The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace's struggle to surpass "Infinite Jest"

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TL;DR

D.T. Max's posthumous New Yorker profile (seed of his 2012 biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story), built on Wallace's letters to Franzen, Nadell, Howard, and Pietsch. For IJ purposes it's the best single account of the novel's biographical genesis (McLean, Nardil, the Brighton halfway house) and its construction (the 400k-word 1993 submission, the endnotes pitch, Gately's takeover of the book, the deliberate non-resolution of the ending).

Key claims

Biographical genesis: after a breakdown, Wallace was prescribed Nardil at McLean (1989) and discharged to a halfway house in Brighton, Boston — the direct model for Ennet House. There he found that "less intellectual people were often better at dealing with life" and that catchphrases like "One day at a time" genuinely worked, to his surprise. He picked up stories at treatment sessions ("part of their therapy was to talk").
He repudiated his earlier work as driven by a "basically vapid urge to be avant-garde and post structural and linguistically calisthenic" (letter to Franzen, 1990) — and feared that this might be his "root motive and character".
Mission statement in a letter to Pietsch during IJ: "I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff."
Genesis of the plot: Hal Incandenza bridged "two worlds Wallace knew well" (pot addiction, competitive tennis); James Incandenza's lethal film and the Québécois separatists seeking it as a terror weapon framed the warning-against-addiction structure. Madame Psychosis/Joelle was partly inspired by Mary Karr (Max's later biography records that Wallace dedicated the essay E Unibus Pluram to M. M. Karr).
Construction timeline: writing daily by March 1991 ("the Project"); 200 pages to Gerald Howard by May 1992; Pietsch outbid Howard ($80k): "I want to do this book more than I want to breathe." Spring 1993: first two-thirds submitted — ~400,000 words. Total delivered: 1,700 pages, several hundred cut; Wallace learned to delete passages from his hard drive so he couldn't restore them.
The endnotes were invented to manage length (pitched to Pietsch April 1994) as "allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story," a way to "mimic the information-flood and data-triage" of future US life, and a means to make the reader "go literally physically 'back and forth' in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story's thematic concerns . . ." He vowed to "fight w/all 20 claws to preserve" them; Pietsch counter-offered footnotes and lost. Wallace: "I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems... the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted."
Gately's takeover: the book began centered on Hal but shifted to Gately as it grew; Pietsch "had not expected Gately to assume such a dominant role." Wallace wrote Gately's final hospital reverie quickly and with rare joy ("couldn't feel my ass in the chair"). Max: "Gately is the first character whose distress seems to touch Wallace"; through Gately IJ "offered readers an oblique form of counsel".
The ending was deliberate: to Pietsch's worry that readers would feel entitled to "find out who or how or why," Wallace replied: "We know exactly what's happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what's happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin. I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural argument for this, but let's spare one another, shall we?" — primary authorial evidence for any ending theory. (cite-as-written cross-flag — transmission variance vs infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij: this note (via Max) carries "argument" SINGULAR, inside one continuous Wallace reply that also contains the Gately sentence; infinite-summer (via Pietsch) carries it PLURAL ("arguments") as p. 785ff marginalia — recorded, not adjudicated)
Aftermath: IJ "quickly became a totem for young people"; Wallace himself had mixed feelings ("I don't think it's very good" to Franzen) and came to see his maximalism as "arch and arid," leading to the decade-long struggle with the "Long Thing" (The Pale King), whose boredom/attention thesis inverts IJ's entertainment thesis.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (the lived substrate of Ennet House); entertainment (the samizdat's genesis as warning); communication (storytelling as therapy — "So yo then man what's your story?"); construction/form (endnotes, length, editing); the ending; depression and suicide (Wallace's own, and the novel's Kate Gompert material).

Cross-references

Quotes extensively from the McCaffery interview (dating it 1991) and the Salon interview.
This Is Water: quoted as the bridge from IJ to The Pale King's attention/boredom thesis.
Lipsky reference note: complementary primary source from the same week IJ tour ended.
IJ connections: Ennet House/Granada House; Gately's hospital-bed endurance ("He could do the dextral pain"); Hal's Year-of-Glad E.R. frame; Joelle/ Madame Psychosis; endnotes as "almost like having a second voice in your head" (Wallace's own gloss on why he liked them — inviting the wraith comparison); ending theories (supports reading the ending as convergence-by-design — cf. the Aaron Swartz piece archived at [local source]).

Notable passages

"His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life... Good writing should help readers to 'become less alone inside.'"
Wallace to Pietsch: "I want to author things that both restructure worlds and make living people feel stuff."
Wallace on the ending, to Pietsch: "We know exactly what's happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what's happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin."
Pietsch on the manuscript: "It's a novel made up out of shards, almost as if the story were something broken that someone is picking up the pieces of."
Wallace to Nadell, from the halfway house: "I will be a fiction writer again or die trying."