IJ study archive

Slate Audio Book Club: Infinite Jest — Roiphe, Patterson, and Surowiecki on the mess, the design, and the sadness (recorded ~March 2009)

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TL;DR

A mainstream-critical roundtable recorded weeks after D.T. Max's "The Unfinished" ran in The New Yorker (published 9 March 2009 — Roiphe notes the piece as just out), i.e. months before Swartz's September 2009 ending essay. Three professional critics — none of them Wallace-community insiders, one (Surowiecki) openly disclaiming being an ideal Wallace reader — argue about whether IJ's non-resolution is design or failure, and never once reach for DMZ mechanics, wraith dosing, or mold: Hal simply loses his mind and nobody asks how. Valuable precisely as that dated negative datum (the pre-Swartz mainstream discourse), as the archive's clearest skeptic's-case statement (the book called a huge and uncontroversial mess, the ending experienced as betrayal), and for the on-air deployment of Wallace's own 1993 RCF self-diagnoses as evidence about the book. ASR transcript: paraphrase only; the on-air readings (pp. 200, 592, 239 — page refs approximate) must be re-verified against print before any quotation. Register audit: ~30 unflagged quoted-ASR fragments de-quoted to indirect discourse or hyphenated references; two loci print-resourced byte-true (the p. 3 double-windowed clause at the windows-motif row, discharging the deferred windows-1 item, and print's inside-Hal sentence, p. 694); surviving quotation marks are titles, print quotes, and ASR name renderings only; the four (ASR, approximate)-flagged specimen quotes were de-quoted to as-aired indirect discourse in the driver audit.

Key claims

  • Dating: sponsor read for Audible; the announcer points to a very intense biographical piece newly out in The New Yorker (= Max's "The Unfinished," 9 Mar 2009); renewed interest dated to the suicide. ~March 2009, ASR-derived, approximate.
  • The 500-pages claim: Surowiecki asserts the draft ran some 500 pages past the published length and that Pietsch ("Michael Peach"/"Peacher" in ASR) and/or Wallace cut ~500 pages [00:10]. Stated flatly, no source given.
  • Wallace vs. Kakutani: Surowiecki reports Wallace's answer to the it's-a-mess review — nothing on the page is there by accident (paraphrase) [00:10]; later, that someone (Pietsch, he thinks) pushed for closure on Broom of the System and Wallace added some, whereas for IJ he refused [00:53].
  • The 1993 RCF interview mined on-air [00:39–00:42]: Surowiecki reads Wallace's self-diagnosed weaknesses — the sentimental affection for gags, the concision problem, absorbing television's raison d'être (being liked), the look-at-me impulse, and the flip-side hostility toward the reader — and the panel applies each to IJ (see Theories).
  • Kate Gompert as the depression datum: Roiphe singles out the brief Gompert scene as depicting depression as active, constant, near-physical pain — chilling and unlike standard accounts [00:30–00:31]. The bandana anecdote from the Max piece (the head about to explode) is read alongside it.
  • Biographical-reading caution: Patterson resists reading IJ through the suicide (he'd no more do so, he says, than read The Waste Land through Eliot's depression) and faults the Max piece for implying too strong a life-work correlation [00:31–00:32]; Roiphe floats the Sylvia Plath parallel — the suicide risks eclipsing the work [00:34–00:35].
  • The particular-kind-of-sadness citation: Surowiecki cites the 1996 Salon interview — Wallace calling the book very, very sad — against the wickedly-comic-rollicking review boilerplate [00:32–00:33].
  • Mario as the great exception: the panel agrees Mario is the one figure exempt from Wallace's inability to let goodness stand un-interrogated; the Loach handshake story (the trainer's would-you-touch-me bet, with only Mario touching him) retold as the book's moral high point [00:19–00:20]. (The panel doesn't name Loach; identified here for indexing.)
  • Consensus aesthetic ranking: the nonfiction is where the gift shows most luminously and consistently — Wallace as journalist placed with McPhee, Didion, Tom Wolfe [00:36–00:37]; the fiction's gift is analysis, not storytelling; the best passages rival anyone's best but must be excavated [00:37–00:38]. Surowiecki's favorite Wallace is "Everything Is Green" [00:56–00:57].
  • Roiphe's sister's masculinity thesis: only men write books like this — the overstuffed doorstop as compensatory masculine building project; flatly, that no woman would have written this book [00:38–00:39]. Offered half-seriously; feeds the later look-at-me discussion.
  • The Pomona syllabus: Roiphe read a Wallace syllabus that interrogates every convention (office hours, what a C means) — moving and painful evidence of the analysis compulsion in life as in work [00:14–00:15].
  • Charlie Kaufman comparison: the attempt to reach real sentiment through heavy postmodern artifice falls just short of the end zone, in Patterson's football figure [00:27].
  • Reception texture, 2009: whether people really read the whole thing as a live question; the book recommended as first-rate insomnia reading; advice to the curious to pick it up in the middle or start with the filmography endnote [00:57–00:58]; a final consensus grade of A-plus-for-effort [00:58].
  • Autobiographical inventory offered casually: tennis past, grammarian mother, the addiction material, pieces of the author scattered across many of the characters [00:58]. Erdedy appears as ASR "Ken Ergody"; his section located at pp. 17–27 (approximate, as said on-air) [00:47].

