Adam Levin Reads David Foster Wallace

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. Or 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. 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. Hi Deborah. 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 write seriously before I'd read him, but I think he was one of the first two or three writers who after I had decided that I really went to. It was like I came at fiction kind of out of order. I wasn't an English student really. And it was, I sort of came to him and Philip Roth at the same time. And... Interesting combination. Yeah, yeah. It was really, you know, it was like, like when I was young, I think it's, I think the writers that got me interested in being a writer, I think actually David Foster Wallace, his work contains both of them in a way, which is like J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut. 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 re-reader. And so, yeah, so I read, you know, I read Infinite just for the first time when I was 19. Like I think it was like the week 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 re-read it. So after that, I was pretty much a giant fan. And I think your first novel, The Instructions, I had a lot of comparisons to Wallace and the reviews and so on. Did you feel that you were, you know, emulating him, trying to absorb a bit of his energy? Well, you know, I thought it was, like, there was like an obvious reason that they were comparing it because it's like the instructions is quite long. It's like over a thousand pages. Infinite just is, you know, quite long. And but I actually, I think 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 Donkey Hote, you know, if that would, like, it's like, I think I kind of know, on a sentence level, I don't think I was doing much Wallace-y stuff. But you know what, 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 Bononoff for years because he'd sent me a version of it in 1999. And he read another version of 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 like a couple of kind of big things. One is, you know, mainly that the moment it was published, it struck me like I read it and I am, as I said, I'm a big fan of David Foster Wallace, but I'm not it. I'm not the biggest fan of Pale 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 the workshop. It was and it was it was pretty instant. And I think part of it, you know, and maybe we'll talk about this after the reading. But like, I think I had just taught a hunger artist by Kafka. 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. It still does. I'm not sure I fully understand it. 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 had I wish I'd been able to work on it with David. So I don't have I don't have I have maybe a few insights from him, but not as many as I would have. Do you recall the the earlier versions? Well, I still have the the 1999 version. OK. 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. So 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. Asterisk in that order is usually sufficient. And of course, you know, I didn't dispose of it. So excellent. Well, yeah, do you I guess what I would ask is do you do you recall the major differences then? 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. That'd 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. 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 square inch of his own body. 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 thought at that point of the lateral malleolus is 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 the bull's eye of soluble ink. He struggled to breathe against the dextrorotated 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 door. 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 spleeniest capitis and longissimus services and the deep sheaths of nerve and muscle surrounding the boy's T2 and T3 vertebra, 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 vertebra. 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 slash distrophic conditions of major recti or with acute lordotic flexion of the lumbar spine or both. A majority display Kvostek's sign or other forms of ipsilateral spasticity. Very little effort or application is involved in their art therefore. In 1932 a pre-adolescent Salonese 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 there upon able to spin unaided on the orally per trusive knee at rates in excess of 300 rpm. The phenomenon of swifagia i.e. self-swallowing has subsequently been identified as a rare form of ananative 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 in bowed. Slowly and incrementally stretching the long vertical fasche of his back and neck the spinalis thoracis and leviter scapulae the iliocostallus lumborum all the way to the sacrum and the interior thighs dense and intransigent gracilis pectinius and adductor longus which fuse below scarpus 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 pectinius 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 pertrusively 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 perinium 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 lips per trusive range requires systematic exercise of the maxillary fascia. Such as the depressor septi, orbicularis aurus, depressor anguli aurus, depressor labia inferioris and the buccanator, sucomoral and risorius groups. The zygomatic muscles are superficially involved. Praxis, a fixed string to weatherly button of at least one and a half 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 shoulders he heads for an exit. Often clients found that the father made the money easy. 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 constant because of the effect of circumlabial hypertrophy on the circumcoral musculature looked unusual also. Rigid and overbroad and seeming in one custodian's evaluative phrase like nothing in this round world. Facts. The Italian stigmatist Padre Pio carried wounds that penetrated both hands and feet immediately 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 Solomani 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 st. Bonaventura and Tomas de Solano st. Francis of Assisi's manual stigmata included bacula form 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 subjects wrists not his hands. Hence the quote necessarily simultaneous truth and falsity of the stigmata that the existential theologist E. M. Siorin explicated in his 1937 La Cremie C. Sfinte the same monograph in which he refers to the human heart as God's open wound. Areas of the boy's bid section from naval to xyfoid 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 solidly arrowed and dotted chest at mid sternum and then slid incrementally down one sometimes 1.5 millimeters a day and this catatonic and or a 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 crackles 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 horizon the edges of the verdant cornfields that began at the city limits. In late summer the fields greens became more sallow and then in the fall there was merely sad stubble and in the winter the fields 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 him. 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 McWhorters. Certainly it was no kind of stunt nor any sort of self-election. 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 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 arioli of his left and right nipples in the autumn of his ninth year. The lips by this time were markedly large and per trusso. 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 10.4 centimeters 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 and 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 sight once he had pressed his lips to it as if the establishment of its accessibility made the sight 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, remain those portions of his trunk that he had not yet attempted. Areas of his chest above the pectoralis minor 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 Newman's stigmata comprised corticot dermal structures that passed medially through both her hands. Therese Newman's capacity for anedio 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 12th 1928, was determined by laboratory analysis to comprise only mucus and empiromatic bile. A Bengali holy man known to his followers as Prah and Satha 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 matricords, and thereupon performed, i.e. 