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Adam Kirsch has a big article (see below for link options) about David Foster Wallace over at The New Republic. It considers The Pale King, Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will and David Lipsky's, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace.
The article is titled, The Importance of Being Earnest: David Foster Wallace was the voice of his generation, for better and for worse (28/7/11). You might be able to get though to the pay wall restricted article with the above link. If not, try following the link embedded in this tweet...
THE MOST AMERICAN thing about Wallace, though, is his conviction that his unhappiness is a specifically American condition. Like many classic American writers but few contemporary ones, he experienced being American as a bitter and significant fate, a problem that the writer had to unravel for the benefit of his fellow sufferers. In a late story, “The Suffering Channel,” Wallace theorizes about “the single great informing conflict of the American psyche,” which is “the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance.” All of Infinite Jest can be seen as a demonstration of the thesis Wallace advances early in the novel: “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels.” When Wallace wrote about how difficult it was to be an American, he specifically meant an American of his own generation—the post-’60s cohort known as Generation X. “Like most North Americans of his generation,” Wallace writes about the teenage hero of Infinite Jest, “Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.” Likewise, in “Westward,” he observes, “Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades ... Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied.” It is no wonder that readers born between 1965 and 1980 responded so strongly to this kind of solicitude, with its implication that they were unique, and uniquely burdened.
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