In any event, the Internet Age was a gift that the post-millennial world gave to Wallace as a writer in search of readers. Collage and pastiche were gaining currency, and caricature and portrait were drawing closer together in people’s minds. Wallace’s characters—modern in their very sketchiness—felt realer to many readers than what realists were writing. As the culture collapsed into the anecdote and sound bite, Infinite Jest was one of the few books that seemed to anticipate the change and even prepare the reader for it. It suggested that literary sense might emerge from the coming cultural
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