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 counter-pointed figure eight 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 algeasia have established that the musculoskeletal structures most sensitive to painful stimulation are the periosteum and joint capsules. Tendons, ligaments, and subconjural 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 include 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 anterior lateral spinal thalamic system are intact in 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 heartcraft of children went, was preferable to many other slack or damaging fixations the father could think of. 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 in his room from outside the door. Dr. Kathy, who sometimes saw the boy for continuing prophylactic adjustments to his thoracic vertebra facets in anterior ramey, 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' 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. Kathy believed the patient to be a very quiet, interdirected boy who had responded to a traumatic T3 subluxation with a commitment to neuro-spiritual 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 is 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, were 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 pursues, the Bible. Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now, Gerta. 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 to shave. When the boy's father thought of himself on the other hand, the word that came unbidden first to mind was always torture. 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 him a feeling that he thought was almost like death. Even as a newlywed, he'd 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'd 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 eight centimeters just below the chin's point, the galley of his scalp's back and crown, the forehead and zygomatic ridge, the ears, nose and eyes, as well as the paradoxical ding-on zik of his lips themselves, accessing which appeared to be like asking a blade to cut itself. These sites 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 worrier, unlike himself, his father thought. But the inaccessibility of these last sites 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 eleventh 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. That was Adam Levin, reading Backbone by David Foster Wallace. 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. Adam, I want to just start by talking about the first sentence. Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. The last 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 grew up to work for the IRS. But every time I read that first sentence, I stop on the word whole. Every whole person. 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 throughout this story, we're mostly focused on the boy, but the father, he's in, he does self-help stuff basically. He's into self-help and he promotes self-help. And I think he sells self-help pamphlets, right? And every whole person, like that construction, it sounds self-helpy. As does to me, ambitions, objectives, initiatives, and goals sounds as self-help as it does corporate to me. But the whole also, it's maybe an earnest. There's a lot of stuff and 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 diehard 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 interuterine 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 the 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 and completeness is threaded through the story. No, that's quite interesting. It's also the fact that his mother is dead in the original version. That makes it, I think, very different from this. I wonder what the father's role is in that, because here, his whole thing 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 just not very much in that 1999 version? The father is in there in the same way he 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 the, to the, 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 may not be relevant. Yeah. I mean, I wonder, because I think, like yet, to me, it seemed the Wallace was trying to say something about faith, because we have that first line, you also have 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 think what you have is faith. And I think that prior to that, like, maybe, again, this might be me having read this story too many times, but the father, he is not faithful 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 ever located for it, right? He just one day decides he's going to push his lips to every squarage 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. And furthermore, he doesn't even seem to 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 of 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's 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 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 of common account is they were surrounded by artists or people who loved art and they gave them, you 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 or 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 compelled. You know, when we're talking about characters, it's weird to think about a character 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 regressing. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that, you know, we have threaded through the story these stories of 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 that 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 not. So why do you think those narratives are there? Well, I think because again, like this has to do, 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 we get when we're hearing about the saints and 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 don't have a particularly hard time believing that strange physical phenomenon happened to people, I don't know if it's caused by faith or whatever, but the case that I think is being made is, is something like, you know, that 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. He would put it through their wrists. And so, so I, 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 really a faithful person. I guess I also look at the boy's 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 in, in some, on some level, I feel that the boy who doesn't really have parents or has, 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, 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, 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, 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. It's pretty bizarre, right? Like, this is a, you know, it's a, it's a cold kind of distant, at least, uh, home. And the father doesn't even really know what he's doing. He thinks he's just, you know, doing me exercises that Dr. Kathy told him to do. Right. Which, which makes it, which, 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 gonna 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, um, so, yeah. I feel like, I feel like, um, David Wallace planted a little clue or maybe just an illusion 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 would 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. Um, and so whenever I see coastal shelf, which is very rarely, I, I don't know if I've seen it anywhere other than in the story, I think of that poem and that, 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. Yeah, no, no, I, I love that. I mean, I, you know, the Larkin poem, I'm, I'm, I only do the first, you know, the first two lines. And, uh, yeah, that's, that's, that's remarkable. Yeah, I think that would, it would be strange if that weren't deliberate on Wallace's part. So yeah, I think that's something that's going on. That has to be the, uh, 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, there is this, this, this hunger artist thing. I mean, like, I'm really curious what you think about that. Like, because, 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 blown away. Like that there is some arc that, you know, was intended by the author. And so with this one, it's, uh, it's a little, it's, it's, it's harder to find than usual. But I do feel like I get the end of the story certainly feels like the end of the story. You know, I, I don't think I'm bringing my own arc. I don't, you know, I'm, that's not the way I read. So it's, yeah. And hunger artist, the arc is kind of clear in here. It's, it's less so. And I, but it, 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, of him getting to the harder and harder places. And along the way, we hear these other stories of self-torture, 