David Foster Wallace: From Broom of the System to Infinite Jest

Wallace was in his early 20s and in his senior year at Amherst during the pre-publication of The Broom of the System, and by the time he submitted his next novel, Infinite Jest, for publication, he was in his 30s and more mature, having learned lessons from the celebrity that The Broom of the System brought him. Wallace (unorthodoxly) gave Pietsch, his editor from Infinite Jest until the end of his career, the manuscript when the novel was about two-thirds completed. "David agreed," Pietsch said, "that many passages could come out, no matter how beautiful, funny, brilliant or fascinating they were of themselves, simply because the novel did not absolutely require them." And Pietsch worked "to subject every section of the book to the brutal question: Can the book possibly live without this?" The capitulation, even in principle, to this type of extensive editing marked a change for Wallace.

Wallace made many of the cuts that Pietsch suggested-about "250 manuscript pages," according to Pietsch-and reworked large swaths to address some of the issues Pietsch had with "the Marathe/Steeply political colloquies and the Orin Incandenza football stories." But while Wallace was more receptive to suggestions, he preferred to take maverick positions on the structural shape of the novel. In response to Pietsch's worries about the unresolved plot strings at the end of the novel, Wallace fired back a missive: "We know exactly what's happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what's happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin. I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural argument for this, but let's spare one another, shall we?"

Moore, the friend with whom Wallace shared his rough draft of Infinite Jest, documented a large number of changes that Wallace made to the final draft. Many of the changes serve to shroud and soften meanings, in a way that does not quite remove anything from the text but shifts the burden of parsing onto the reader. For example, "the novel's gentle note that Orin 'had already drawn idle little sideways 8's on the postcoital flanks of a dozen B.U. coeds' replaces the MS's coarser 'had already gone about penetrating a huge cross-section of BU's incoming freshwomen." Other changes seem to reveal instances where Wallace simply thought of an improvement: "Queer Tony" becomes "Poor Tony"; Wallace favors the acronym of "prettiest girl of all time" to the phrase itself; Charles Tavis imitates Pierre Trudeau, not Richard Nixon; the "Year of the Twinkie" becomes the "Year of the Whopper."[25] While Pietsch and Moore's suggestions informed some of these changes, Wallace's agonizing over nugatory choices-e.g., the naming of characters, places, years, etc.-in a 1079-page book reveals Wallace's vice-like grip on authorial prerogative.

Works Cited

[1] Moore, Steven. "The First Draft Version of Infinite Jest." July 16, 2009. Thehowlingfantods.com.

[1] Wallace, David Foster. "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Harper's Magazine. April 2001.

[1] Neyfakh, Leon. "Gerry Howard on Discovering, Editing, and Hatching David Foster Wallace: 'He Was the First Person Who Ever Called Me "Mister."'" The New York Observer. September 17, 2008.

[1] Waters, Julia. "Ruth Reichl on David Foster Wallace and Magazines." Salon Magazine. October 6, 2009.

[1] Kipp, Jeremiah. "Looking for One Value but Nothing Comes my Way: An Interview with Film Critic Glenn Kenny about David Foster Wallace." The House Next Door. April 8, 2009.

[1] Neyfakh, Leon. "Infinite Jest Editor Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown on David Foster Wallace." The New York Observer. September 19, 2008. [

1] Pietsch, Michael. "Editing Infinite Jest." Infinite Summer. July 3, 2009.

[1] "David Foster Wallace on Life and Work." Wall Street Journal. September 19, 2008. (Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.)

[1] Wallace, David Foster. Consider the Lobster. Little, Brown and Company. 2006.

[1] Lipsky, David. "The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace" Rolling Stone. October 20, 2008.

[1] Max, D.T. "The Unfinished." The New Yorker. March 9, 2009.

[1] "David Foster Wallace." Charlie Rose. March 27, 1997.

[1] Mundaca, Marie. "The Influence of Anxiety: Wading In." Hipster Bookclub. June 2009.

[1] Thompson, Bob. "New Yorker Publishes Part Of Unfinished Wallace Novel." The Washington Post. March 2, 2009.