The Best Mind of His Generation

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TL;DR

A. O. Scott's Week-in-Review appreciation, published eight days after Wallace's death — the New York Times critic's attempt to fix Wallace's place in the literary generation he "exemplified and articulated". Scott's Wallace is the purest instance of a shared post-boomer crisis: the young male novelist "haunted by a ridiculous, poignant question: what if it’s too late?" and locked in an Oedipal struggle with the "lions of postmodernism" (Gaddis, Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut) he "regarded … as heroes, but also as obstacles." The essay carries two genuine interpretive threads under its eulogy: an influence-lineage reading (Wallace as the Ezra Pound of late postmodernism, Infinite Jest to that movement what the Cantos were to high modernism) and a life-and-work continuity reading ("his personality is stamped on every page"), the latter advanced against Wallace's own stated hostility to biographical criticism. Chiefly, though, this is reception: a canonization document that ranks Infinite Jest — "a masterpiece that’s also a monster" — above the more prize-friendly big books of Wallace's cohort (Eugenides, Franzen, Lethem, Chabon), while predicting its Cantos-like fate as a monument few finish.

Key claims

The generational-emblem thesis. Wallace "may not have been the most famous novelist of his time, but more than anyone else, he exemplified and articulated the defining anxieties and attitudes of his generation." Infinite Jest is "the enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation’s benchmark for literary ambition".
The voice. Wallace's hyperarticulate, self-aware voice: "It was — is — the voice in your own head." A "shock of recognition" for readers who felt "not only did I know this guy, but he knew me." Scott, an undergraduate "with a head full of literary theory and a heartsick longing for authenticity," dates his own encounter to that recognition.
The Oedipal-influence frame. Wallace "regarded the lions of postmodernism as heroes, but also as obstacles", quoting Wallace's own early-1990s line: "If I have an enemy … a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon." Scott's gloss: "That’s a lot of fathers for one Oedipal struggle".
The Pound analogy. Of Wallace's cohort, "the figure he resembles most is Ezra Pound" — not the later crank but the modernist innovator who "pushed his insights further, into an extreme, enormous, all-but-unreadable book — the “Cantos” — that is to high modernism what “Infinite Jest” is to late postmodernism." Corollary prediction: as with the Cantos, few readers swallow such a book whole, and "a similar fate may lie in store for “Infinite Jest.”" Wallace will survive for general readers "in the smaller, less daunting doses of his stories and journalism."
The ranking within the cohort. Infinite Jest is "a masterpiece that’s also a monster — nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness", whose "size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric." The other big cohort books — Middlesex, The Corrections, The Fortress of Solitude, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — are "more accessible, easier to connect with and to give prizes to", and their authors (with Powers, Moody, Eggers) "stand in Mr. Wallace’s shadow", not because his version of the generational crisis "was better or truer than theirs, but rather because it was purer and more rigorous."
Life and work as continuous. Scott opens on Wallace's own Borges-review attack on biographical criticism (that Borges's stories "so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant"), then argues the opposite pull is nearly irresistible for Wallace, whose "personality is stamped on every page — so much so that the life and the work can seem not just connected but continuous." Scott flags the temptation to read the suicide into the work as something that "must be resisted" but "should nonetheless be acknowledged", and predicts that Wallace's persona "will be his most durable creation."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's whole project is a generational Oedipal struggle with the postmodern masters — heroes and obstacles both — that Infinite Jest carries furthest, making him the Ezra Pound of late postmodernism

Crux: pynchon-influence
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [author] Wallace's early-1990s statement: "If I have an enemy … a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon." [¶ influence]
- [secondary] The "monuments of the previous era" a faculty-brat reader met on the shelves — "William Gaddis and John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut" (spacing as the raw carries it) — "pointed the way forward" but "also blocked the path." [¶ influence]
- [inference] The Pound/Cantos analogy: Wallace "understood the literary logic" of his movement "more clearly than any of his contemporaries" and pushed it into an "all-but-unreadable book" standing to late postmodernism as the Cantos stand to high modernism. [¶ Pound]
Notes: Scott's version of the influence claim is [author]-anchored and affiliative (heroes-as-obstacles), the opposite valence to the hostile derivative-of-Pynchon charge of the 1996 pans; Barth heads the same patricide list. Scott concedes Wallace "expended a lot of energy trying to assimilate and overcome their influences" — i.e. the reading is of a struggle Wallace worked past, not mere imitation.

THEORY: In Wallace the life and the work are continuous — the personality is stamped on every page and the persona is the durable creation — despite Wallace's own stated hostility to reading a writer's life into the work

Crux: ij-autobiographical
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [inference] "Mr. Wallace was hardly one to conceal himself within his work; on the contrary, his personality is stamped on every page — so much so that the life and the work can seem not just connected but continuous." [¶ death]
- [inference] "I suspect that Mr. Wallace’s persona — at once unbearably sophisticated and hopelessly naïve, infinitely knowing and endlessly curious — will be his most durable creation." [¶ persona]
- [author] The counter-position Scott himself foregrounds: Wallace's Times Book Review Borges piece attacked "the standard biographical procedure of mining the lives of writers for clues to their work," insisting Borges's stories "so completely transcend their motive cause that the biographical facts become, in the deepest and most literal way, irrelevant." [¶ opening]
Notes: Counterevidence carried in-source: Scott opens on Wallace's own anti-biographical stance and grants that the temptation to read the death into the work "must be resisted" — then argues the continuity anyway, treating the resistance as a duty rather than a description. The block records the tension as Scott stages it, not as settled.

Themes

Reception and canonization (the generational-benchmark verdict, the ranking above the cohort's prize-winners, the Cantos-fate prediction); influence and the anxiety of influence (the postmodern "patriarchs," the Pound analogy); the autobiographical question (life and work "continuous," the persona as durable creation); the encyclopedic novel (Infinite Jest as "an encyclopedia of phobia, anxiety, compulsion and mania"); voice and generational recognition.

Cross-references

Continues the influence-and-belatedness argument Scott had made eight years earlier in his 2000 essay on Wallace: the patricide-of-the-postmodern-fathers reading is the through-line between the two pieces, the 2008 obituary reprising the 2000 thesis in a valedictory key.
The affiliative counter-pole to the 1996 pans that read the same influences as mere derivation — Dale Peck's "Well, duh" ("Wallace out-Pynchons Pynchon") and Michiko Kakutani's review. Where they hear imitation, Scott hears assimilation-and-overcoming.
Pairs with Chad Harbach's n+1 canonization essay on the DFW-vs-cohort ranking: both make Infinite Jest the dense star the lesser cohort books orbit, and both single out Franzen's Corrections as the most direct descendant.
The "Octet" and Oblivion material Scott cites connects to the archive's notes on those stories (Octet, Good Old Neon).

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (curly quotes and em-dashes preserved).

"he exemplified and articulated the defining anxieties and attitudes of his generation."
"the enormous, zeitgeist-gobbling novel that set his generation’s benchmark for literary ambition" — followed by "an encyclopedia of phobia, anxiety, compulsion and mania."
On the voice: "It was — is — the voice in your own head."
The patricide line (Wallace, via Scott): "a patriarch for my patricide, it’s probably Barth and Coover and Burroughs, even Nabokov and Pynchon." Scott’s gloss: "That’s a lot of fathers for one Oedipal struggle".
"his personality is stamped on every page" … "the life and the work can seem not just connected but continuous."
The Pound analogy: "that is to high modernism what “Infinite Jest” is to late postmodernism."
The verdict: "is a masterpiece that’s also a monster" … "nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness".
The prediction: "a similar fate may lie in store for “Infinite Jest.”"