David Foster Wallace is a funny thinker, a library vaudevillian with an “amphetaminic eagerness” to please. Though best known for his two long, deeply complicated, and often funny novels, The Broom of the System (Penguin, 1987) and Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, 1996), Wallace is most popularly read as a writer of provocative short fiction, collected in three volumes—Girl With Curious Hair (W.W. Norton, 1989), Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (Little, Brown, 1999), and Oblivion (Little, Brown, 2004)—and as a profanely humorous essayist. Wallace’s second collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, published last month by Little, Brown, follows eight years after his first, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, also published by Little, Brown, in 1997.

Everything I know about DFW (even his wanton use of acronyms in place of proper nouns) I know secondhand—through his books, a few printed interviews, reviews, and critical studies. It’s not that I haven’t tried to pose some questions directly to the writer himself, to ferret out a few insights from the man Sven Birkerts—in a review of Infinite Jest for the Atlantic Monthly in 1996—called “a wild-card savant.” No, my search to find the real DFW has been impeded by agent and publicist alike: I’ve been stonewalled. Whether he is “publicity shy,” as his publicist contends, or whether he’s weaving a web of literary mystique about himself, I do not know. And, it seems more and more likely, I never will.

I do know that DFW lives up a canyon road in the easternmost foothills of Los Angeles. I know the road that leads to him often washes out when rains push over the San Gabriel Mountains. I know he lives among coyotes and suburban black bears, “trash bears” we call them—bears that must be careful, lest they end up with crimped collars around their necks, performing in a traveling circus. I know all this because I live where he lives—in Claremont, California.

My odyssey to interview DFW began with a series of telephones calls—first, to Pomona College, where he is Disney Professor of Creative Writing (an endowed chair funded by Walt Disney’s nephew, Roy). From Pomona College I was sent to DFW’s literary agency in San Francisco, Frederick Hill/Bonnie Nadell. San Francisco sent me back to Los Angeles, to Bonnie Nadell herself, DFW’s agent and the person to whom Consider the Lobster is dedicated.

While Bonnie Nadell was certainly nice, she was noncommittal. She was interested in taking down my phone numbers and e-mail addresses and “getting back to me.” She was interested in “talking things over with David,” and seeing if, together, they felt the interview was worth it. When I didn’t hear back from her, I contacted DFW’s publicist at Little, Brown in New York, but she offered little help. Each time I called her, she was seemingly in a hurry to do something else, and answered each of my questions before I finished asking:

Would it be possible to interview David Foster Wallace for Poets & Writers Magazine? “I spoke with David last night, and he’s not doing interviews for the book.” Could I send him a few questions by e-mail to respond to? “David doesn’t do e-mail.” Are you saying he’s not going to do any interviews at all for Consider the Lobster? “I may talk him into one or two major things.” Can I at least get an advance reading copy of the new book? “They’re all gone. They went like hotcakes.”

In a last-ditch, Woodward-and-Bernstein effort, I stalked DFW at work. I delivered a plea for an interview, in writing, to his office in Crookshank Hall (a name and place straight out of Harry Potter) at Pomona College. Silence.

So, it’s really true. The road that leads to DFW washes out.

Luckily, there is a precedent for this kind of journalistic profile sans interview, and it comes from the work of DFW himself. In the same way he never spoke directly with David Lynch, but wrote about him (in the essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) and never actually talked to Michael Murphy, John McCain’s senior campaign strategist (for his essay on the senator’s 2000 bid for the GOP nomination for president, in Consider the Lobster), I never actually spoke with DFW.

I’m forced back to his work, the words—and there are plenty of them. I’m forced back to the clues you can buy at the bookstore and read on the Internet and in the papers. And nearly everyone has an opinion, something to say, about DFW. Everyone, it turns out, except David Foster Wallace.

Born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962, DFW was raised in Illinois, in the middle of Tornado Alley, by two college professors interested in books and tennis—his father taught philosophy and his mother taught English. Clearly, DFW continues to work his family’s metaphorical farm; he puzzles and writes, writes and puzzles. It’s a plausible petri dish, certainly, for the writer he is still becoming. But who is DFW, really? What makes him tick?

