Maud Newton’s essay on David Foster Wallace in the New York Times, suitably categorized under “riff,” situates Wallace’s idiosyncratic use of language inside a generational context while critiquing its extravagances.
But I found it notable that she only dealt with his older texts. Many of the stylistic distinctions that she brings up were abandoned (or at least tempered) in Wallace’s “The Pale King.” He certainly keeps the specialized language of a esoteric clan (in this case, IRS lingo), but has limited so much of the vast leaps between “high diction, childlike speech, [and] slacker lingo.” Maybe it’s true that Wallace will be remembered for his youthful extravagances rather than his more mature work — it’s certainly more fun to critique the wild language and ideas of his earlier essays and fiction — but it’s useful to note that the master of irony/sincerity and qualifiers and rhetorical posturing did strive, later in his life, to write in a more straightforward manner.
Also, I think Newton might afford too much credit to Wallace in this paragraph:
In the Internet era, Wallace’s moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.
It’s not as though Wallace started a movement (although he certainly has had a sizable influence), but that he embodied a zeitgeist. So he didn’t cause the slackerized syntax and diction as much as was the effect of it: he existed in a cultural moment fascinated with such linguistic mannerisms and he happened to codify them by presenting them with such erudition. Plus, perhaps this is just the lack of rhetorical skill among youth, and not symptomatic of a widespread imitation.
