The infinite jester: Author David Foster Wallace's unique brand of humor a mixed blessing (Mitch Pugh, Copley News Service)

source

TL;DR (plain-language summary)

A June 1999 syndicated feature (with a signed sidebar) tied to the release of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. It is an other-book profile and advances no Infinite Jest interpretive theory — its value is biographical and compositional. Infinite Jest appears only as the over-attended prior book Wallace is now embarrassed by ("pimple on a flea"; "our standards of what an event is has been drastically altered by TV"), and as the occasion of the Frank Bruni medicine-cabinet incident that made him bar journalists from his home. The genuinely useful material is about Brief Interviews: Wallace explains that Neil LaBute's films led him to cut "10 or 11 of the interviews", names the unseen female interviewer as the book's "main character," and reacts to Michiko Kakutani's pan. Not in Burn's anthology.

Key claims

Wallace disassociates from the Infinite Jest attention: literary weirdos have small, fanatical followings, and "There are at least a dozen writers about my age who do the sort of stuff I do" — he is "just lucky enough to get a major publishing house to pick up the stuff I do and plug it mercilessly." [L59-63]
He describes his fan base as "almost all nerdy white males between 30 and 45" [L64].
He downplays Infinite Jest as a literary "event": it was "pimple on a flea," and "our standards of what an event is has been drastically altered by TV." [L86-97]
The Frank Bruni privacy incident: after Bruni "peeked into his medicine cabinet and reported the contents in a New York Times Magazine piece", Wallace began barring journalists from his home — he had "invited the guy over to my house to meet my dogs and stuff", the reporter asked to use the bathroom, and "It's just creepy." [L75-85]
Composition of Brief Interviews (the load-bearing oeuvre datum): seeing Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men and Your Friends & Neighbors made Wallace rethink a book "made up almost entirely of interviews"; some were "repetitive," some "too brutal," and "I ended up taking 10 or 11 of the interviews out and regarded it as a very helpful movie for me to see." [L110-120]
He names the unseen interviewer (the "Q.") as "the main character of the book," someone "extremely sensitive to misogyny in all its forms" [L139-143].
On reception: he has stopped reading reviews; on Kakutani's pan, "Michiko Kakutani stomped on it with golf shoes except I knew she was going to stomp on it with golf shoes," and he calls her dislikable-characters objection "a bit vapid." [L130-138]

Themes

Fame and privacy (the Infinite Jest over-attention Wallace recoils from; the Bruni medicine-cabinet breach; barring journalists); composition (the LaBute-prompted cutting of Brief Interviews; the unseen interviewer as its center); reception and criticism (Kakutani; the "mixed blessing" of Wallace's humor); entertainment / media (book-events rescaled by television — an E Unibus Pluram echo, though applied to publicity, not to the novel).

Cross-references

oregon-voice-1998 — the same recoil from literary celebrity ("weatherman"-scale fame there; "pimple on a flea" here); read together they are Wallace's steadiest 1998-99 refrain that book-fame is trivial next to television's scale.
The Frank Bruni NYT Sunday Magazine profile (March 1996) — the medicine-cabinet incident Wallace describes here is the aftermath of that profile; the two belong together.
wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — Wiley too logs Wallace's discomfort with the Pynchon/Joyce "event" comparisons; the book-as-event skepticism here extends that.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (oeuvre) — the LaBute-cut testimony and the "main character is the interviewer" reading are primary composition data for that book, adjacent to Infinite Jest rather than internal to it.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the archived feature. Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in chicago-pugh-infinite-jester-1999.txt.

"There are at least a dozen writers about my age who do the sort of stuff I do." [L61-62]
"almost all nerdy white males between 30 and 45" [L64]
"our standards of what an event is has been drastically altered by TV" [L92-93]
"after writer Frank Bruni peeked into his medicine cabinet and reported the contents in a New York Times Magazine piece" [L77-78]
"He asked to use the bathroom and I didn't think twice about it. It's just creepy." [L81]
"I ended up taking 10 or 11 of the interviews out and regarded it as a very helpful movie for me to see." [L117-118]
"She, to me, is the main character of the book" [L142-143]
"Michiko Kakutani stomped on it with golf shoes except I knew she was going to stomp on it with golf shoes" [L134-135]