Again, my guesswork turns forensic, archeological. I want to know things—I want the silence cracked. I have my own set of Questions for the Absent Author (QAA). Do you believe in God? Do you believe you “put the novel back on the map,” as Charlie Rose said you did, when he interviewed you back in 1997? (Charlie Rose must fall neatly into his publicist’s classification of “major things.”) Do you love the primary material of your work—the people, places, things—more than the work itself? Is Scientology the answer to any question at all? What pain lies behind your panoply of fun?

Fortunately, trace elements of DFW’s biography are threaded throughout his work. Just like the weird Beadsman clan in The Broom of the System, published when he was just twenty-five years old, DFW followed his father to Amherst College. He graduated from Amherst in 1986 with a degree in philosophy, while focusing his studies on mathematical logic and semantics (an interest that would later develop into a book about, of all things, infinity—Everything and More was published by Atlas Books in 2003). DFW received his MFA from the University of Arizona in 1987, and for most of the 1990s, he taught at Illinois State University before filling the Disney Chair at Pomona College in 2002. QAA: Why did you choose prose over proofs?

DFW’s academic background might explain his love of pulling together arguments using footnotes—nearly all of his books, whether fiction or nonfiction, include detailed footnotes—in discussing hegemonies, in opining on his intellectual cravings (what he calls his “jones”), in unpacking “complicated ironies” in front of readers in hopes of reaching a conclusion, which, it turns out, he rarely does. If anything, DFW enjoys the journey, enjoys allowing the reader, in nearly every case, to come to her own conclusions. His work is always difficult, though, layered with complicated sentences and underused words, and, depending on your own “jones,” worth the trouble—or not. Reading DFW isn’t for the weak. QAA: Why the compositional witchcraft? Do you think the form of your prose helps or hinders the content? Do you ever feel like simply telling your readers what and how to think? Should that ever be the point of writing in the first place?

While DFW’s theoretical thinking on fictions, on metafictions, on the modern and postmodern is thoroughly tangled and troubling—and at certain low biorhythmic times during the day, beyond my powers—his actual fiction and his actual essays are not, really. It can be said that DFW’s writing rarely strays from a singular expository axiom: Isn’t it interesting what I find interesting? Even Michiko Kakutani, the book critic for the New York Times, has agreed. His essays, in particular, are stuffed full of the offbeat and underexamined. In Consider the Lobster—which I was finally able to procure from my editor at Poets & Writers Magazine—DFW stretches to cover subjects as diverse as the annual Adult Video News (AVN) Awards, McCain’s presidential bid, the poor quality of Tracy Austin’s tennis memoir, ruminations on Kafka and Dostoevsky, and the morally quarrelsome method of preparing lobsters. QAA: Have you ever been in a fistfight? Do you think Ben Marcus was a big meanie in his October 2005 Harper’s essay, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life As We Know It,” or do you agree with him that “literary language can also make a more abstract but no less vital entertainment”? Does it bother you that you weren’t mentioned in that article—even as a footnote?

Consider the Lobster opens with “Big Red Son,” a long travelogue, first published in Premiere magazine in 1998, devoted to the AVN Awards in Las Vegas. The essay begins with a soliloquy on self-castration—with talk of “kitchen tools” and “wire cutters” and the male odyssey to find the “perfect release.” What follows, though, proves that his hyperbole has little point—he was, in fact, only joking. “Big Red Son” actually ends up tracing DFW’s rather routine journalistic junket through an adult video industry, which was, unfortunately, on its best behavior. His convention weekend coverage reveals no wild sex in stairwells, no drug vials casually left behind at a booth in the casino’s all-you-can-eat buffet—just bored starlets in hotel rooms watching reruns of Seinfeld and the like.

