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"What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given moment." There should be a separation between the artist and the art. Should. Wallace is very cerebal (perhaps too much so at times); you can hear his languid hesitation in clinging to each word. There are no mistakes here, no false foot forward. Every word, every choice is deliberate. There is a hint that Wallace perhaps excelled at the short form rather than the long, condensing his ideas, keeping them on their point. Again, the separation and the should. Always the should. Moving into the post #metoo world, one cannot but sense the presence of Wallace's ideal of women. Often it is not there but when it comes, it comes dark and ugly and cannot be ignored or escaped. In the end, it is Wallace himself, rather than the work, that hinders the excellence of this art.

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5.0

I was interested in this mostly because of the hype on the movie. This is intense writing on every level. You have to have 3 brains to get it all seemlessly, and then I'm not sure that would be good enough. I read about 75% of it. I regret that I had to stop, when I feel like this is a writer who gets more meaningful with every story. But, as my daughter says, "He was making my brain explode."

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