Josh Rothman over at Boston.com's Brainiac has a great article responding to David Friedlander's recent article [previously] in The New York Observer, The David Foster Wallace "Industry". Why is there a popular posthumous surge in David Foster Wallace's reputation? Rothman writes,
There's a more obvious explanation, to my mind: David Foster Wallace was actually a great novelist, and Infinite Jest was one of the most unique, and possibly the best, American novel of the last two decades. People love Wallace because he was a genius, and because he wrote about American life better than anyone else. The Observer's story sees Wallace as "big business," and that's certainly true. But before he was big business, Wallace was a big thinker; in his combination of analytical rigor and empathetic fervor, he recalled Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky is big business, too.)
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