most complete and mature work of fiction, and there's an earnestness to it that feels very much an idea he was developing in answer to the age's empty irony. Please join me in reading, and considering this text.

One of the main reasons we do this website and called it Sew:YKnot? is because were are dedicated adherents to the idea that life is a journey of discovery not perfection. (If there were a reset button maybe if could be a journey of perfection.) Ideally, you are unpeeling onions until your clothes are soaked. And yeah, there are tears, but you can’t make omelets without broken eggs, and most of the things you learn are from what failed, not what succeeded.

This isn’t the ideal prelude to a literary criticism / discussion of David Foster Wallace’s “Good People,” but that’s not the goal either. And it’s important to note this is something of a two-parter. Next week, I hope to chronicle my own experience at the State Fair in a piece modeled after DFW’s famous Vanity Fair piece, Ticket to the Fair. That’s it for ulterior motives.

The overt motive is that this is a really great damn story. First, it’s sort of like the fair story, in that it’s Wallace settling into a very Midwestern character (trope, you could even argue) and animates his thoughts in a way that feels much more relevant two decades after it was written, given the turn in the manosphere.

The story is about as simple as it gets, which is another of its appeals for me. It’s told almost entirely in media res, which is damn difficult. Go ahead, write an interesting story in 3000 words where nothing physically happens until the last 750 words and then it’s just them turning to face each other. It’s literally and figuratively the point. It’s certainly a Hollywood happy ending; only you can say if you feel it’s earned.

The craft to get there – if he did – is estimable, and a great lesson for anyone working in literary fiction. One of the first things to recognize is the way it transitions and moves from the present into thoughts, and the layers of reality – like the layers in Inception – that he moves between as a way of mimicking movement and drawing his character to his anagnorisis without anything concrete happening. (Okay, she looks into his eyes, but the understanding, we are told came in the moment before that, as if her bringing the moment to its crisis was enough to wake him from his ethical torpor.)

This is part of why we feel this is such an appropriate text, because it’s on some level about the male species’ impulse (socialized into an instinct it would seem) to avoid any responsibility that can be sloughed off on a woman, but also, how this is done on some level because men are slow, dim animals only vaguely aware of other people’s emotional lives beyond their four mental walls.

It’s set up to be to his credit that he recognizes this before it’s too late. It’s interesting that this functions in some manner as an alternate echo of his male voices in 1999’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The short story was part of his unfinished novel, The Pale King. The entire second half of his career was an effort to bypass his Generation’s sort of emotional armor and fear of exposure with more direct, honest writing that examines moral paralysis and the struggle to remain present and engaged.

In some sense his later work, of which this might be seen as the most complete and intentional – actually published two years before his death, unlike The Pale King, though a part of the novel – that this is an answer to his famous Kenyon commencement speech to “pay attention to and choose how you construct meaning from experience.” This and his critical jeremiad against ironic distance – which he saw as anathema to human emotional connection – definitely resonates in the story.

You can't help but notice all the use of a dialectic. There are two opposing parties, and a fear of division that is opposed by a fear of unity because the protagonist, Lane Dean Jr, doesn't feel he loves her and he doesn't want to lie. Before I get into the story itself, I want to not the locale – it's by a lake.

There are people fishing in it. The girl's name is Fisher, and there is some sense that like the Fisher King in lore and specifically Eliot's The Wasteland, Lane is getting his lands in order. or trying to. The tree that lies in the shallows is obviously referent to the baby and the way it was felled and now lies in water is emblematic of this sudden calamity that has left a huge divot and an upended tree where there once was continuity and structure. Lane now sees the error of his ways, and why God has rules, in one of those moments of humor at Lane's dim expense.

Part I

It opens fairly foreboding with the tree downed and the angle of the light making it seem dark, as opposed to the rest of the sunny lake. It's submerged, and perhaps he feels like he's drowning with this newfound responsibility he'd like to shirk. Thought he had already shirked, we eventually find.

They are alike, dressed alike, sitting alike, but she's moving, sort of rocking and he's immobile as a rock. This passivity is his central characteristic and proves to be his character's desire – he wants to break free of his passivity, he wants he to unfreeze him.

