Infinite Jest Editor Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown on David Foster Wallace — New York Observer

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TL;DR

Leon Neyfakh's New York Observer profile of Michael Pietsch, filed September 19, 2008 — a week after Wallace's death the previous Friday — reached the editor while he was traveling and got a handful of personal memories. It advances no interpretive theory about the novel; its value is biographical and acquisition-history: the Observer's framing of how Infinite Jest came to Little, Brown (via agent Bonnie Nadell's decision to submit widely after Wallace's first two books went to Gerry Howard), and Pietsch's first-person recollections of Wallace as acutely uncomfortable with success and self-promotion, playful with children (the "Worm Tag" cookout), and pointedly insulated from reviews. One acquisition figure here — the partial manuscript "clocking in at a mere 500 pages" — is the journalist's characterization and differs from the archive's other acquisition-partial figures; it is flagged, not smoothed.

Key claims

How IJ reached Little, Brown (Neyfakh's account). Gerry Howard "acquired David Foster Wallace’s first novel and published it as a trade paperback original" (Broom, in Penguin's Contemporary American Fiction line) and kept Wallace for Girl With Curious Hair; for the second novel, "his agent Bonnie Nadell … decided the responsible thing to do was to submit the manuscript to several editors and see how much it could draw," which brought Wallace to Little, Brown, "where he remained until his death."
The acquisition partial (journalist's figure). "An editor named Michael Pietsch made the acquisition based on a partial manuscript clocking in at a mere 500 pages." (A variant figure.)
Wallace's discomfort with success and self-presentation (Pietsch). "David was extremely uncomfortable at anything having to do with success, power, competition, anyone sort of putting themselves forward." It showed in "the casual way he dressed, the way he spoke in front of an audience"; he "would take loud, theatrical slurps of water and then say ‘Excuse me’ as he belched"; and, per his own "Up, Simba" essay, "he always felt more comfortable hanging out with the camera crew than he did with the professional journalists he was working with."
The cookout and Worm Tag. "I got him to come to my house for a cookout once, and he spent much of the time playing with my kids, who were 3 and 6 at the time. He created a game called Worm Tag, which involved reaching down into the grass and finding worms."
Insulation from reviews. Wallace "tried to stay as minimally exposed as possible to reviews of his work"; "At some point he asked us not to send him reviews of any kind," saying only: "give me a call if there’s a particularly hideous review in a prominent place so I can understand why people are looking at me pityingly."

Themes

Biography and temperament (Wallace's discomfort with success, competition, and self-promotion; his ease with children and support crews over professional elites; his deliberate insulation from criticism); the acquisition and career history of Infinite Jest (Howard → Nadell's wide submission → Pietsch at Little, Brown); the author-and-reviews relationship (self-protective avoidance, the "looking at me pityingly" self-image).

Cross-references

mcnally-making-of-ij-nadell-pietsch — Nadell's own fuller account of the same acquisition (the wide submission, the $75k health-insurance ask, Pietsch's "more than he wanted to breathe" vow); this 2008 profile is the contemporaneous, obituary-moment version of that history from the editor's side.
iw-pietsch-2016-full, infinite-summer-pietsch-editing-ij, pietsch-letter-dec-1994 — the Pietsch cluster; this is the earliest (2008) and most personal member.
Wallace's "Up, Simba" (the 2000 McCain campaign essay, collected in Consider the Lobster) — Pietsch cites its camera-crew-vs-journalists observation as evidence of the same temperament; relevant to the ASFT/CTL nonfiction notes.
The camera-crew-over-journalists and reviews-avoidance material bears on how much weight to give Wallace's own public self-presentation as evidence (a standing caution in the composition record about author self-report).

Notable passages

"David was extremely uncomfortable at anything having to do with success, power, competition, anyone sort of putting themselves forward."
"He would take loud, theatrical slurps of water and then say ‘Excuse me’ as he belched."
"I got him to come to my house for a cookout once, and he spent much of the time playing with my kids, who were 3 and 6 at the time. He created a game called Worm Tag, which involved reaching down into the grass and finding worms."
"At some point he asked us not to send him reviews of any kind, and he just said, ‘Please, just give me a call if there’s a particularly hideous review in a prominent place so I can understand why people are looking at me pityingly.’"