Not P but DFW: a mean parody

[Mike Jing]

The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's review of John
Updike’s *Toward the End of Time*:

The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the
line-by-line prose, Updike’s great strength for almost forty years. Toward
the End of Time does have flashes of beautiful writing—deer described as
“tender-faced ruminants,” leaves as “chewed to lace by Japanese beetles,” a
car’s tight turn as a “slur” and its departure as a “dismissive
acceleration down the driveway.” But a horrific percentage of the book
consists of stuff like “Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to
my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its
mingled cruelty and tenderness” and “How much of summer is over before it
begins! Its beginning marks its end, as our birth entails our death” and
“This development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues
of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet.” Not to mention whole reams
of sentences with so many modifiers—“The insouciance and innocence of our
independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or
honey-colored or mahogany limbs”—and so much subordination—“As our species,
having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out,
move in”—and such heavy alliteration—“the broad sea blares a blue I would
not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter”—that they seem less
like John Updike than like somebody doing *a mean parody* of John Updike.

I thought the word "mean" here is used with an approbative connotation,
i.e. the parody is considered very well done, instead of being poorly done
or mean-spirited, is that correct?