So Lane's looking everywhere but at her, but when he gets to the tangle of roots once hidden and now exposed to the light of day, he wheels like the shadows he describes as moving with the day, toward her. There are a number of these moments where the universe (Deus Ex Machina) gracefully guides Lane back to the issue at hand.

She's dressed casually in an old checked shirt with pearl snaps, a more traditional detail than buttons. But more just how she looks, we get how she smells, which is like something good. It's sort of like he negativcly negging disgust – she's the antithesis. Should be no surprise that final confirmation from Mom: "She's Good People." Note again, the kind of plurality, not singular here.

It's interesting too that not 500 words into it and Wallace telegraphs a bit where this will go.

always smelled very good and clean, like someone you could trust and care about even if you weren’t in love. Lane Dean had liked the smell of her right away. His mother called her down to earth and liked her, thought she was good people, you could tell—she made this evident in little ways.

Yet Lane doesn't list the ways. Instead he imagines the waters feeding (teething) on the fallen tree. He wants to pound his fist into the mitt of his glove like a ballplayer does to kind of keep himself present, only it's not appropriate. The idea of what's appropriate is very important to Lane, but it's never clear where he gets these ideas. Later, he starts to even wonder himself what that means.

(We can't help but go back to these extraordinary Peter Taylor short story, The Other Times, about a boy in the forties who couldn't decide how appropriate it was to plant one on the girl he liked, on some level because he was a stuck-up snob, but there's real pathos to it, in part because she makes light of it years later, saying she didn't know what he was thinking, and whether it was low or high stuff, to his great consternation.)

Across the lake he sees his functional doppleganger, a man, alone, in a suit like his grandfathers (see, old) staring out at the lake. This is like a look into the future. There are no ducks in this future, which is said like this is a bad thing, so we'll take DFW's word on it.

Part 2

The first part essentially ends on this first bit of business from Lane, which we can only wonder if it was code for "lame." In the Swift Move Sherlock category, Lane discovers that all this time when he's been saying, he'll be there with you, she's been making an interior "gas face" and just now shared it. He's freaking mortified. Then again, he did call it "the least he could do," and it very much was. DFW with the fine use of language there.

time he said it again now she shook her head and laughed in an unhappy way that was more just air out her nose. Her real laugh was different. Where he’d be was the waiting room, she said. That he’d be thinking about her and feeling bad for her, she knew, but he couldn’t be in there with her. This was so obviously true that he felt like a ninny that he’d kept on about it and now knew what she had thought every time he went and said it—it hadn’t brought her comfort or eased the burden at all. The worse

He hates himself and knows something is expected from him, but can't seem to manifest it. It's unclear whether he's a lunkhead or a jerk at this point, but neither are a great look, which is pretty typical for men in the DFW universe. The guy is so sad, he imagines himself almost literally as ultimate loser, Wile E. Coyote: "He could almost visualize himself tiptoeing past something explosive. A big stupid-looking tiptoe, like in a cartoon." And of course, the implication is that it was never going to work and he knows its never going to work, and yet.... there he sits, our own Godot.

He's a faithless selfish SOB, and he knows it, and it hurts, and it's supposed to.

 he pretended to himself he did not know what it was that was required. He pretended it had no name. He pretended that not saying aloud what he knew to be right and true was for her sake, was for the sake of her needs and feelings.

There is a lot of thought after her snort laugh, but a couple things pop out that are very relevant. First, he'd tried to pray but couldn't even begin. Presumably he knew he was false and couldn't show himself that way to the Lord. Second, she's smarter than him and better than him, and he's not in a lot of doubt in the matter. He knows he sort of lucked into a dream. He can't even look her in the eye.

Wallace again, cutting between his stalled physical impulses and bits of exposition, explaining her better grades, and how "she knew what she wants." Of course, she didn't want this, and he's now the fly in the soup. "She was serious in a way Lane liked," he says and relates how she had a friend smother in a refrigerator. What? That's not what she said? Well, that's how men understand it thanks to years of movie training.