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'm, I always have ended up surprised by the thought of lips kissing themselves as being the ultimate thing. And it's so, so maybe that's, that's part of what's arcing too is this person who has thought this through to its, you know, 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, for this chapter in the book, which is that these, the children we see in the book are going to grow up to be at the IRS doing, you know, the most tedious job imaginable. And this is what the boy is doing is continually referred to as tedious and, 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, he has the sort of devotion to do that. Doesn't get bored or, or he likes the boredom or it's worth it for him. So I suppose where 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, in the Pale King. Yeah, I don't recall that that being as clear with this one as to who would have been the adult. I recall conversations about people, yeah, 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 you, although the, the letter he sent, he called it a fragment, correct? So was he, was he talking about 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 it, and, and what he sent me then did not have the last few paragraphs of this version. So it gets stopped on the image of the blade trying to cut itself. Okay, okay. I mean, you know, one other question I have for you, Deborah, it's like, you know, when we're looking at this again, it's, it's like, we have like this sort of, there's the, 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. But in here, it's, it's, it's not clear. 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? This, 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 I, and I wonder how much that has to do with, with, with the story and the way that it arcs. Like, because we obviously, we go outside of him in a large part of the story, but at some point, I think we delve right in. There's not much announcement about 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 a, it's like, you know, like just like, just like a couple of 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 I, you know, in the book, there are chapters that are told by David Foster Wallace and, and, you know, it's a first person thing. And that, that's not true in these chapters about the children. And this voice, it's very strange when you think about it because this, 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. Don't really know who it is. Yeah. I mean, and it makes you, I, I, I mean, I agree. And, and I kind of, I kind of love that. Like, I think it makes these really interesting moves really early so that they can think the first one, the first one I've marked is, is in that like third paragraph. We have, we get to some of these survive the eventual fire regarding the father's promotional materials. So it does seem a bit all seeing. 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 going to be a fire. And then, you know, by the end, you like, 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 is an 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 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 fire is 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 time she does it, yeah, he'll tell you some interesting thing about stigmatists. And yeah, you know, who doesn't want to hear about that. Confortionists. Yeah, conforcionists. Yeah, self swallowing. Yeah, the self swallowing, yeah, doing the spinning on her, on her patella. Yeah. 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, has done a lot of reading in medical textbooks. And we get a lot of, you know, you know, from having just read this allowed, we get a lot of long sentences with scientific names for things, which aren't on the same level exciting as, as written text, as, you know, some of these survived the fire. So why do you think we get those long tracks? I think, I mean, I think they establish like some kind of when you're, 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 stiley kind of thing for lack of a better term, but, but in terms of the, the medical terminology, I think it gives the reader or at least this reader a sense that the writer actually does what he's talking about, that there's an objective reality to some of this sense of that. And, and I think, you know, that's, that's another thing I guess that some of these survived 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 is 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's more real. Yeah. And maybe it's that just the words 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 knee that is self swallowed. Yeah. I think actually all of those factors, I mean, sort of the, 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, you know, interesting moment. And also the story's a little bit educational, I suppose, like in its, it gives us history, it gives us anatomy. It's, you feel the voice of the story perhaps trying to teach us something. Although I did have a question for you about the mystics. Did you look all of them up at any point? Not all of them, but some, yeah. Yeah, some me too. And it was like, I looked up the first few, I looked at the woman with the needy, who, you know, who said she hadn't eaten for 40 years, this woman existed. For sure. And there were a couple of St. Francis of Assisi, sure. And like, but there's the, I believe he's Indian, the guy who makes his eyes, like, leave his head and then, you know, spin around on cords. And I couldn't find him. I couldn't find a reference to him. 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 like, it bends in on itself. It's like, well, that should exist. I really want to believe in this. 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 I 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 AD 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, you know, 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 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, it 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 times 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's 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 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 cast a shadow over the whole endeavor, a tenor birth shadow that the boy chose to see as 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. Um, 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 called out 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'm, I like that you see it that way that you see that last, that last part is a high note. Cause like I feel like it's, it's, it's, this is where my point of view problem gets, gets. Well, at the same time, it's bittersweet, obviously, because we know he's not going to 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, I think what it does at the very least, it doesn't make him seem like a sort of walking tragedy, right? He's not going into anything blindly, I think, even though she's being said to have pure faith or something. But the whole thing is, is 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? Are we in Wallace's? Cause the, the, the line in previous is, yeah, he did not yet know how, but he believed as he approached pubescence that his head would 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 going to happen. But was it he believed it or was it Wallace is telling us this, our narrator is telling us this, because there are 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. 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 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, Bubble Gum 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 Writers' Voice podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writers' 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 LeMay. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening. I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And I'm Jazzy Sepcek. And we're the hosts of the Bon Appétit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appétit's community of confident, curious bakers. Jazzy and I love to bake. Some might even call us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the house and why and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on Bon Appétit.com that introduces a baking concept we think you should know. Then you'll bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe. So consider this your official invitation. Come join the BA Bake Club. New episodes on the first Tuesday of every month wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.