Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

“And yet, the ‘creative’ half of the title suggests an impulse rather than Enlightenment perspicuity motivates the writer and shapes the writing.”

how sad the world was when you opened your eyes, how much pain it contained.

Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight,

“Show us what’s at stake for the character,” was a constant request from the faculty, as was, “Why is this person telling us the story?”

“the head throb heartlike”:

the paradox that his attempt to condemn seduction had proven so seductive.

Sorrentino,

hated the acclaimed Magnolia, which he found pretentious and hollow, “100% gradschoolish in a bad way.”

Frank Norris’s ungainly naturalist novel McTeague in the former and to T. S. Eliot’s cryptic “The Waste Land” in the latter.