Theories & evidence

THEORY: IJ's refusal of narrative confluence and closure is deliberate design — the book does to its plot what anti-confluentialism does to film

  • Crux: designed-holes
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] JOI's filmography includes the anti-confluential school (print's term, nominalized on air), defined as a stubborn, possibly intentionally irritating refusal of narrative lines to merge into meaningful confluence — which is how the whole book feels (Surowiecki). [00:10–00:11]
    • [text] The p. 17 (approximate) Year-of-Glad line where Hal references Gately and the grave-dig — a potentially powerful narrative payoff planted once, essentially never delivered, and unreadable as a clue on a first pass since the characters aren't yet known (Surowiecki). [00:11–00:12]
    • [author] Wallace's reply to the Kakutani-style mess charge: everything there was meant to be there (paraphrase). [00:10]
    • [author] Wallace's stated program of steering between television's passive ease and postmodernism's punitive difficulty — with the panel judging IJ tips toward the difficult pole (Surowiecki). [00:12–00:13]
    • [inference] Roiphe: the plot strands are mesmerizing but never resolve — the juggler's balls never come down — and that non-landing belongs, in her reading, to what the entertainment itself is; the infinite jest goes on forever. [00:06–00:08]
    • [inference] Patterson: the structure is a web — a web will never deliver conventional narrative satisfaction, but it is a species of thing unto itself; he'd sooner reread this than the cohering Underworld. [00:50–00:51, 00:54–00:55]
  • Notes: The panel accepts the design as intentional (closure refused on purpose; Wallace, per Surowiecki, not wanting the reader to enjoy it overmuch [00:52–00:53]) while splitting on verdict: Patterson defends the webbed form; Surowiecki, though granting intent, reports feeling somewhat cheated and relays readers who took the ending as a betrayal [00:49–00:50, 00:53]; Roiphe holds both. Fragments-that-never-cohere is contrasted with Ulysses, where they do [00:50–00:51].

THEORY: IJ enacts on its reader the look-at-me / hostile dynamic it depicts — the book performs the Entertainment's sadistic logic

  • Crux: ij-as-entertainment
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [author] The 1993 RCF interview: Wallace catching himself absorbing television's need to be liked — gags and formal stunt-pilotry serving the darker look-at-me, like-me purpose (paraphrase; three years pre-publication). [00:39–00:41]
    • [author] Same interview, the flip side: the desire to be liked curdling into hostility toward the reader — deliberately making it hard, making the reader prove they want it (Surowiecki finding that same war on the reader waged inside this book too). [00:41–00:42]
    • [inference] Roiphe: the novel is about a work of art that destroys its consumer, so the sadistic fantasy is enacted in the reading experience itself; her aphorism as aired — wanting someone to love you that badly shades over into hating them. [00:42–00:43]
    • [inference] Patterson: the reading experience likened to performance art — sitting through a Bruce Nauman video. [00:42]
  • Notes: The panel's most original move: using Wallace's own pre-publication self-diagnosis as the interpretive key to the book's reader-relation. Balanced on-air by Patterson's counter that the book succeeds in the most fundamental sense — it alters how you think [00:43] — which all three end up endorsing [00:55].

THEORY: Hamlet is the frame — dead father's ghost, two father figures, and a foreshadowed Hal–Gately union that the text makes you dig for

  • Crux: hamlet-frame
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Title from the Yorick speech, flagged in the opening plot summary (Patterson). [00:03]
    • [text] The Hamlet skeleton: a dead father eclipsed (by an uncle, as Surowiecki puts it), the father's ghost returning near the end to converse with Gately. [00:51–00:52]
    • [text] Two candidate father figures for Hal — Gately and James — plus an odd foreshadowing, as Surowiecki hears it, that Hal and Gately will wind up together somehow. [00:52]
    • [inference] But extracting any of that takes enormous effort — the frame is not quite on the page, Surowiecki concedes: it exists, under-delivered. [00:52]
  • Notes: Raised late and loosely (Hamlet arriving only as a vague late association); no Avril/Gertrude or Tavis/Claudius mapping attempted. Note the uncle slot goes unfilled in their account.

