Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wallace, David Foster - Jenifer Levin (review date 5 November 1989)

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Jenifer Levin (review date 5 November 1989)

SOURCE: "Love Is a Federal Highway." in New York Times, November 5, 1989, Sec. 7, p. 31.

[In the following review, Levin finds Wallace's collection of short stories evidence of both an impressive talent and a tendency toward excess.]

With this collection of stories [Girl with Curious Hair], David Foster Wallace, the author of the novel The Broom of the System, proves himself a dynamic writer of extraordinary talent, one unafraid to tackle subjects large and small. Ever willing to experiment, he lays his artistic self on the line with his incendiary use of language, at times seeming to rip both the mundane and the unusual from their moorings, then setting them down anew, freshly described.

Mr. Wallace is particularly interested in flux as a partial definition of human nature, in distance as a component of love and—most important to him, perhaps—in the obvious as well as...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Kirkus Reviews (review date 15 November 1986)
   2. Madison Smartt Bell (review date 6 August 1989)
   3. Jenifer Levin (review date 5 November 1989)
   4. Douglas Siebold (review date 21 January 1990)
   5. Sven Birkerts (essay date 1992)
   6. Larry McCaffery (interview date Summer 1993)
   7. David Kipen (review date 11 February 1996)
   8. R. Z. Sheppard (review date 19 February 1996)
   9. Jay McInerney (review date 3 March 1996)
   10. Rick Perlstein (review date 4 March 1996)
   11. Steven Moore (review date Spring 1996)
   12. Tom LeClair (essay date Fall 1996)
   13. Richard Stern (review date 9 March 1997)
   14. Laura Miller (review date 16 March 1997)
   15. Alexander Star (review date 30 June 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright