Hugh Steeply

Rémy Marathe is Steeply's most important relationship in the novel. Though nominal adversaries — Steeply works for the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services, Marathe for the Québécois Wheelchair Assassins — both are double agents who know it, which strips their hillside dialogues of pure opposition. What remains is something closer to a friendship shaped by argument, with Marathe's collectivist ethics persistently unsettling Steeply's American liberal-individualist certainties.

Steeply disguises himself as "Helen Steeply," a female journalist, to get close to Orin Incandenza, whom the O.U.S. suspects knows something about the distribution of the lethal Entertainment cartridge. The disguise is played in almost comic terms — Helen is conspicuously large and not quite convincing — which Wallace uses deliberately to reflect a culture skilled at performance but poor at genuine self-knowledge.

Steeply's mission is to locate and neutralize the master copy of James O. Incandenza's lethal film, the Entertainment, which renders viewers catatonically pleasured to death. Operating for the U.S. Office of Unspecified Services, he pursues leads through his undercover persona as Helen Steeply and through surveillance of figures connected to the Incandenza family, including Orin, Joelle van Dyne, and Hal Incandenza.

Steeply's father became obsessively fixated on the television game show Jeopardy!, staying up through the night and neglecting his family until his mind was colonized by the show's rhythms. Recounted conversationally to Marathe, this backstory is one of the novel's quietly devastating sequences. It transforms Steeply from ideological mouthpiece into a grieving son who has already witnessed, in miniature, exactly the catastrophe the Entertainment threatens to inflict on an entire population.

Steeply defends a broadly American liberal-individualist position: that individual choice is its own justification and that freedom and desire are essentially the same thing. He argues that people have the right to choose their own pleasures, even self-destructive ones. Marathe counters that a culture unable to distinguish a want from a need will freely choose the Entertainment and freely die, a rejoinder to which Steeply has no clean answer.

Steeply's confidence is gradually eroded, though he never fully converts to Marathe's collectivist view. He begins each hillside exchange certain that American liberal individualism is defensible and ends each one slightly less sure. His personal history — watching his father destroyed by a television obsession — gives this philosophical erosion private roots, suggesting his blind spot about addiction is not merely intellectual but deeply personal.

Steeply and James Incandenza never meet, as James is already dead before the novel's present action begins. Nevertheless, James's lethal film is the gravitational center of Steeply's entire professional existence, making theirs a relationship conducted entirely through artifact and consequence — Steeply pursues the meaning and location of a work made by a man he can only know through its devastating effects on others.

Disguised as journalist "Helen Steeply," Steeply exploits Orin's well-established susceptibility to female attention to cultivate him as an intelligence source on the Entertainment cartridge. Orin is manipulated without realizing it, making the relationship a dark comedy of seduction and surveillance. Wallace frames it as faintly pitiful — an operation that mimics intimacy while hollowing it out entirely.