Patricia Lockwood on David Foster Wallace

[Johnny Marr]

Time​ will tell who is an inventor and who is a tech disruptor. There was
ambient pressure, for a while, to say that Wallace created a new kind of
fiction. I’m not sure that’s true – the new style is always the last gasp
of an old teacher, and Infinite Jest in particular is like a house party to
which he’s invited all of his professors. Thomas Pynchon is in the kitchen,
opening a can of expired tuna with his teeth. William Gaddis is in the den,
reading ticker-tape off a version of C-Span that watches the senators go to
the bathroom. Don DeLillo is three houses down, having sex with his wife.
I’m not going to begrudge him a wish that the world was full of these
wonderful windy oddballs, who were all entrusted with the same task: to
encompass, reflect, refract. But David, some of these guys had the
competitive advantage of having been personally experimented on by the
USmilitary.
You’re not going to catch them. Calm down.





>From her piece in the LRB (which isn’t as harsh on his writing as she was
on Updike, despite her disdain for DFW as a person)