IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 18: Sean Pratt — narrating the Infinite Jest audiobook (56 hours, the endnotes controversy, and tempo as design)

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TL;DR

The voice of the Infinite Jest audiobook (Hachette, 56 finished hours) walks the hosts through the entire production history: the ~2008–09 approach by producer John McElroy, the nine-month greenlight wait, the year of recording (a week at a time, spaced six-to-eight weeks apart), and — the episode's centerpiece — the endnotes saga: omitted "from higher up," released to fan fury and one-star Audible reviews, then recorded after all as a standalone file, a reversal Bucher attributes on-air to Nick Maniatis's advance review. Datable to ~June 2016 (the Wallace conference "last weekend," ep. 17's conference guests, an upcoming Suicide Squad named as the next big-tent release). Near-zero interpretive-theory yield, but the archive's only performance-medium source: what IJ's paratext (endnote loops, chapter glyphs, abbreviations) survives translation out of print, and a narrator's close reading of Wallace's scene-level tempo engineering. ASR transcript: paraphrase only.

Key claims

  • Genesis and logistics: McElroy called Pratt out of the blue ~2008–09 (Grover Gardner's referral); nine months to a Hachette greenlight, three more before recording; the text arrived as a 2,000+-page loose-leaf 8.5×11 printout. Recording ran one week in every six-to-eight for a full year — unlike his normal one-book-a-week cadence. At his estimated 3:1 work-to-finished ratio, ~180 booth hours for 56 finished hours. [00:16–00:20]
  • Not his longest book: a five-volume history of California ran 150 hours and a two-volume Lincoln biography 110 — but IJ is "still the hardest book I've ever narrated," and the most rewarding. [00:01, 00:18]
  • The French was the worst of it: he can't speak French; every French phrase took at least five takes; he apologizes on-air to francophones. The Québécois material was the single biggest pronunciation burden. [00:14–00:15, 00:48]
  • Adaptation rules: no audiobook is strictly unabridged (tables of contents and acknowledgements are never read); text changes are governed by two touchstones, author intention and listener comprehension. For IJ's abbreviations his ~90% solution was expansion — "H.H." read as "Headmaster's House" — because an unglossed initialism ejects the listener. [00:29–00:31]
  • The chapter glyphs are simply gone: the shadowed-circle symbols heading some chapters were stripped from his script before he ever got it — "there's nothing I can do that would verbalize a symbol." Audiobook listeners receive zero signal of the novel's chapter divisions. [00:31–00:32]
  • The endnotes saga (the episode's production-history core): the omission decision came "from higher up" with Pratt's agreement — the original plan was main text plus a PDF download of the notes; the filmography (n. 24) alone runs about an hour read aloud, and there is no player technology for bouncing between files. Release was followed by roughly two months of "gnashing of teeth" and harsh Audible reviews, then McElroy's you-won't-believe-this call: Hachette would record the endnotes after all — as a standalone recording, still not interleavable. [00:35–00:41]
  • Bucher's attribution: Nick Maniatis got (he believes) the only advance copy, reviewed it at the Howling Fantods as "I cannot recommend this to my fans," and traded enough correspondence with Hachette/Little, Brown to push them over the edge into recording the notes. [00:42–00:43]
  • Wallace as self-narrator: Pratt and the hosts agree authors are usually poor narrators of their own work (his Tom Robbins-in-Central-Park anecdote); Wallace's own audiobooks (Brief Interviews, Consider the Lobster) were abridged, and CTL's producers handled footnotes by shifting Wallace's voice to a tinny filter with spoken "now we're back" cues — exactly the disruption, Pratt says, that integrating IJ's endnotes would have inflicted at scale. [00:28–00:29, 00:49–00:50]
  • Voice method: a three-tier system — textual descriptors first; then a borrowed voice (one of the Arizona admissions deans in the opening scene is his Ronald Reagan voice); then, for crowds, one affectation per speaker. Unattributed multi-speaker dialogue was built line by line with punch-and-roll — the rec-room scene of Hal watching a cartridge when the girls come in was assembled literally line by line, never performed "live." [00:53–00:59]
  • The blood sister endnote: his favorite endnote to record ("Blood Sister: One Tough Nun"); the page-long single sentence in the mother-superior fight took about an hour to get the rhythm of. He also cites the getting-to-know-you montage as pitch-perfect film cliché. [00:43–00:46]
  • Favorite-scene inventory: young JOI with his progressively drunker father; Schtitt's freezing early-morning pain talk; Poor Tony detoxing in the library and seizing on the subway; yrstruly's "ricky-ticked the fuck out of there" (Laird's favorite delivery in the whole recording); his observation that the book's length lets every character get "one really damn good extended scene." [00:46–00:47, 01:09]
  • Aftermath: he has listened to the full recording twice — rare for him — and is proud of it; compares the project's unforeseen iconic weight to Patrick Stewart signing onto Star Trek. Some sections he still wishes he could re-take for tempo. [00:48, 01:05, 01:10]
  • Scholarly hook: Ryan Marnane (Rhode Island) had just presented at the Wallace conference on the audiobook's place in the Wallace archive and supplied questions for this interview. [01:14]
  • Color: ~900 books narrated by that Christmas; earlier career as Lloyd James; classical-theater background (Pearl Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre); hosts flag the Csikszentmihalyi flow tangent — a name that appears in IJ — and the Pale King resonance of narration-booth boredom discipline. [00:08, 00:13, 01:01]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: IJ's scene-level prose is engineered for tempo — the Erdedy opening is a designed zero-to-full accelerando, and the Lentz/Gately sequence is a converging fast/slow crosscut

