Wallace believed the “three dreary camps” of current fiction writers corresponded to three different responses to this insidious force. One camp consisted of the young hip brat pack writers like McInerney and Ellis, whom he defined as practicing “Neiman-Marcus Nihilism, declaimed via six-figure Uppies and their salon-tanned, morally vacant offspring.” A second camp were the minimalists. He characterized their style as “Catatonic Realism, a.k.a. Ultraminimalism, a.k.a. Bad Carver.” And the third was just about every other writer he’d ever read, especially those favored by his teachers at
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