IJ study archive

Inside The New York Times Book Review: 'Infinite Jest' at 20 (Pietsch + Bissell)

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TL;DR

February 2016 NYT Book Review podcast for the 20th-anniversary edition: ~15 minutes each with Michael Pietsch (editor, then Hachette CEO) and Tom Bissell (who wrote the new foreword). Pietsch retells the acquisition/editing story with several specifics beyond our Infinite Summer note; Bissell supplies the "first great internet novel" framing and a personal addiction angle. Only the first half of the 47-minute episode is IJ (the rest is Amazon-bookstores news and an unrelated author). Auto-captions; paraphrase only.

Key claims — Pietsch (~min 2-20)

(Podcast speech is paraphrase throughout; short coinages stand.)

  • Acquisition: Bonnie Nadell sent stories from obscure magazines, then roughly the first 150 manuscript pages — assorted starts and pieces; a very small set of editors competed, in the end effectively Little, Brown against one other house (~min 5-7).
  • The brief Wallace gave him: shorten the book as far as it would go while it stayed itself — and Wallace had felt his past editorial relationships went badly because he was too dismissive (~min 7).
  • Elevator pitch: an extremely funny novel whose people are in great pain; explicitly not science fiction — the near-future as license to make fun of the world as it stands (~min 8-10).
  • Endnotes vs. footnotes was a real layout debate: at the foot of the page they made the book read like a scary textbook; endnotes kept the page approachable; ultimately Wallace's call (~min 11).
  • Editing on partials: all he could flag was where he was confused or slowed ("this section feels like a wall") vs. racing; Wallace's responses ran the range from flat refusal — no persuasion on the planet would change a passage — to the deadpan capitulation Pietsch still quotes: told to cut an early chapter, Wallace inventoried what it carried — three major characters, five central themes — and then agreed anyway (~min 12-14).
  • Marathe/Steeply fix (~min 14-15): the mountainside material originally featured a character faking a bad French accent; Wallace realized the extra layer was unperceivable and made it simply a heavy accent — a concrete example of his sanding readability problems himself.
  • The videophony save (~min 15-16): Pietsch recommended cutting the videophony rise-and-fall as detachable; Wallace's reply — that Pietsch was out of his mind, the passage killed read aloud, and the book needed its set pieces. Pietsch now calls it one of the first things people cite.
  • Marketing: the challenge was making the length an asset — a campaign that in effect dared the buyer: are you reader enough? (~min 18-19).
  • The first-chapter clue (~min 16-17): asked if Wallace knew the ending, Pietsch deflects to the McGuffin while noting the very first chapter carries a line about it, before any of the characters have even been met — i.e. the editor reads the p. 17 graveyard memory as the planted key. Also: he's rereading from page one for the anniversary and hadn't read it entire since Wallace died (~min 19-20).
  • A Supposedly Fun Thing pitched as IJ's companion: both books, in his pairing, treat pleasure taken past its limit and the sadness on the far side (~min 16).

Key claims — Bissell (~min 20-30)

  • Met Wallace via Franzen over chewing tobacco; their quitting conversations map almost one-to-one, he says, onto IJ's addiction passages — addiction as a hijacking of every decision-making motor in the head, quitting as requiring a "spiritual breakthrough," which he says he learned from Wallace/IJ (~min 21-23).
  • Structure: three (really four) driving storylines that decline the payoff a traditional novel would deliver — the ending sits back in the first ten pages as a one-sentence mention the reader must loop back for; a book that critiques entertainment couldn't allow itself to be propulsively entertaining, hence the deliberate roadblocks (~min 23-25).
  • "The first great internet novel" (~min 25-26): written pre-web, but the Entertainment is the analog of Netflix, 60-hour games, social-media refresh — predictive in a spiritual rather than one-to-one way.
  • The funny litmus test: anyone who read it unamused is, he insists, either lying or humorless (~min 25).
  • Post-suicide rereading: the Kate Gompert nausea-of-depression scene made him put the book down, wondering how autobiographical it was; Wallace's perceptiveness was his great blessing as a writer, and also what made being David Foster Wallace so hard (~min 27-28).
  • What lasts: the sentences and the empathy for fictional people — placing Wallace with Eliot/Austen/Melville/Bellow/Robinson on those two axes (~min 29-30).

Themes

addiction-recovery (Bissell's tobacco mapping), entertainment-self (internet-novel framing), depression-anhedonia (Gompert), structure (endnotes, editing).

Cross-references