Title: like Jackie Gleason in Drag
Product review: Critics of DFW tend to fall into one of two categories:1. Too stupid/impatient to get what's going on/being attempted;or2. Smart, but ideologically encumbered/terminally insecure, and thus predisposed towards rejection.Both sets of critics appear to have missed the point.The joy of DFW is that he doesn't attempt to answer his own questions. This is the literary equivalent of socratic method. He presents his argument to the reader, and then asks (as in Chapter 1 of Infinite Jest), "what's _your_ story?" Like any other educational experience, what the reader elicits is directly proportional to what the reader invests. Challenging? Yes. Pedantic? Often. But also by turns hilarious, insightful, and deeply moving. Consider anything he's written as one half of a dialogue. It's left to the reader to respond.
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