The Salon Interview: David Foster Wallace

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TL;DR

DFW interviewed on the IJ publicity tour, weeks after publication — his most direct statements of what the book was for: "I wanted to do something sad," about a specifically American "stomach-level sadness" / "lostness," with AA as the starkest available response to it. Also key construction facts (1,700-page manuscript, ~500 pages cut, "everything that's in there is in there on purpose") and the tennis-academy/halfway-house mirror as two faces of addiction.

Key claims

Stated intent: "I wanted to do something sad... And I wanted it not to have a single main character... something real American, about what it's like to live in America around the millennium."
The sadness diagnosis: not economic or circumstantial — "a stomach-level sadness... a kind of lostness," afflicting the privileged and well-educated; his friends played it out as drugs, workaholism, singles bars: "20 different ways, but it's the same thing." This is the novel's unifying affect (Hal's anhedonia, Kate Gompert, the Ennet House residents).
AA's role: he didn't set out to write AA, but attended meetings with friends and found them "tremendously powerful." The Ennet House material is "supposed to stand for a response to lostness and what you do when the things you thought were going to make you OK, don't."
The cliché engine: educated characters (and DFW) feel "real repulsion" at slogans like "One Day at a Time," yet "Something as banal and reductive... enabled these people to walk through hell, which from what I could see the first six months of detox is." Banal truths "can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't... something our generation needs to feel." Direct enactment of E Unibus Pluram's single-entendre-values program.
Fiction's magic, restated: existential loneliness is the baseline; great fiction gives "brief flashes" of "Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do... I feel human and unalone".
Two contempt-for-the-reader pitfalls: avant-garde writing for other writers vs. "television on the page"; both blame the reader for fiction's marginalization. The worthwhile project: avant-garde difficulty that is "also pleasurable to read," where "The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses."
On the tennis academy: "I wanted to do something with sport and the idea of dedication to a pursuit being kind of like an addiction" — competitive achievement as "a very American illness," giving yourself away to a goal that's really about how others feel about you (cf. LaMont Chu and Lyle on fame-envy; Schtitt's pedagogy).
Construction facts: delivered MS was 1,700 pages, close to 500 cut; Pietsch line-edited it twice; "If it looks chaotic, good, but everything that's in there is in there on purpose." Claims a good-faith attempt "to be fun and riveting enough on a page-by-page level so I don't feel like I'm hitting the reader with a mallet, you know, 'Hey, here's this really hard impossibly smart thing. Fuck you. See if you can read it.'"
Self-positioning: "I've always thought of myself as a realist" — pop saturation and 250 ads a day are simply "the texture of the world I live in," the modern equivalent of trees and rivers.

Themes

Addiction (substances, achievement, entertainment — explicitly equated); entertainment/irony (fiction staking out territory against slick mass entertainment); communication/solipsism (feeling "unalone" as fiction's payoff); AA/sincerity vs. educated irony; tennis-as-addiction.

Cross-references

McCaffery interview: pre-publication program of which this is the post-publication report; same loneliness-and-fiction argument in plainer dress.
E Unibus Pluram: the "two pitfalls" and entertainment-competition argument applied to IJ itself.
The Unfinished: D.T. Max quotes this interview's "lostness" and "put away childish things" lines and confirms the biographical substrate (Wallace's own halfway-house stay at Granada House).
IJ connections: Ennet House and the AA-cliché pedagogy (Gately's "Abide"); ETA as the mirror institution; Hal/Erdedy/Gompert as variants of lostness; the endnote/length debate (see also Pietsch correspondence cited in The Unfinished).

Notable passages

"I wanted to do something sad."
"It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness."
"The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting... can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important."
"I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art."
"If it looks chaotic, good, but everything that's in there is in there on purpose."