Smarter than You Think | The New York Review of Books

NYRB on the methods of David Foster Wallace:

"Planet Trillaphon" was only Wallace’s first attempt at combining the immediacy of vernacular voices with challenging structural choices, to the end of producing, as he told Lipsky, writing that could “capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings in a way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.” The Broom of the System would also end in an unfinished sentence (“‘I’m a man of my’”), and Infinite Jest, rooted in people attempting to navigate through a range of emotional extremes from adolescence to addiction, would internalize the will to evade conventional ideas of completion, the novel ending in a complete sentence but leaving the principal narrative strands and the fates of many of its characters, though suggested, in no conventional way resolved by book’s end.