  • Crux: prose-tempo-design
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The Erdedy scene starts near-motionless ("where was the woman who said she'd come," ASR paraphrase) and accelerates continuously over ~25 minutes until door and phone ring simultaneously — the tempo peak. [00:20–00:22]
    • [text] The bug-in-the-wall paragraphs function as clutch-presses: moments of respite after which the read resumes one gear faster. [00:21]
    • [text] The Lentz cocaine-jag/dog-killing scene runs ever faster while the intercut Gately car-moving scene at Ennet House drags ever slower, the two tempos colliding when the Canadians arrive. [00:22–00:23]
    • [inference] Cocaine-jag speech in life accelerates the same way; the text's speed mirrors the character's internal state, so the design is "in the text if you look carefully." [01:08]
  • Notes: A performer's-craft argument: he built the read line-by-line to realize the acceleration and uses the Erdedy scene as a timed teaching exercise (students must land it between 17:30 and 18:30). Offered as Wallace's deliberate design ("he helps you... as a writer"), not as his own imposition.

THEORY: The endnotes are an essential, deliberately disruptive part of the text — not optional apparatus

  • Crux: endnotes-function
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Hosts (advancing): you cannot read the book without the endnotes; they are an essential part of the text, so their omission was a genuine loss, not a trim. [00:38]
    • [inference] Pratt (conceding the point while defending the cut): the disruptive back-and-forth "was one of his styles... part of who he was as a writer" — but an audiobook is "a different animal," and the endnotes were a no-win problem in that medium. [00:41–00:42, 00:50]
    • [secondary] Maniatis's cannot-recommend review, cited as the fan consensus that the notes are non-negotiable. [00:42–00:43]
  • Notes: The interpretive claim (endnotes as designed disruption) is uncontested on-air; the disagreement is entirely about what the audiobook medium can carry. Pratt's stated first law — an audiobook must be entertaining first, aimed at the casual listener, not the hardcore fan — is the value framework behind the omission. [00:50–00:52]

Themes

Entertainment-and-the-self (an adaptation of the novel about lethal Entertainment explicitly governed by "entertaining first"; the Erdedy/Lentz/Poor Tony scenes he singles out are all addiction scenes); structure-and-design (tempo engineering; the chapter glyphs' erasure; endnotes as designed disruption); communication (page vs. voice; what a performance adds that an author's own reading lacks); addiction-and-recovery (his own account of narration flow as addictive).

Cross-references

Advances