RaveThe Village Voice""Wallace’s dense style is a homeopathic antidote to our verbose information-overloaded age. In ‘Authority and American English Usage’ he gives an F to academic prose, calling it ‘[p]ompous . . . sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline . . . jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead.’ An English lit professor himself, Wallace is always lucid, and in both his fiction and nonfiction he evinces a heartfelt desire to engage your ethics and beliefs—when not sending you staggering to the dictionary—by laying out indefatigably researched (if sometimes contradictory) conclusions.
Wallace’s encyclopedic knowledge of porn seems a direct corollary to the ‘social costs of being an adolescent whose overriding passion is English usage’...Even as the adult Wallace pushes the frontiers of the written word, his self-deprecation rings sincere. Consider his final verdict, after 20 pages of pondering humanity’s hegemony over the food chain in Lobster: ‘There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.’""
