Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wallace, David Foster - Richard Stern (review date 9 March 1997)

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Richard Stern (review date 9 March 1997)

SOURCE: "Verbal Pyrotechnics," in Chicago Tribune Books, March 9, 1997, pp. 1, 11.

[In the following review, Stern examines Wallace's collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and equates Wallace's accomplishment with that of the classic essayist Montaigne.]

'I go out of my way," wrote Essayist Number One, "but by license not carelessness…. I want the material to make its own divisions … without my interlacing them with words, with links and seams put in for the benefit of … inattentive readers." As to style, "I love a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as in the mouth … succulent and sinewy, brief but compressed … better difficult than boring … irregular, disconnected and bold."

Montaigne's 400-year-old prescription works to describe these wonderful essays by David Foster Wallace. The best essays—blends of fact, scene, observation,...

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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