Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wallace, David Foster - Steven Moore (review date Spring 1996)

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Steven Moore (review date Spring 1996)

SOURCE: A review of Infinite Jest, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 141-42.

[In the following positive review, Moore places Wallace firmly in the tradition of encyclopedic American novelists like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gass.]

While reading William Gass's The Tunnel last year at this time, I feared I was witnessing the last of a dying breed, the encyclopedic American novel that began with Gaddis's Recognitions in 1955, hit its stride in the sixties and seventies (Giles Goat-Boy, Gravity's Rainbow, Gaddis again with J R, The Public Burning, LETTERS), went baroque in the eighties (Darconville's Cat, Take Five, Women and Men, You Bright and Risen Angels), then raged against the dying of the light in the nineties with Powers's Gold-Bug Variations and Gass's massive masterpiece. Who was left to write...

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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