David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest with Leonard Lopate (March 1996)

source

TL;DR

Radio interview from the first weeks of IJ's release (book in second printing), heavy on composition and editing detail: the Pietsch arrangement made before delivery, the several-hundred-page cut, the plot-isn't-a-MacGuffin defense (whatever looks like a single thing is really several at once), and a cut subplot about China objecting to Subsidized Time. DFW reads the Lyle weight-room section aloud. ASR transcript (no punctuation; "Infinite Jest" sometimes "infinite chest", Pietsch is "peach"); speech is paraphrase throughout.

Key claims

(Radio speech is paraphrase throughout; the one verbatim quote below is IJ print read aloud.)

Genesis and contract: he wanted to make something long and kind of sad; IJ is the only work he ever sold unfinished — grocery money, plainly — on the first 250-300 pages; he and Pietsch agreed beforehand that the delivered draft would run longer than felicitous and would need help toward accessibility. The summer-1994 manuscript ran several hundred pages longer.
Seduction thesis again, aimed at the avant-garde: a lot of hard serious writing is simply no fun and doesn't much care about its reader; he wanted something avant-garde, strange, demanding — and fun enough that a reader would actually want to keep reading. Ideal reader: someone who likes reading and will grant the writer some provisional trust; demands on a reader have to serve a discernible function.
On plot and the MacGuffin question (the film): he concedes it may look rather MacGuffin-like, but the book isn't plotted the way most books are — nearly everything that looks like one thing is also, he says, four or five other things. Early lines pay off hundreds of pages later by design — planted, he confirms, not retrofitted.
Craft pride: the first thing he's done, he says, where no line went unconsidered and no fact unresearched — line-edited twice.
Subsidized Time played straight: not meant to be funny — meant to be entirely plausible, a fairly painless way of shaving the deficit. Cut material: a subplot in which China takes offense at America's perversion of the lunar calendar, convinced the idea was stolen from them.
Comparisons resented: hasn't read Pynchon in eight years; on-his-mind authors while writing were DeLillo, Gaddis, Ozick, Manuel Puig, Richard Powers (a Goldberg-Variations slip for The Gold Bug Variations); DeLillo named the best fiction writer alive, making the comparison offensive — to DeLillo.
Tennis autobiography calibrated: regional junior (17th in the USTA Western section at 14, which he converts to roughly four-thousandth nationally); serious players give their lives to it, in his figure, the way monks do.
Hype meta-irony: the book is partly about a culture of attention, hype, and image — so its own hype spins off complicated ironies; he avoids reviews, which aren't for the writer — reading one is like eavesdropping on two people discussing you.
Perfectionism and the dark years: hold fidelity to perfectionism too high and nothing ever gets done; writing the book grew realer to him than pieces of the real world — like something shackled to the skull.
Teaching: "the grammar Nazi" persona — the joke that a student whose semicolons fall short of Mozartesque is headed for a C; teaching taught him how empty look-how-clever writing feels from the receiving end, a lesson his own grad-school cleverness never did.
He reads the Lyle section — the sweat-licking guru on the towel dispenser: "Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself." (IJ print verbatim, p. 128 run; digest-verified.)

Themes

Construction/editing (Pietsch, cuts, planted payoffs); entertainment/seduction; Subsidized Time and O.N.A.N. satire; fame/hype recursion (book about hype, promoted by hype); tennis-as-monasticism (ETA); perfectionism and the writer's solipsism.

Cross-references

Pietsch on editing IJ: the other side of the same arrangement; corroborates the pre-delivery deal and cuts.
Subsidized Time chronology: the China cut is a nice gloss on Year-of-the-X naming as lunar-calendar "perversion."
Bookworm 1996: "nothing in there by accident" / designed-for-rereading, same claim with structural detail.
Salon 1996: the "long and sad" intent.
Charlie Rose 1997: the hype-vs-reading complaint a year later.
IJ connections: Lyle (and LaMont Chu's fame counsel); the samizdat-as- MacGuffin-and-more; ETA monasticism; endnote 304-adjacent O.N.A.N. politics.

Notable moments (paraphrase)

Nearly everything that looks like one thing in the book is also four or five other things.
The only work he ever sold before finishing — grocery money.
Subsidized Time not meant as a joke but as an entirely plausible deficit fix.
The book grown realer than the real world — something shackled to the skull.