“Big Red Son,” like several other essays in Consider the Lobster, and some in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, wasn’t DFW’s idea in the first place. He was simply contacted, or “contracted,” by different magazines and asked to go somewhere, look around, and write about it. And so he does. QAA: Has there ever been a topic that you refused to write about? Have you ever considered covering the Rubik’s Cube World Championships in Orlando?

All of the pieces in the new essay collection are saturated with footnotes, and in DFW’s books, this is how readers learn more than they really need to know. For example, there were nearly eight thousand adult videos released in 1997; the AVN Awards cover 106 presentation categories; thirty thousand sex scenes were committed to tape over twelve months, and so on. Readers learn, too, that “The average professional lifespan of a female performer is two years. Males, though lower paid, tend to last much longer in the business—sometimes decades.” The details pile up. QAA: What did a minimalist ever do to you? Do you believe Joan Didion was right, that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”?

While DFW is himself learned, he is keenly interested in making his readers so, too. Whether we are following him around a lobster festival, thinking about whether the crustaceans “feel pain” when boiled alive, or whether he’s busy mulling over Kafka’s kind of funny—DFW wants something from us. He wants a conceit, a confession that none of us knows as much as we thought we did about anything—even him. Every essay, complete with footnotes, is a quest for knowledge and a giggle. He goes wild for an academic yarn.

In Consider the Lobster DFW ponders U.S. lexicography and American usage and a Dostoevsky scholar’s four-volume masterpiece. In his earlier collection he rustled over the state of U.S. fiction. Though A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again has a similar balance of reporting and scholarly-like argument, it is much more autobiographical than the new collection. In essays like “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” DFW unpacks his Midwestern background and love of tennis for readers, and in “David Lynch Keeps His Head,” he discusses his MFA-aged revelations on art and literature as inspired by his favorite filmmaker. Stylistically, both collections of essays are filled with blue-bookish, yet offbeat, pieces. QAA: How many televisions do you own? Who’s your favorite Brady? What did you mean when you wrote “metafiction’s real end has always been Armageddon”?

Arguably, DFW is more acrobatic with form and language in his short fiction than he is in his essays. His wildly popular early collections, Girl With Curious Hair and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, were followed up, in 2004, with Oblivion. It is here, in the short story, that some would argue DFW’s extraordinary talents peak.

The collection’s title story is an odd tale of marital strife that centers on a central mystery—is the husband in the story snoring at night and awakening his wife, or is she, in fact, imagining the whole thing? Through a series of funny scenes and a number of trips to the Meredith R. Darling Sleep Clinic, the couple (and the reader) gets to the crux of the troubling scenario. “She’s claiming to know better than myself whether I’m even awake. It’s less unfair than seemingly almost totally insane.” Deliciously, both husband and wife turn out to be all wrong.

The first story in Oblivion, “Mister Squishy,” takes place in an Orwellian universe where brand icons rule the landscape, where marketing focus groups are either the cause of the strained social fabric of the metropolis, or are its outgrowth. The story opens with a group of subjects testing a “high-concept chocolate intensive Mister Squishy brand snack cake” called Felonies. The snack cakes are aptly named to “both connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis-à-vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack.” Finally, and somewhat abruptly, the story ends for the reader as it does for one of the characters, “his mind a great flat blank white screen.” Readers, sometimes like the characters in the story, don’t get the neat, bundled conclusions they seek. QAA: Why don’t you just tell your readers what you really mean once in a while, as you often do in your essays? Have you ever thought about beginning a story with “Once upon a time,” and ending it with “So the moral of this story is…”?

The most surprising story in Oblivion is the shortest, “Incarnations of Burned Children.” In remarkable and poetical prose, DFW unleashes a long, single-paragraph description of a scalded child, “the toddler in his baggy diaper standing rigid with steam coming off his hair and his chest and his shoulders scarlet and his eyes rolled up and mouth open very wide….” Here, the reader is swept along on a river of emotion to a haunting, terrible finish, “and the child had learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead….” In an uncharacteristically moving passage, DFW writes, “If you’ve never wept, and want to, have a child.”