But seriously, she's seen someone lose their life and on some level appreciates the value of things in a way that - to his credit – Lane recognizes as more advanced than his own. It's interesting that this train of thought leads directly into his sense of being a sinner. There's a low-grade temptress vibe to the way you get there. "He was desperate to be good people," he says, in relation to his own conundrum, but it also calls into question why he chose her.

Was it his choice or that of the crowd/his mom? More than that, the niggling question is, why? To what purpose does Lane pursue "good" other than as something for people to say about him. Is it more than an affectation? Without coming out and saying it, Wallace concludes this second part with a sort of cliffhanger on Lane's immortal soul. Is he just a hypocrite who didn't believe and wouldn't follow through on his promises or convictions? Was he just a lazy selfish bastard?

It's sort of great Wallace's "madonna" presentation in opposition. It's cute and all but we worry for Lane what he places probative value in.

Her tennis shoes had little things doodled on them from sitting in her class lectures. She stayed looking down like that. Little notes or reading assignments in Bic in her neat round hand on the rubber elements around the sneaker’s rim. Lane A. Dean, looking now at her inclined head’s side’s barrettes in the shape of blue ladybugs.

Part 3

The last section ended with Lane relating how he came to be motionless after "the girl" decided not to get the abortion, putting him into this purgatorial position where there's nothing safe he can say. Woe is he! Just like that, "a terrible kind of blankness had commenced falling through him." The truth is that clearly a terrible blankness was his former situation, this has been the wake-up call. That's what he's asking for – someone to re-introduce him to life. But he froze himself, in response to her decision, she isn't responsible for that.

Finally Lane does the one thing he actually can safely do. He explains his feeling and asks her to explain her own. They had come to a decision and she changed her mind. It's funny his mouth is moving, but still he's impassive or at least unmoving. It's important because his immobilization is effectively his inability to understand her and her thinking. On the other hand, he knows what is expected of him – there's nothing she can do to make him accept it. Why they call them shotgun weddings.

Now in a story, for it to be effective, there has to be change. Usually there's a physical manifestation, that's easier to work with. Queenie gets the look over and stern talking to from the Supermarket Chief and our bag boy stages a quixotic stand of principle, probably without know what that would entail of him going forward. But here the change is subtle acknowledgements. From worrying that he was a hypocrite he goes on to admit that mostly what he wants is to figure out what to say to get her to do what he wants. That doesn't make him much of a hero, but the honesty is what's lacking in this equation. If he can be honest with himself...

This was true, that he felt this way, and yet he also knew he was also trying to say things that would get her to open up and say enough back that he could see her and read her heart and know what to say to get her to go through with it. He knew this without admitting to himself that this was what he wanted, for it would make him a hypocrite and liar. He knew, in some locked-up little part of him, why it was that he’d gone to no one to open up and seek their life counsel, not Pastor Steve or the prayer partners at campus ministries, not his UPS friends or the spiritual counselling available through his parents’ old church. But he 

Lane is moving through Kubler-Ross' stages from denial to bargaining. Like Susan Collins, he feels that lessons were learned and there's no need to go so far as to crush him with the consequences. "This is how we learn, right, God? Through your beneficence?"

He so fervently wished it never happened. He felt like he knew now why it was a true sin and not just a leftover rule from past society. He felt like he had been brought low by it and humbled and now did believe that the rules were there for a reason. That the rules were concerned with him personally, as an individual. He promised God he had learned his lesson. 

This bit of honesty actual elicits another. He recognizes that everything sort of is pinned on the idea that this is a mistake and not a gift, that he doesn't really love her and therefore this would be a bad thing for everyone involved. It's sort of taken as a given that this is the case, and that if it weren't he was sort of expected to say something, because that's not something you can omit, even if you're shy, at a time like this.

