The New York Observer now asked him to review Updike’s Toward the End of Time, a story, like Wallace’s two novels, set in the near future, and he agreed. Wallace’s one-sided conversation with Updike was long-running. Admiration and dislike were always in competition, usually mixed together. Updike was an extraordinary writer, Wallace acknowledged, but there was something too insistent about the way he always declared his genius. The self-conscious beauty and elegance of his prose, Wallace wrote to DeLillo in January 1997, “paw…at the reader’s ear like a sophomore at some poor girl’s bra.” Now
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