Oblivion’s accomplishments certainly echo DFW’s earlier success with the short story form, and clearly show the sophistication and inventiveness noted by those who praise his two novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest. In 1997, Michiko Kakutani wrote, “Although Wallace has burned off the annoying Pynchonesque echoes of his…debut novel, The Broom of the System, and discovered an exuberant voice of his own, Infinite Jest does owe a decisive debt to that earlier book. Like Broom, it uses stories within stories to point up the tension between life and art. And like Broom, it concerns a character’s (well, many characters’) search for identity and meaning.” Mark Caro, in the Chicago Tribune, called Infinite Jest “a grandly conceived, dizzyingly executed, darkly comic vision of America’s not-so-distant future.” QAA: Mixed praise is the porridge of the critic, don’t you think? Do you read your own reviews? Do you read the newspaper?

Infinite Jest is certainly the most referred-to work in the DFW canon, though, my research tells me, it is, arguably, the least-read. While the thousand-plus-page novel has been heralded by some as a sign of genius (indeed, a year after it was published, DFW received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation), it has been lambasted by others as self-interested, self-conscious—egocentric. It is, nonetheless, the hub of the DFW literary universe. Marshall Boswell, literary scholar and established DFW critic, wrote this about Infinite Jest in his book-length Understanding David Foster Wallace (University of South Carolina Press, 2003):

[It is] set in a slightly cockeyed near future; also like its predecessor, the book yokes together a vast, heterogeneous collection of themes and concerns. Wallace continues to link issues of language, signification, solipsism, and objectification, as he did in The Broom of the System, while at the same time expanding Girl with Curious Hair’s preoccupation with pop-culture, irony, to self-reflexivity. To these abiding concerns he adds a number of new preoccupations, such as drug addiction, terrorism, politics, and tennis. The result is a book that functions as both the culmination of his earlier work and a remarkable expansion of his reach and ambition.

Infinite Jest culminates, too, in the most difficult of reads. While some agree the novel demonstrates DFW’s formidable gifts, the book also throws a spotlight on his self-admitted weaknesses as a writer. DFW, in an interview with Larry McCaffery for the Center for Book Culture—a nonprofit organization based at Illinois State University, where DFW used to teach, which, at least partly, explains why he granted the interview—revealed he has “a grossly sentimental affection for gags, for stuff that’s nothing but funny, and which I sometimes stick in for no other reason than funniness. Another’s that I have a problem with concision, communicating only what needs to be said in a brisk efficient way that doesn’t call attention to itself.”

This is also true in DFW’s creative nonfiction. Some readers like their head-scratching funnies, embrace Herculean challenges, reject the easy and passive. Others do not. Certainly, there are examples everywhere in DFW’s writing of his ability to concisely pierce a topic, an emotion, a grand idea. His story “Oblivion,” while complicated and recursive and funny, is strangely touching—and in a way it opens a window into the human condition like none other. That’s not bad, is it? And “Incarnations of Burned Children” is poetry. QAA: If you really want, as you often state in your essays, to “put it as simple as possible,” why don’t you do that in your fiction?

Salman Rushdie recently commented in the Paris Review on his growing ambition to tell a story simply and clearly: “I’ve gotten more interested in clarity as a virtue, less interested in the virtues of difficulty.… I don’t like books that play to the gallery, but I’ve become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.… A story doesn’t have to be simple, it doesn’t have to be one-dimensional but, especially if it’s multidimensional, you need to find the clearest, most engaging way of telling it.”

Perhaps, one day DFW will abandon the “virtues of difficulty” as well. But I doubt it. DFW, though hard to reach, while discursive and funny, is not as interested in reinventing literature as his critics give him credit for. He is, I believe, interested in welcoming us into his mind and heart. It is difficult to guess, but I don’t see DFW giving up the footnotes any time soon. There are certainly as many people hoping he will as there are people who hope he will not.

Perhaps, one day soon I’ll get to ask him—or his publicist or agent, rather—about his plans. In the meantime, I’ll just read DFW and try to make my own way up that road before it washes out again.

Joe Woodward is the author of Small Matters: A Year in Writing.