I admire David Foster Wallace’s ambition and talent and wide-ranging literary experimentalism, even though for the most part I thought he was a fake-out artist whose disingenuous personality belied his genuine complexity. (See, for instance, his remark that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all”—a line I would’ve loved to have seen Jason Segel’s puppy dog David try to deliver sincerely.)
