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TL;DR

John Jeremiah Sullivan's GQ essay is nominally a review of the posthumous Pale King, but it doubles as one of the most quoted appraisals of Wallace's whole project, with substantial Infinite Jest-bearing passages. Sullivan argues that Wallace "spoke for a generation" in a sense "almost scientifically true" ("Cultures extrude geniuses the way a beehive will make a new queen"), remembering his own twenty-year-old's certainty on first hearing of Infinite Jest: "This is it. One of us is going to try it." He reads Wallace's method as writing into characters rather than about them — Wallace "hands parts of himself to different characters, so that at times the edges blur" — and, most usefully, he complicates the famous fiction-against-solipsism bromide: Wallace's Pollyanna line that only in literature do we have "a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness" was something "Wallace knew … was a bromide", undercut in the fiction itself by "Good Old Neon"'s "inbent spiral." The essay samples a B.U. country passage from IJ (scene 097) as an instance of the paragraphs where Wallace is "able to trap things, fleeting qualities of our "moment,"" as he puts it. Its Pale King judgments — a "splendid failure" in the Faulknerian sense, patternless because unfinished — round out the essay.

Key claims

The generational writer, literally. "When they say that he was a generational writer, that he "spoke for a generation," there's a sense in which it's almost scientifically true." "Cultures extrude geniuses the way a beehive will make a new queen when its old one dies, and it's possible now to see Wallace as one of those." Sullivan's own first encounter, at twenty: "This is it. One of us is going to try it. The "it" being all of it, to capture the sensation of being alive in a fractured superpower at the end of the twentieth century." "About none of his contemporaries … can one say that they risked as great a failure as Wallace did."
The loss to the language. "Here's a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That's what Wallace's suicide did … It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow."
Writing into characters. "Wallace doesn't write about his characters; he hadn't in a long time. He writes into them." The method is the tennis-court / cruise-ship observational power turned on interior lives; "Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside." Its cost: "You have to let a lot of other consciousnesses into your own. That's bad for equilibrium."
Parts of himself in the characters. "Wallace hands parts of himself to different characters, so that at times the edges blur" — offered of The Pale King's Sylvanshine/Dean/Cusk and its two "David Wallace" figures, continuous with the David-Wallace narrator of "Good Old Neon."
The solipsism bromide, and Wallace's knowing it. Wallace made "frequent and uncharacteristically Pollyanna statements about the supposed power of fiction against solipsism," e.g. that "only in literature do we know for sure we're having "a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness."" But "Wallace knew that this was a bromide." In the books "so fluffy an idea would never survive the withering storm of panoptical analysis" — witness "Good Old Neon"'s narrator fighting "the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere". "Fiction can only substitute the chaos of text for the chaos of talk. It replaces the mirrors in the hall with other mirrors."
The intentionality reading. Reading the Michael Joyce tennis essay, Sullivan notes the "false modesty" and the Joyce-named-Joyce pun: "Not much happens by accident in Wallace's stuff; his profound obsessive streak precluded it."
The recording angel. "That's what I love in Wallace, noticed details like that, microdescriptions of feeling states that seem suggestive of whole branching social super-systems". "He was the closest thing we had to a recording angel." There are "paragraphs in Infinite Jest where he's able to trap things, fleeting qualities of our "moment,"" things otherwise lost.
On The Pale King (brief). The IRS setting is theological — "using the IRS the way Borges used the library and Kafka used the law-courts building". The Lane Dean and Toni Ware chapters are among "the finest fiction of the year", but the book is unfinished — "The patterning isn't right", the ending chosen by editor Michael Pietsch, not Wallace, so "whether we can call this "a Wallace novel" becomes unsolvable." Verdict, via Faulkner: "Wallace's work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense" but as "our splendid failure to do the impossible." "Wallace failed beautifully."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace's stated faith that fiction defeats solipsism ("a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness") was a bromide he knew to be one — and undercut inside the fiction itself

