The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Adam Levin Reads David Foster Wallace

November 1, 2025·1 hr 6 min·5 clips

DFW's 1999 cover letter instructs Treisman to destroy his manuscript with 'some combination of shredder and flame, asterisk, in that order.'

Deborah Treisman opens plainly. She explains the podcast's archive practice, names David Foster Wallace's Backbone from March 2011, and brings in Adam Levin as the writer who picked it. Levin speaks as an admirer, but the conversation does not overwork the influence. It gives Wallace a place in Levin's development as a serious writer, then gets out of the way. Then Backbone begins. The opening centers on a boy with a private goal: to touch his lips to every square inch of his own body. Wallace treats the premise less like a stunt than a mystery. The strangeness stays calm, which makes it more unsettling. The story moves through the child's discipline, the family's thin contemporary house, and the father's baffled word for him: dutiful. The domestic details do a lot of work. A home office, mail-order motivational tapes, evening sales calls, and a side entrance to a cemetery give the house a particular pressure. The father notices plenty, but he cannot quite settle what he sees. The boy seems flexible and obedient, harmless and faintly alarming at the same time. Dr. Cathy adds another layer with her language of spine, nervous system, spirit, and cosmos. It sounds strange, but it keeps the body at the center. Levin's choice feels exact. The pull of the story, at least from what is heard here, is Wallace's patience with eccentric behavior. He lets it become a test of attention, tenderness, and unease. The reading remains the main event. Treisman's frame is bookish and spare, with enough context about Levin's books and New Yorker history without crowding the prose. The credits return quietly, and the episode keeps its focus: a writer's selection, a measured setup, and a story left to carry its own charge.

As heard by us

A precise, uneasy reading of Wallace's "Backbone," where bodily obsession turns comic, solemn, and quietly strange.

Adam Levin's visit to The New Yorker: Fiction turns on David Foster Wallace's "Backbone," a story built around a boy's strange devotion to touching his lips to every part of his own body.

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