[In the following review of Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Miller sees the writer fulfilling the promise and allaying the suspicions generated by his much-discussed novel Infinite Jest.]

Many readers young and old (but especially the young and media-saturated) regarded David Foster Wallace's mammoth novel, Infinite Jest, with suspicion. Jaded by too many middling writers heralded as the Next Big Thing, they wondered if, as its title intimated, this daunting tome wasn't just a big joke. Infinite Jest itself didn't quite clear things up. Messy, demanding and stubbornly unresolved, it was also frequently brilliant. Yet Mr. Wallace's penchant for pointed satire and flashy tricks often obscured the book's passion. Ultimately, Infinite Jest felt noncommittal, leaving some readers unconvinced that Mr. Wallace offered anything more than a lot of energy and a dazzling but heartless cleverness.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again should settle the matter at last. This collection of "essays and arguments"—originally published in Harper's, Esquire and Premiere, among other magazines—reveals Mr. Wallace in ways that this fiction has of yet managed to dodge: as a writer struggling mightily to understand and capture his times, as a critic who cares deeply about "serious" art, and as a mensch.

The most outright amusing pieces here are Mr. Wallace's two journalistic forays into Middle American culture: "Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All," about a visit to the Illinois State Fair, and the title essay, in which Mr. Wallace takes a seven-day luxury cruise to the Caribbean. These vivid, hilarious essays attracted much attention when they were originally published, but they also made Mr. Wallace vulnerable to accusations, as a friend of mine put it, of "sneering at ordinary people." Rereading them lays such reservations to rest. The primary butt of Mr. Wallace's humor is himself, and if he seizes upon his experiences to reveal ugly aspects of the American character, he always does it through the lens of his own worst impulses. Compulsively analytical, he no sooner notices something—the at first irritating "bovine and herdlike" movement of Midwestern fairgoers, for example—than he's formulated a grand and quite credible theory about it: "the vacation-impulse in rural IL is manifested as a flight-toward. Thus the urge physically to commune, melt, become part of a crowd."

With Mr. Wallace on assignment, readers will learn how everything smells (the aroma of cow manure is "wonderful—warm and herbal and blameless—but cows themselves stink in a special sort of rich biotic way, rather like a wet boot") and receive a detailed report on all forms of junk food. This manic observational faculty never seems to shut off; even while cooling his heels in a dreary waiting room with several hundred other cruise passengers, he's noting "driven-looking corporate guys … talking into cellular phones while their wives look stoic" and counting the different makes of camera.

This inclination to record his every impression doesn't bog down Mr. Wallace's writing as often as you might think, but he is open to accusations that he lacks discipline. "David Lynch Keeps His Head" is a baggy monster of a profile that suffers from too much rumination on Mr. Lynch's significance to the budding artistic sensibility of the young Mr. Wallace. Nevertheless, this essay and others show a side of him that's refreshingly ardent and sincere. When it comes to the people he admires, Mr. Wallace wears his heart on his sleeve. And it turns out that he harbors high ideals for art in general and fiction in particular, despite the "irony, poker-faced silence and fear of ridicule" that enervate the work of many of his contemporaries. "The new rebels," he speculates, "might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the 'Oh, how banal.' To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness."

That daring has begun to blossom in Mr. Wallace's own fiction, as it does in this collection's most ambitious critical essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." Of course, as Mr. Wallace himself observes, it's easier to draft manifestoes than it is to fulfill them. As a novelist, he hasn't entirely jettisoned the crutch of irony, but in this essay he thoroughly demolishes it as an option. "Television," he argues, "has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing and re-presenting the very same cynical post-modern esthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal

of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative." In other words, the illusion of transcendence by mockery is just another kind of trap.

Finally, Mr. Wallace's distinctive and infectious style, an acrobatic cartwheeling between high intellectual discourse and vernacular insouciance, makes him tremendously entertaining to read, whatever his subject. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again proves that his accomplishment is far more than just a stunt.