Does your life approach anything like a linear narrative?

Wyatt Mason has a great article about DFW in the latest NY Review of Books (Smarter than You Think, in the July 15th issue). Starting off by discussing David Lipsky's Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, Mason brilliantly dissects what it is that makes DFW so fascinating:

Wallace dedicated his fiction to the asking of that question [in DFW's words, "...a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that?] and to answering it at the aesthetic distance that modernism had imposed. ...
All Wallace’s formal ingenuity would have been for naught if he hadn’t been intent on using these forms to probe at the most injured parts of being. If his work does impose an aesthetic distance, it never sought to do less than bring particular persons as close as possible.

The whole thing is worth a read. At the very least, the piece is full of insightful DFW quotes in that astute voice of his:

Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.