Fenton here was a dyed-in-the-wool paranoid schizophrenic who believed that radioactive fluids were invading his skull and that hugely complex high-tech-type machines had been specifically designed and programmed to pursue him without cease until they had caught him and made brutal sport of him and buried him alive.

Minutes later, Orin learns that breakthrough technology had made it possible to ‘scan and study how different parts of poor old Fenton’s dysfunctional brain’ work by injecting him with ‘a special blood-brain-barrier-penetrating radioactive dye and then sticking him in the rotating body-size receptacle of a P.E.T. Scanner’. We are left with the image of ‘Fenton’s eyes bugging out in total foreseen horror’, before

the body-size receptacle rotates the test-subject counter-clockwise, with brutal speed … faster and faster, the machine’s blurps and tweets not even coming close to covering Fenton’s entombed howls as his worst delusional fears came true in digital stereo and you could hear the last surviving bits of his functional dye-permeated mind being screamed out of him before all time …

Fenton’s dysfunction turns out to be prophetic: the method of diagnosing its cause merely justifies its intensity. What to make, then, of a biography that seeks to spread its dye-feelers through this anxiety-prone and media-shy writer’s life? What answers can be expected from the experiment? More worryingly, what nightmares might such an exercise confirm?

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is a sustained report on Wallace’s life and work (I hesitate to call it literary biography). Max is most interested in Wallace-the-cultural-phenomenon. In the preface to the UK edition, Max muses on ‘how deeply people read their own lives into Wallace’s. They identify with his genius, his depression, his anxiety, his loneliness, his frustrations, his early success, his amazement that the world isn’t gentler, and his upset at how hard it is to say what you mean.’ Max claims that Wallace made a profound mark on a generation of teenage and young-adult isolates – entertainment junkies robbed of communal bonds but bound to one another, nonetheless, by a shared sense of loneliness – and ably charts Wallace’s transformation from tennis ‘prodigy’ to overachieving university student to writer. In the process, he sketches Wallace’s literary influences, from Wodehouse through to Dostoevsky and Pynchon – the latter ‘like Bob Dylan finding Woody Guthrie’.

Among other things, we learn that Wallace enjoyed rap music, David Lynch films, and The Wire; had sustained friendships with Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and David Markson; was fond of dogs; used a pink Care Bears folder while teaching at a university; and once got into a fist fight with a furniture removalist who dared to criticise one of his favourite books, David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988).

Wallace’s literary significance is much contested. This is not surprising, given the extremity of his artistic credo. He reversed the truism that artists should learn the basics before ‘playing jazz’, insisting that they earn the right to guileless expression and luminous clarity only through the difficult and entangling byways of jazz and the twelve-tone technique; they must incorporate Flaubert’s irony, Barth’s metafictional tics, and Pynchonian excess before uttering banal truths or engaging in sentimental yearning; they must descend through the underworld of postmodernist reflexivity before emerging renewed with a pristine and developed voice.

The opening pages of Infinite Jest deal with the youngest Incandenza brother, Hal. The suicide of his film-maker father and betrayals of his grammarian mother have left him hollow. Where Hamlet loses the ability to act, Hal is unable to speak – the paralysis of postmodernity replacing that of modernity.

The moral agents of the novel shine the way: middle brother Mario’s savant-like insights are funnelled through physical deformity; recovering addict Don Gately’s difficult clarity and stubborn purpose are the hard-won accretions of a rehabilitated but fragile life. Language must similarly endure its wounds, deficiencies, and deformities if it is to ring true.

Max cogently interlaces biography and fiction while recording Wallace’s metamorphosis from an intelligent and ambitious writer into a brilliant and essential one. Referring to the early novella, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, Max writes:

There is a sense – again brought to full boil in Infinite Jest – that our obsession with being entertained has deadened our affect, that we are not, as a character warns in that book, choosing carefully enough what to love. And ‘Westward’ suggests for the first time in Wallace’s fiction that not just he but his whole generation share this difficulty.

According to Max, Wallace universalised his neurosis while developing a literary corrective to a cultural disease. His adolescent denunciation of bland minimalism ripened into a broader impatience with the opposing literary trends he had formally embraced, prompting him to discard the undernourishment of habitual irony and metafiction in favour of a genuinely new literary voice – one marked by shifting social imperatives and intense personal experience.

Those experiences included several mental breakdowns, resulting in long-term medication and occasional electroconvulsive therapy; addictions to drugs, alcohol, and television; sexual promiscuity and destructive love affairs; AA groups, suicide attempts, and a stint in a halfway house for recovering addicts. Wallace apparently had a violent streak and could be as erratic and dangerous with companions as he was sensitive and generous with broken people, students, and animals.

On the whole, this is a welcome but flawed biography. Benefiting from the contributions of Wallace’s friends and family, Max provides a solid outline of Wallace’s short life. His research seems sound but the analysis questionable, especially when it speaks to Wallace’s eventual suicide. Max writes of an early suicidal episode: ‘Suicide looked to him like an escape rather than a solution.’ This is credible, but given that it is presented as Wallace’s personal view, it seems reasonable to assume that there is a source for this statement. Are we dealing with fact here, or interpretation? Due to inadequate referencing, there is no way of knowing.

According to Max, rejection by his first publisher was ‘devastating’ and Wallace had consequently ‘written a suicide note that no one would ever read’ (including the biographer, presumably). Once again, no source is provided for this information; instead, we have to assume that Wallace mentioned it somewhere.

Interpretation in biography may be essential, but transparency is equally crucial, and the lines between fact, fiction, and Max’s analysis are simply too unclear, too often. This undermines his version of events, and proves particularly infuriating when combined with puzzling episodes in Wallace’s life, like his relationship with the writer Mary Karr and a period of estrangement from his mother. Searching for sources of information about Wallace’s more extreme behaviour – smashing car windows, trying to push Karr from a moving vehicle – the reader is continually confronted with a blank.

Max is also guilty of prosaic analysis. Speaking of Wallace’s fondness for the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, he writes: ‘the implications of Wittgenstein’s theories were very alive for him. After all, late Wittgenstein was Wallace well; early Wittgenstein, the author depressed.’ This is a pithy formulation but hardly accurate; there is room enough for Wallace’s ‘wellness’ and ‘depression’ in both of Wittgenstein’s phases.

Despite these deficiencies, Max manages to capture a movingly elegiac tone. The portrait drawn is largely sympathetic, and we get the feeling that this is how people who knew Wallace have been speaking and thinking about him. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is perhaps best at representing how Wallace is remembered; Max’s ‘toxic dye’ distils and superimposes the feeling Wallace left behind more than the life he lived. If a nightmare is confirmed in the process, it is slight enough to forget.