I’m sure his non-fiction is great but it will never compare to the drug-fueled adventures at Enfield Tennis Academy. Wallace is one of those writers who provokes you to rage at his self-mutilated prose slightly more often than he reduces you to giggles or lifts you up into ecstasy. The lows are low, and at a precisely calculated depth, but damn are those highs up there. In that I think he’s like some of his other contemporaries, i.e. DeLillo and Pynchon.
I honestly thought DFW’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity was not only more interesting, but just generally better than Infinite Jest, but IJ isn’t my favorite book, while EaM is one hell of an awesome read on so many levels (even if it’s a bit more of a challenge than IJ).
For my money, Hunter Thompson was twice as good at this kind of thing and only needed 1/10th the word count.
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