The New York Review of Books soon afterward published the first major overview of Wallace’s mature work, taking a stance between impressed and skeptical and implicitly psychoanalyzing the author along the way. “The Panic of Influence,” by A. O. Scott, emphasized Wallace’s anxious relationship with post-modernism and also his expectation he could have things both ways, pursuing the questionable tactic of writing cleverly to assert the superiority of sincerity in a world wedded to cleverness.
