Criticizing David Foster Wallace

I have already mentioned how David Foster Wallace bothers me. This has.left me questioning my judgment. Then I found The Last Essay I Need to Write about David Foster Wallace from Literary Hub. Mary K. Holland sets out the case for Wallace in her opening:

David Foster Wallace’s work has long been celebrated for audaciously reorienting fiction toward empathy, sincerity, and human connection after decades of (supposedly) bleak postmodern assertions that all had become nearly impossible. Linguistically rich and structurally innovative, his work is also thematically compelling, mounting brilliant critiques of liberal humanism’s masked oppressions, the soul-killing dangers of technology and American narcissism, and the increasing impotence of our culture of irony.

I did not get this from reading Infinite Jest. I got, maybe, the exact opposite - exploitation of the drug addicts and lower classes by an MFA writer. Could be my biases come shining through. Could be reading him in prison was the wrong place and time. So be it. Could be I just prefer Nelson Algren.

 Back to Ms. Holland's essay, she lays out the criticism and biographical details, which are too detailed for anything but you reading them yourself, before coming to this conclusion:

What does it mean that this artist could not produce in his life the mutually respecting empathy he all but preached in his work (or, most clearly, in his statements about it)? What does it mean that a man and a body of work that claimed feminism in theory primarily produced a stream of abusive relationships between men and women in life and art? What can we learn about the blindness of both men and women to their participation in misogyny and rape culture, despite their professions of awareness of both? How might reading Wallace’s fiction in the contexts of biographical information about him and women’s narratives about their experiences of sexual violence enable us to better understand—and interrupt—the powerful hold misogyny and rape culture have on our society, our art, and our critical practices?

 I knew about his being a possible stalker. Still, this gives me a sense that my vague discomfort with his novel had.some rational justification.

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