'Infinite Text': A Review, an Excerpt, and an Interview (Anne Marie Donahue, Boston Phoenix Literary Section, March 1-7 1996)

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TL;DR

A three-part Boston Phoenix Literary Section package on Infinite Jest — a review, a pulled excerpt, and a sidebar interview — printed the month the novel appeared and built from a tour-stop sit-down with Wallace at the Copley Plaza the same day he taped Christopher Lydon's radio hour. Anne Marie Donahue's review calls the book "a big fat mess" and then insists the mess is the point: it is "brilliant," "extraordinarily funny," ambitious and "implicitly political," and its refusal to resolve ("interruptus ending") is deliberate. She lays out the near-future Boston of ONAN and subsidized time, the Incandenza family, the Ennet House / Don Gately strain, Madame Psychosis, the legless Wheelchair Assassins, and the fatal samizdat film, and she flags the apparatus (388 endnotes, page-long sentences). The excerpt is the men's-group "Inner Infant" scene Hal blunders into. The interview is the piece's real prize: publication-era Wallace, calm and fame-baffled ("I'm somebody who spends much of his life in libraries... I'm just not that interesting"), describing the book as "a very careful mess" ("A lot of work went into making it look like that"), as "designed more like a piece of music than like a book" built of "leitmotifs and things that curve back" and "movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not", and defending the aclimactic ending — it is not him "giving them the finger" but a book that is "supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project." He names his real lineage (Beckett, Fiction Collective 2, Dalkey Archive — "extreme avant-garde shit," with Pynchon and Gaddis demoted to "commercial avant-garde"), confesses he "can't even own a TV anymore" because he'll "sit there slack-jawed" consuming "absolute shit... very pleasurable shit," and states the design goal: make a reader say "Holy, shit, I've got to read this," then "seduce them into doing a certain amount of work." He reframes the writer-reader bond from "sexual" (when younger) to "a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off."

Key claims

The review's verdict: a deliberate mess. "David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a big fat mess" — three-plus pounds, 388 endnotes, page-spanning sentences, "three main plots and dozens of subplots that never quite come together" — "But for all its untidiness, which is part of the point, Wallace's big fat book is brilliant." Donahue's three "inadequate but equally true" one-liners: "an addicting book about addiction," "an entertaining book about entertainment," "a long book about longing."
The book is "[a]mbitious and implicitly political". It is "packed with fresh and largely sympathetic insights into the hunger of the human heart in an age of rampant consumerism and entrancing diversions"; drugs, recovery, entertainment, and competitive sports "sometimes serve the same function. They distract. They numb.... They are the stuff of addiction, writ large." Donahue singles out the even-handed Gately/Demerol account and the crack-addicted woman with the dead baby as the book's most haunting, and the Robert-Bly men's-group scene and the towel-rack guru as its best comedy.
The ending is intentional, not a snub. Wallace: "Plot-wise, the book doesn't come to a resolution. But if the readers perceive it as me giving them the finger, then I haven't done my job. On the surface, it might seem like it just stops. But it's supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project. Musically and emotionally, it's a pitch that seemed right." He frames the commercial happy ending as "contempt for the reader... Like they're children and have to have their fantasies enabled and have a happy ending."
The book was built like music. "It's really designed more like a piece of music than like a book, so a lot of it consists of leitmotifs and things that curve back. And there's all this stuff about movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not." And the mess is engineered: "It may be a mess, but it's a very careful mess.... A lot of work went into making it look like that. That might sound like a pathetic lie, but it's not."
The reader is enlisted, not disdained. The tasks Wallace names: "keeping track of enormous amounts of information," "being required to pay attention to some of the strategies that regular entertainment uses", and "having certain formulaic expectations that go along with reading commercial stuff fucked with. Not just disdained. Fucked with." The aim: "make somebody say, 'Holy, shit, I've got to read this,' and then seduce them into doing a certain amount of work. And that — if I can be pretentious for a second — is what art ought to do."
His real lineage is the avant-garde, not the marquee postmodernists. "I come to writing from a pretty hard-core, abstract place. It comes out of technical philosophy and continental European theory, and extreme avant-garde shit. I'm not just talking Pynchon and Gaddis. That's commercial avant-garde. I'm talking like Beckett, and Fiction Collective 2, and Dalkey Archive." (Donahue notes he neglects to mention he studied philosophy at Harvard.)
The television confession. "I'm somebody who can't even own a TV anymore, because I'll just sit there slack-jawed and consume enormous amounts of what is, in terms of art, absolute shit. But it's very pleasurable shit." He locates the book in the tension between that pull and the abstract/avant-garde one: "The project, at least with this book, was to do something long and difficult that was also fun."
Writing as private exhibitionism; reading as intimacy. Writers are "weird hybrids... a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private." And on the reader: "When I was younger, I saw my relationship with the reader as sort of a sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off."
Fame sits uneasily. At 34 and "about as famous as serious writers get in this country before they've been dead for quite a while," Wallace seems "genuinely baffled": "I'm somebody who spends much of his life in libraries... I'm just not that interesting," and "The less I'm being watched, the more I can watch, and the better it is for me and for my work."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The aclimactic, non-resolving ending is deliberate design — the book is "supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project," a refusal of the reductive happy ending commercial fiction trains readers to expect, not a snub