THEORY: Gately's ending leaves him maybe dying — shot, on a bed, fate open

  • Crux: gately-fate
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Gately makes a real journey and changes his life, yet in Surowiecki's summary as aired winds up shot, gravely ill on a bed, and possibly dying. [00:32]
    • [text] Concedes the Gately strand is the book's nearest thing to closure — a beginning and something like an end — though what finally becomes of him stays unknown. [00:53–00:54]
  • Notes: Genuinely uncommitted — neither the survives nor the dies camp; useful as a 2009 mainstream sighting where the question isn't yet argued, just left open.

THEORY: Hal suffers an unexplained psychotic breakdown

  • Crux: hal-condition
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [text] None argued — Surowiecki's summary as aired: Hal comes apart in something like a psychotic break, with no clear on-air account of why; the book opens roughly a year past its own ending and gives ten pages of later-Hal, then nothing. [00:07]
    • [text] Print's "inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows" (p. 694) cited later, but for the sadness theme, not as mechanism. [00:33–00:34]
  • Notes: The striking thing is the absence: no DMZ, no dosing, no Entertainment-viewing hypothesis anywhere in 59 minutes — three careful readers in early 2009 treating the collapse as simply unexplained. Pre-Swartz baseline datum for the popularity axis.

THEORY: The minor-character sprawl is humane design — letting the figurants speak

  • Crux: figurant-design
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The figurants discussion itself — the wraith-and-Gately scene on background extras in Cheers-like sitcoms — offered as the book's own warrant (Patterson, seconded by Surowiecki). [00:48]
    • [text] The Erdedy section (pp. 17–27, approximate): ~10–12 pages lavished on a man who barely recurs; likewise Poor Tony's long ordeal — space granted to structurally minor lives. [00:47–00:48]
    • [inference] Patterson's Stoppard-shaped gloss as aired — the book lets the world's Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns have some peace; relatedly, the parade of grotesques and deformities handled without gargoyling — insisting they're still human beings. [00:48–00:49]
  • Notes: Surowiecki's rival gloss recorded as live dissent: the digressions as a refusal of storytelling — a willful bedeviling of the reader. [00:49]

THEORY: Windows are a designed motif — the book tracks perception through lenses, screens, and glass

  • Crux: windows-motif
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Patterson's inventory as aired: a window in the book's first paragraph and one in its last, hundreds more between, plus pointed defenestrations, the man frozen to the window, and Orin's windshields-as-high-beams passage. Print check: the opening paragraph is genuinely windowed — "double-windowed against the November heat" (p. 3) — but the closing paragraph carries no window (its glass is the mirror square Gately looks into); the first/last symmetry is Patterson's on-air recall, recorded as said. [00:23]
    • [inference] Fits the book's broader perception apparatus (lenses, screens) the way Updike's doors fit Rabbit, Run — Patterson doubts it's accidental and wonders if anyone has written it up. [00:22–00:23]
    • [inference] The hyper-realist set pieces (the p. 239 bathroom-door description, approximate) belong to the same program: the passage centers a film student (Joelle), and the style reads as Wallace's anxiety about the novel's role in a culture of visual media (Patterson, with Surowiecki assenting). [00:44–00:46]
  • Notes: Offered as a genuine open research lead in 2009; a candidate for a scene-level motif tag.

Themes

Entertainment-and-the-self (the book as its own Entertainment; the 1993 look-at-me/hostility axis); the ending and structure (design vs. failure, webbed form, anti-confluentialism); addiction-and-recovery (the p. 200 exotic-facts reading, analysis paralysis, the AA earnestness inside the postmodern shell); communication-and-solipsism (arduous relationships, the Loach handshake, Mario); depression-and-sadness (Gompert, the particular-kind-of-sadness citation, the Plath problem); masculinity and reception (the sister's thesis, cult-of-DFW talk).

Cross-references

Accuracy notes

  • Surowiecki's claim that the original draft was 500 pages longer repeats the radical-editing picture the better-documented accounts (Moore, Hering, Carlisle; cf. gc-ep040) treat as a misconception — the cuts were real but scope-preserving. The myth was already in mainstream circulation by 2009.
  • His claim that the Hal–Gately grave reference gets no other mention in the book and no payoff is contradicted by Gately's p. 934 dream; the grave-dig is a corroborated, near-consensus reading. A factual disagreement about the evidence base, recorded as said.

Advances