The Grunge American Novel (Frank Bruni, The New York Times Magazine, Mar 24 1996)

TL;DR (plain-language summary)

Frank Bruni's March 1996 New York Times Magazine profile, published the same month as Infinite Jest and written from the launch of the book tour, is the definitive contemporary account of the novel's arrival as a cultural event: the K.G.B.-bar reading, the "it boy of contemporary fiction" framing, the critics' rapture (Kirn, Birkerts, Blythe, Kakutani all quoted), and the engineered publicity campaign that Little, Brown built around the book's sheer size. Its lasting value is documentary rather than interpretive — it captures Wallace's ambivalence about sudden fame in real time (the no-network-TV pledge, "I'm real greedy about respect," the flight into daydreamed museums at his 12th photo shoot) and preserves two data points that bear directly on the novel: the report that he was asked to cut about 300 pages from his draft, and his own confession of a taste for anesthetic television (Baywatch, The Love Boat) "soothing, like a narcotic." Heavily cited in later Wallace scholarship as the origin document of the "young-genius" reception. Not in Burn's anthology.

Key claims

• The profile opens on Wallace's dread the night he launched a ten-city tour with a reading at the K.G.B. bar in downtown Manhattan, before roughly 125 people; he read three passages (a bungled burglary, a fitness guru, near-future video telephones) and won sustained applause. Bruni casts the taxi ride there as a dividing line "between modest literary recognition and immodest literary fame."
• Bruni positions Wallace as the era's literary Wunderkind — "the first young novelist in several years to pique such intense curiosity" — in a lineage from Mailer through the 1980s Brat Pack (McInerney, Ellis, Janowitz), and shows his contemporaries turning out in force (Wurtzel and Hawke at readings, A.M. Homes at the book party).
• The critical reception is compiled at length: Walter Kirn in New York magazine ("Next year's book awards have been decided"; "The plaques and citations can now be put in escrow."), Sven Birkerts in The Atlantic, Will Blythe in Esquire ("it shows signs, in fact, of being a genuine work of genius."), and Michiko Kakutani in The Times — reported as "highly dubious" but nonetheless anointing Wallace "a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything."
• Compositional datum: editor Michael Pietsch paid an estimated $90,000 for the book as a work in progress; Little, Brown then turned the length into the campaign. Bruni reports that although Wallace was "asked to cut about 300 pages from his initial draft, he was still allowed to exceed 1,000 pages," which set the $30 price.
• Marketing datum: the publicity department mailed 4,000 booksellers, industry insiders, and media contacts a staggered set of six cryptic postcards promising "infinite pleasure" with "infinite style," then three more carrying author and critic blurbs; Bruni renders marketing head Amy Rhodes's strategy as "a kind of dare: are you reader enough for this book?"
• Bruni's own plot précis (useful as a period reading of the novel): it centers on "the three Incandenza brothers -- a promiscuous football punter, a brainy tennis prodigy and a dwarf" under the shadow of their suicide father, with "a band of terrorists in wheelchairs" hunting a movie "so entertaining it puts anyone who watches it into a permanent, blissed-out stupor", and Don Gately far below; he calls the book best read "with a dictionary and maybe even a pharmacology textbook at hand" and notes "the 96 pages of footnotes."
• On fame and privacy, Wallace: he refuses network television not from integrity but because "I feel I'm going to turn off exactly the people whose approval I'm most hungry for"; he is "not greedy about money" but "real greedy about respect"; he nixes both Charlie Rose and Today.
• Biographical material Bruni gathers (some of it flagged by him as contested): the tennis-playing Urbana childhood; the Amherst philosophy major and the professor who called him a genius ("It was the happiest moment in my life"); the late-1980s period of heavy drinking, drugs, and a psychiatric stay that Wallace narrates vaguely and that friends recall differently; the tattoo of Mary Karr's name; the churchgoing and the Poags.
• On television as anesthesia, Wallace defends watching Baywatch and The Love Boat: "it was soothing, like a narcotic. You knew all problems would be resolved in 15 minutes and many lush platitudes would be exchanged."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Little, Brown asked Wallace to cut about 300 pages from his initial draft of Infinite Jest, though the finished book still exceeded 1,000 pages

• Crux: ij-cuts
• Stance: mentions
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] Bruni, reporting the publisher's account: Wallace was "asked to cut about 300 pages from his initial draft, he was still allowed to exceed 1,000 pages," a length Little, Brown then marketed as importance.
• Notes — against the record: the archive's composition-history record rules the "300–500 pages cut" story a myth and stresses instead what was added after 1993. Recorded cite-as-written, this March-1996 profile is one of the earliest period sightings of the 300-page figure in the wild, and it sits on the publisher/marketing side — Bruni reports the figure inside Little, Brown's length-as-importance account (the cut requested, the allowance to still exceed 1,000 pages, the $30 price), distinct from the 400-pages-range figure Wallace himself was already giving on the same publicity circuit (on Boston radio in late February 1996, a month before this profile ran). It corroborates that a substantial cut was requested, not the myth's larger arithmetic.