Crux: communication-solipsism
Stance: complicates
Evidence:
- [author] Wallace's Pollyanna claim, quoted via Sullivan: "only in literature do we know for sure we're having "a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness."" [¶ solipsism]
- [secondary] Sullivan's counter: "Wallace knew that this was a bromide … In his books, so fluffy an idea would never survive the withering storm of panoptical analysis." [¶ solipsism]
- [text] The "Good Old Neon" instance of the undercutting — the narrator consciously fighting "the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere". [¶ solipsism]
- [inference] "Fiction can only substitute the chaos of text for the chaos of talk. It replaces the mirrors in the hall with other mirrors." [¶ solipsism]
Notes: A critic-tier reading that grants the anti-solipsism hope Wallace voiced in interviews (the McCaffery "less alone inside" line) while insisting the fiction problematized it — the complicates posture exactly. In-source qualifier: Sullivan credits Wallace's "native conscientiousness" for keeping him from "shirking the role of sage altogether", so the bromide was sincerely offered even as it was doubted. The GON instance is a story-quote; the reading applies oeuvre-wide, IJ included (the loneliness theme Sullivan calls the crowd-drawing center of the work).

THEORY: Wallace writes "into" his characters, handing them pieces of himself until author and figure blur — the surrogate-self method

Crux: ij-autobiographical
Stance: mentions
Evidence:
- [secondary] "Wallace doesn't write about his characters … He writes into them." [¶ into]
- [secondary] "Wallace hands parts of himself to different characters, so that at times the edges blur." [¶ Sylvanshine]
Notes: Anchored in The Pale King's David-Wallace/David-Cusk doublings and "Good Old Neon"'s David-Wallace narrator; carried here as the oeuvre-wide method. It bears on the question of Wallace's author-surrogates in Infinite Jest, though Sullivan never names Hal. A mention, not an IJ-scene argument.

Themes

Reception and canonization (the generational-writer / beehive appraisal, the "recording angel", the loss-to-the-language elegy); communication and solipsism (the fiction-against-loneliness bromide and its self-undercutting); the autobiographical method (writing "into" characters, self handed to David-Wallace figures); intentionality and craft ("Not much happens by accident", the Joyce pun); the unfinished book and the ethics of posthumous publication (The Pale King's editor-chosen shape). Wallace's tennis essays (Michael Joyce, Federer) and the Lynch set anecdote frame the appraisal.

Cross-references

The fiction-against-solipsism line traces to the 1993 McCaffery interview ("we become less alone inside"); Sullivan's undercutting instance is Good Old Neon.
The Dostoevsky essay Sullivan quotes at length (on requiring "an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions") is held as ctl-frank-dostoevsky — the same essay the 1996 pans weaponized differently.
Pairs with A. O. Scott's 2008 appreciation on the generational-writer verdict — Scott's "voice in your own head" and Sullivan's "spoke for a generation … almost scientifically true" are the same canonization move three years apart.
The Michael Joyce and Federer tennis essays Sullivan discusses, and the Lynch-set anecdote, sit in the A Supposedly Fun Thing / Both Flesh and Not material — see the Michael Joyce essay note and the Federer essay note.

Notable passages

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

"When they say that he was a generational writer, that he "spoke for a generation," there's a sense in which it's almost scientifically true."
"Cultures extrude geniuses the way a beehive will make a new queen when its old one dies, and it's possible now to see Wallace as one of those."
"This is it. One of us is going to try it." … "to capture the sensation of being alive in a fractured superpower at the end of the twentieth century."
"being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished." … "It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow."
"Wallace doesn't write about his characters; he hadn't in a long time. He writes into them."
On the bromide: "Wallace knew that this was a bromide." … "Fiction can only substitute the chaos of text for the chaos of talk. It replaces the mirrors in the hall with other mirrors."
"Not much happens by accident in Wallace's stuff; his profound obsessive streak precluded it."
"He was the closest thing we had to a recording angel."
The sampled IJ passage (Sullivan's selection, from the Gately/B.U.-country run of scene 097): "Arm out like a hack's arm, Gately blasts through B.U. country."
The Faulkner verdict: "Wallace's work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense" — "our splendid failure to do the impossible." "Wallace failed beautifully."