Crux: designed-holes (advances); ending-missing-year (supports); reader-realization (mentions — the reader is left to "project" beyond the stop)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] "Plot-wise, the book doesn't come to a resolution. But if the readers perceive it as me giving them the finger, then I haven't done my job. On the surface, it might seem like it just stops. But it's supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project. Musically and emotionally, it's a pitch that seemed right."
- [author] The commercial-fiction foil: "some of that commercial stuff evidences a real contempt for the reader, by having such a reductive idea of what the reader wants. Like they're children and have to have their fantasies enabled and have a happy ending."
- [S] The review reads the ending the same way: the strains break off "just as that assault is about to take place, before any of the narrative strains has reached a resolution"; the "elaborate strangeness of these stories and their interruptus ending inevitably fuel suspicion that Infinite Jest is precisely that. And it is. But it isn't just a jest."
Notes: A publication-month author confirmation that the non-resolution is intentional and projective ("hum and project" — the pitch continues past the last page). Routes to the ending-design lane: designed-holes (the gap as constitutive design, not blockage) and ending-missing-year (the strains cut off short of resolution), with a light reader-realization mention (the reader supplies what the book projects). Kin to the archive's ending-camps and to the parabola/"read it twice" material; here in Wallace's own first-tour words.

THEORY: Infinite Jest was "designed more like a piece of music than like a book" — built of "leitmotifs and things that curve back" and "movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits" — and it is a "very careful mess," heavily worked to look artless

Crux: annular-structure (advances — the curve-back recursion and closed-form design)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] "It's really designed more like a piece of music than like a book, so a lot of it consists of leitmotifs and things that curve back. And there's all this stuff about movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not."
- [author] The mess is engineered: "It may be a mess, but it's a very careful mess.... A lot of work went into making it look like that. That might sound like a pathetic lie, but it's not." And: "the book doesn't work the way novels normally work."
- [S] The review corroborates the designed-untidiness: sentences "that span several pages," "three main plots and dozens of subplots that never quite come together," "for all its untidiness, which is part of the point".
Notes: The music / leitmotif / "curve back" design claim is the same-tour cousin of the Silverblatt fractal/Sierpinski-Gasket statement (April 1996) and of Miller's "everything that's in there is in there on purpose" (March 1996) — a cluster of publication-era self-descriptions of IJ's architecture. Routed to annular-structure on the recursion/closed-form ("things that curve back," "movement within limits"); the "music not book" framing may also touch prose-tempo-design.

CONNECTION: The novel enacts E Unibus Pluram's program — it forces the reader to notice "the strategies that regular entertainment uses" and has their "formulaic expectations" from "commercial stuff fucked with"; Wallace, who "can't even own a TV", aims to "seduce" the reader into hard work

Crux: eup-connection (supports)
Stance: supports
Evidence:
- [author] The reader-tasks: "being required to pay attention to some of the strategies that regular entertainment uses" and "having certain formulaic expectations that go along with reading commercial stuff fucked with. Not just disdained. Fucked with."
- [author] The seduce-into-work design goal: "I wanted to write something that would make somebody say, 'Holy, shit, I've got to read this,' and then seduce them into doing a certain amount of work. And that — if I can be pretentious for a second — is what art ought to do."
- [author] The television confession that grounds it: "I'm somebody who can't even own a TV anymore, because I'll just sit there slack-jawed and consume enormous amounts of what is, in terms of art, absolute shit. But it's very pleasurable shit."
Notes: A publication-era author statement of the anti-passive-entertainment / seduce-the-reader design — the executed program of "E Unibus Pluram." Consonant with Silverblatt (the avant-garde's forgotten job: seducing the reader into being willing to do the hard work — ASR-derived wording, paraphrase only) and with Wallace's own TV-as-pleasurable-poison confession. Logged eup-connection supports; a possible second route to entertainment-purpose is left open.

CONNECTION: The writer-reader relationship reframed as sincere intimacy — from "sexual" (when younger) to "a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off"; writing as "exhibitionism in private"

Crux: sincerity-definition (supports)
Stance: supports
Evidence:
- [author] "When I was younger, I saw my relationship with the reader as sort of a sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off."
- [author] The writer as "weird hybrid": "There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person."
Notes: A publication-month datum for the sincerity / anti-irony connection-with-the-reader register (masks-off honesty over knowing distance). Sits beside Miller's banal truths "can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't" and Silverblatt's conversation-between-human-beings framing. Logged sincerity-definition supports.

