Wallace's entire career can be summarized as a very ambitious and multifaceted attempt to transcend the very prevalent contemporary mode of Irony, which he presumably sees as a hindrance in making his art more authentic -- if not the actual relationships between actual human beings themselves. If Amis calls his nonfiction collection The War Against Cliche, sometimes it seems as if Wallace is waging a lengthy, quixotic war against irony. At times his writing is admirably direct and emotionally powerful, as in the rehab sequences of Infinite Jest, and sometimes he takes an entirely different approach, using extensive distancing techniques or sometimes even going so far in the direction of media-refracted irony that we are forced to attend it anew. Often these modes exist side by side in the same work, especially in Infinite Jest. It must be said that in its evident sincerity, his work often seems nothing so much as religious or spiritual in nature, as he attempts to find the basis for authentic experience in a world or universe or mode of consciousness that seems to conspire against his efforts to do so.
His novels are somewhat sprawling and ambitious, and they often meld writing in various modes, and incorporate jargon and vocabulary (sometimes quasi-invented) from a wide variety of fields. His shorter fiction is frequently cold and more aggressively experimental, and has sometimes taken the problem of the authenticity of the authorial voice and the reflexivity of the project of writing to incredible lengths, especially in the story "Octet" in his short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which carries the problem of the author/reader relationship to what might be called either parodic lengths or the limits of sanity, depending on the mood of the reader.
Wallace has a trademark, most famously wielded in Infinite Jest, "Octet," and the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996, which is the liberal use of lengthy explanatory footnotes, often nearly as expansive as the text proper. It should be noted that these footnotes betray quite similar concerns about preserving some measure of authenticity as seen in his fiction, but for some reason these innovations are far more successful and appropriately deployed in his nonfiction.
It may not be a trademark, but an equally distinct quality of Wallace's writing is a mixture of the erudite and the vernacular, which often allows him, in his nonfiction at least, to achieve an authorial intimacy, emotional detail, and -- insofar as one can be bold enough not to use scare quotes with this next one -- honesty.
To be frank, one always has the feeling with Wallace that the showy innovations are essentially a kind of trick or game, but it must be admitted that they do serve a valid purpose and, in the nonfiction at least, are often fantastically effective in redefining his craft in the way Wallace intends.
His career has some similarities with the career of Norman Mailer, albeit in possibly a less tumultuous mode. Like Mailer, Wallace has written some extremely interesting, and not always entirely successful fiction, fiction that combines frequent passages of bravura brilliance with sometimes awkwardly experimental sections. Again like Mailer, Wallace has at the same time produced some of the most trenchant and profoundly resonant journalism of his generation.
In an era that boasts many fine young American novelists (Franzen, Lethem, Foer, etc.), somehow Wallace always stands apart. In addition to the unique qualities of his talent, whatever they may be, he has also been especially canny in seeking unusual venues for his nonfiction work, which has in some ways made his work more protean and at the same time more direct, a benefit of not always addressing intellectuals or his fellow literati exclusively. While his colleagues were busy writing for The New Yorker and McSweeneys, Wallace wrote in those places as well but also undertook writing projects such as covering Senator John McCain, the Pornography industry, and 9/11 for Rolling Stone; the U.S. Open tennis tournament for Tennis magazine; the director David Lynch for Premiere magazine; and a lobster festival for Gourmet magazine.
Nonfiction
On Wallace
Interviews