CONNECTION: Wallace's own taste for anesthetic television — Baywatch and The Love Boat as "soothing, like a narcotic" — is the private-citizen version of the pleasure-anesthesia the Entertainment weaponizes

• Crux: entertainment-lethality (also bears on eup-connection)
• Early text: n/a (interview) — "it was soothing, like a narcotic. You knew all problems would be resolved in 15 minutes and many lush platitudes would be exchanged." [on why he watched The Love Boat]
• IJ echo: the samizdat's fatal comfort and the E Unibus Pluram diagnosis of television as sedation; Wallace confessing the pull of resolution-in-15-minutes TV is the felt, first-person basis for the novel's lethal cartridge and its vision of entertainment as narcotic.
• Weight: shared-preoccupation
• Notes: kept as CONNECTION, not THEORY — Wallace frames the habit as an aesthetic one ("There are very complicated esthetic reasons why I watch it") about his own viewing, not as a claim about what Infinite Jest is doing. The load-bearing step to the samizdat is the reader's, not his.

Themes

Fame and the literary marketplace (the "it boy" apparatus, the six-postcard buzz campaign, the length-as-importance dare, the $90,000 advance); television and entertainment (TV as narcotic sedation, the no-network-TV pledge); persona and privacy (respect over money, the flight into daydream at the photo shoots, the Midwestern seclusion); communication and solitude (Franzen on the writer's personality that "corresponds to that solitude"); composition and reception (the requested cut, the footnotes, the marketed heft).

Cross-references

• wiley-minnesota-daily-1997 — the closest companion from the same publicity window: Wiley (Feb 1997) gives Wallace's own account that much of the wire-head material got cut, where Bruni gives the publisher-side "about 300 pages" figure; together they show the cuts story from author and marketing angles.
• dfw-last-interview-expanded — Stivers 1996's endnote-cut numbers and Streitfeld's "we kept cutting and cutting" are the same compositional thread; Bruni is the reception-side sighting of the figure.
• moore-first-draft-ij — the archival counter-account (only ~40 pages cut against 200+ added after 1993) that Bruni's "300 pages" report predates and helps date as an early form of the cut-legend.
• word-ezine-1996-chat and miller-1996-salon-interview — the other spring-1996 launch-window sources; Bruni is the reported profile against their interview transcripts.
• burn-conversations-with-dfw — this profile is not among the 22 pieces Burn collected, despite being one of the most-cited documents of the launch window.
• Characters/scenes: the Entertainment / JOI's film (Bruni's "blissed-out stupor" plot gloss); the three Incandenza brothers; the near-future videophone reading passage.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the archived profile. Locators are 1-indexed line numbers in nyt-sunday-magazine-1996.txt (see the note on the scheme below). Where a span is a direct DFW quotation it is marked (DFW); otherwise it is Bruni's prose or a critic he quotes.

• (DFW) "Somebody took my saliva, because I don't have it." [L26]
• (DFW) "I keep getting the feeling that all of this is about some initial surge of excitement, and now it's created excitement about the excitement" [L108-110]
• (DFW) "When I won't do things like appear on network television, it's not because I have a lot of integrity" [L130-131]
• (DFW) "I feel I'm going to turn off exactly the people whose approval I'm most hungry for." [L132-133]
• (DFW) "I'm real greedy about respect." [L134]
• (DFW) "It was the happiest moment in my life. I felt like I would never have to go to the bathroom again" [on being called a genius at Amherst] [L208-209]
• (DFW) "I'm massively selfish about my work, and I don't seem to be able to be very polite or considerate about other people's feelings" [L239-241]
• (DFW) "it was soothing, like a narcotic. You knew all problems would be resolved in 15 minutes and many lush platitudes would be exchanged." [L252-253]
• (DFW) "I have actually gotten to revisit, in my head, all the museums I've ever gone to." [on his 12th photo shoot] [L265-266]
• (Bruni) "asked to cut about 300 pages from his initial draft, he was still allowed to exceed 1,000 pages" [L163-164]
• (Bruni, on the Entertainment) "said to be so entertaining it puts anyone who watches it into a permanent, blissed-out stupor" [L66-67]
• (Bruni) "the first young novelist in several years to pique such intense curiosity." [L55-56]
• (Bruni, voicing Little, Brown's marketing dare) "are you reader enough for this book?" [L168]
• (Kirn) "Next year's book awards have been decided" / "The plaques and citations can now be put in escrow." [L79-81]
• (Blythe) "it shows signs, in fact, of being a genuine work of genius." [L84-85]
• (Kakutani) "a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything." [L87-88]
• (Franzen) "You tend to develop the personality that corresponds to that solitude" [L119-120]