CONNECTION: Reception-era plot-and-apparatus description — the review names the samizdat film as fatally entertaining, tallies the endnote apparatus, and maps the three interrupted strains

Crux: entertainment-lethality (mentions); endnotes-function (mentions)
Stance: mentions
Evidence:
- [S] The film: one of James's unreleased films, Infinite Jest, "casts all who see it into a blissful but vegetative state that leads to death"; it is "prized as a potential political weapon" the Wheelchair Assassins hunt.
- [S] The apparatus: the book "has 388 endnotes and errata, many with their own endnotes and errata," and "contains sentences that span several pages".
- [S] The plot map: near-future Boston, ONAN, the "experialist" US annexing a mutagenic-dump northern New England, the Incandenzas, Ennet House / Gately, Madame Psychosis, the "legless anti-ONAN Québecois terrorists called the Wheelchair Assassins".
Notes: Reception-context description, not an interpretive intervention — logged as mentions of the two IJ-architecture points the review touches (the film's lethality; the endnote tally). The three IJ passages Donahue quotes or excerpts are IJ-via-press and are NOT folded as archive IJ quotes.

Themes

The designed mess (untidiness "part of the point"; "a very careful mess... A lot of work went into making it look like that"); the book as music (leitmotifs, "things that curve back," "movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits"); the aclimactic ending ("supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project"; the happy ending as "contempt for the reader"); addiction writ large (drugs, recovery, entertainment, and competitive sport as the same distracting/numbing function); the seduced reader (attention to "the strategies that regular entertainment uses"; formulaic expectations "fucked with"; "seduce them into doing a certain amount of work"); television as pleasurable poison ("slack-jawed... absolute shit... very pleasurable shit"; can't own a TV); the avant-garde lineage (Beckett, Fiction Collective 2, Dalkey Archive over the "commercial avant-garde" of Pynchon and Gaddis; technical philosophy and continental theory); writing as private exhibitionism and reading as masks-off intimacy; and fame-baffled reticence (he calls himself "somebody who spends much of his life in libraries" and says "I'm just not that interesting"; "[t]he less I'm being watched, the more I can watch").

Cross-references

wbur-connection-1996-lydon — the Lydon / The Connection taping this interview dates and places (Copley Plaza, same tour day: "shortly after doing Christopher Lydon's radio show and before heading out for a reading"). The two are the same Feb-1996 Boston tour stop; Donahue captures the print-side quotes, Lydon the on-air hour.
silverblatt-bookworm-1996 — the same-tour design self-descriptions in a different metaphor: Silverblatt's fractal / Sierpinski-Gasket to Donahue's "piece of music... leitmotifs and things that curve back"; both carry the seduce-the-reader-into-hard-work claim and the careful-not-sloppy insistence.
miller-1996-salon-interview — the companion March-1996 interview; complementary emphasis (Miller gets the sad-book intent, the cuts, "everything that's in there is in there on purpose"; Donahue gets the music/ending/avant-garde-lineage material).
nyt-magazine-bruni-1996 — the other publication-month profile; strong overlap on the TV-as-narcotic self-report (Bruni's Baywatch / Love Boat "soothing, like a narcotic" beside Donahue's "slack-jawed... very pleasurable shit") and on fame-ambivalence.
the-ending / annularity — the ending-camps and the ring/closed-form design Wallace's "hum and project" and "things that curve back" bear on.

Notable passages

Verbatim from Wallace's interview, rendered in straight type; the scan's mechanical damage (a column artifact that turns capital I into a bar) is restored in these passages.

It may be a mess, but it's a very careful mess.... A lot of work went into making it look like that. That might sound like a pathetic lie, but it's not.

It's really designed more like a piece of music than like a book, so a lot of it consists of leitmotifs and things that curve back. And there's all this stuff about movement within limits and whether you can puncture the limits or not.

On the surface, it might seem like it just stops. But it's supposed to stop and then kind of hum and project. Musically and emotionally, it's a pitch that seemed right.

I'm not just talking Pynchon and Gaddis. That's commercial avant-garde. I'm talking like Beckett, and Fiction Collective 2, and Dalkey Archive.

I'm somebody who can't even own a TV anymore, because I'll just sit there slack-jawed and consume enormous amounts of what is, in terms of art, absolute shit. But it's very pleasurable shit.

When I was younger, I saw my relationship with the reader as sort of a sexual one. But now it seems more like a late-night conversation with really good friends, when the bullshit stops and the masks come off.

Accuracy notes

The review carries a few small errors about the novel that could mislead a reader:

Avril Incandenza is called "a scientist and grammatical activist". In the novel she is an academic administrator (Dean of Academic Affairs at the tennis academy) and a militant grammarian, not a scientist.
The halfway house is spelled "Ennett House" throughout; the novel's is "Ennet House" (one t).
Madame Psychosis's face is said to have been "disfigured by acid" as settled fact. The novel leaves her disfigurement deliberately uncertain — the acid account is one version among competing ones, and the veil-wearing organization she joins covers the improbably beautiful as well as the deformed.