All the different angles and ways they had come at the decision together did not ever include it—the word—for had he once said it, avowed that he did love her, loved Sheri Fisher, then it all would have been transformed. It would not be a different stance or angle, but a difference in the very thing they were praying and deciding on together. Sometimes

To be honest, never really loved that he waited all this time to tell us her name, especially given he's using the Fisher King glyph, but we'll let it go. The end of this part and the push into the climax ends with him saying effectively that he doesn't love her, though it's all weirdly rationalistic and about "a word" when obviously there's nothing rational or well-thought about such a thing, which is a clue.

Part 4

The last part and climax begins with him parsing his lie of omission, vis-a-vis love. The obvious point is that love is mutable and hard-to-define; it can come and go as it pleases. It defies easy rationalization.

This is a splendid bit in my mind. Lane half acknowledges that he's in a game of chicken with his girlfriend/baby-momma, and if you look in your heart, you know he's not strong enough to win, and he knows it too.

were he to look right at her and tell her he didn’t, she would keep the appointment and go. He knew this. Something in him, though, some terrible weakness or lack of values, could not tell her. It felt like a muscle he did not have.

The story winds to a great final flourish as Lane considers Hell as the inner guilt and awareness of your own weak inadequacy to a moment's responsibility despite all the fine words he speaks. He realizes he is empty and that's why he's frozen. At the same time, it is also a riff on the modern-day other and our inability to understand or conscience them though they are nothing but our shadow, with all those meanings and signifiers.

We can't help but think of the Eliot line, "We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison."

 sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle—the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand,could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.

Here perhaps is where the religious element enters, inasmuch as what Lane by his own admission experiences is a moment of "grace." He is relieved for a brief moment of his own super ego and self-awareness, capable of seeing into Sheri's own heart and to discern the Gift of the Magi move that she attempts to pull.

She turns to him and the story races to the climax. Similarly, Lane realizes the teething was a bad analogy, the water is going to-and-fro, it is not suckling the trees essence, the water is gentle. The man, like him, remains motionless. The roots which seemed to random were refracted by the light and change directions, as Lane is about to do.

Later on, he believed that what happened was he’d had a moment of almost seeing them both as Jesus saw them—as blind but groping, wanting to please God despite their inborn fallen nature. For in that same given moment he saw, quick as light, into Sheri’s heart, and was made to know what would occur here as she finished turning to him

It's probably the most honest he's seen himself in the story and in allowing himself to be blind and groping it gave him a way out of being fallen, a ticket to something better, so to speak. What it really is, obviously, is that suddenly Lane has a blinding moment of sympathy and compassion at Sheri's fucked situation.

Seeing what she would do - sacrifice herself rather than force someone to sacrifice themself – inspires him with proof of the kind of good people that she is, and in that moment, realizing that this was a complete fucking bluff, he is filled with love for someone willing to do this for someone they knew as well as outerspace, even though you knew this to be their responsibility and the morality that they had so often lauded. She cut her hair, and he's ready to sell the watch fob.

The bit of putting us in the moment is also priceless, and sweetheart that she is, she lets him off in every way. He doesn't even need to love her.

 she will carry this and have it; she has to. With her gaze clear and steady. That all night last night she prayed and searched inside herself and decided this is what love commands of her. That Lane should please please sweetie let her finish. That listen—this is her own decision and obliges him to nothing. That she knows he does not love her, not that way, has known it all this time, and that it’s all right. 

A complete fucking bluff. Hoping against hope that her brash turning away will activate him against what could be lost by a moment's passivity. (Well, more than a moment, lol.)

She is gambling that he is good. There on the table, neither frozen nor yet moving, Lane Dean, Jr., sees all this, and is moved with pity, and also with something more, something without any name he knows, that is given to him in the form of a question that never once in all the long week’s thinking and division had even so much as occurred—why is he so sure he doesn’t love her? Why is one kind of love any different? What if he has no earthly idea what love is?

Yes indeed. What if you have no idea what you're doing and are about to make the biggest mistake of your life?

In the end you never really ever know anything, it seems to suggest. How could trusting your heart be any worse?

For a fellow that isn't much for sentimentality – which this is obviously much more sophisticated than, while featuring elements thereof – this is quite the sappy human story. But that's why we call them sappy. Because they make us feel vulnerable and maybe a little too seen.