There even seems to be a now common agreement in academia that readers who champion Wallace’s essays as their favorite work of his are simply missing something and must be less advanced readers, because his nonfiction couldn’t possibly hold up to his one towering opus. It’s a facile assumption that accessibility signals lack of seriousness.

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What would David Foster Wallace think? We asked David Lipsky, who spent five days on the road with the late author during his book tour for "Infinite Jest" for a Rolling Stone profile. After Wallace's death, the article became the basis for his book "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Your Self: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace." And judging by Wallace's fondness for R.E.M., it's easy to imagine that he would have liked the jangly "Calamity Song" even before the Decemberists tribute to Eschaton. 

Had you imagined what Eschaton would look like, and how close did the vision in the video come to your sense of the game? What caught your imagination most about the video? 

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The sign for the Sunset Foot Clinic on West Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles is known to some locals as a kind of fortuneteller. On one side is depicted a foot with a woeful face, a bandaged big toe and crutches, while the other side shows an ecstatic foot in gloves and sneakers giving the thumbs-up sign. (Yes, these feet have both arms and legs.) When the sign is working, it rotates, and several residents of the nearby Silver Lake and Echo Park neighborhoods believe that whichever side they see first indicates what sort of day awaits them. Others use the sign as a guide: If they see the Happy Foot, they get to do something fun, while the Sad Foot condemns them to an afternoon of chores.

The Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign became better known to readers outside the Los Angeles area when it appeared in Jonathan Lethem's 2007 novel, "You Don't Love Me Yet." In that book, the main character, a musician named Lucinda, can see the sign from the window of her apartment: "The two images presented not so much a one-or-the-other choice as an eternal marriage of opposites, the emblem of some ancient foot-based philosophical system. This was Lucinda's oracle: one glance to pick out the sad or happy foot, and a coin was flipped, to legislate any decision she'd delegated to the foot god."

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Maybe Wallace was a little of all of these things, though surely he'd have been the first to inform us he was no saint. On the other hand, one of his persistent themes was the self-deluding vanity of cleverness, which sneers at the truths encased in nostrums and mottos simply because they're banal. What he left as the sole counterpoint to the various posthumous Cults of Dave was the unfinished manuscript of "The Pale King," his third novel. His editor, Michael Pietsch (who, full disclosure, edited my own book), has assembled the completed portions and included some of Wallace's notes on the narrative's conclusion into a volume that has just been published.

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The profile never ran (Rolling Stone sent Lipsky off to write about heroin addicts in the Pacific Northwest instead), and the interview went unused until last year, when Lipsky had the mournful task of writing about the last weeks of Wallace's life; the author killed himself in September 2008. Still, that left five days' worth of 1996 material largely untapped at a time when hunger for Wallace's words and thoughts has never been keener. "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace" is a book-length transcript of those three days, an engaging and occasionally frustrating record of an extended conversation between two young men who had no idea that, 12 years later, the literary world they took for granted would melt away and one of them would be dead by his own hand.

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The papers offer a closer look into the writer's psyche, a familiar place to his readers. DFW once said that "the shtick" of his nonfiction work -- his essays and reporting -- consisted of the kaleidoscopic insecurities turning inside his head: Oh gosh, look at me: not a journalist who's been sent to do all these journalistic things.

Perhaps the best example of this approach was published in Rolling Stone almost exactly 10 years ago, when Wallace wrote about his brief journey with Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign. It was a slapdash assignment, accelerated after McCain's surprise win over George W. Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary. Bush was supposed to walk away with the nomination, but all of a sudden, there was McCain with an underdog story that swept every American political journalist off his or her feet.

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McCain has run for the presidency twice, as two completely different candidates. His campaigns and his image have been shaped by the nasty partisanship of the late 20th and early 21st century, an era that may be remembered as the Late Culture Wars. McCain has never seemed comfortable with that style of politics. Despite his identification as a conservative, he's been willing to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats who shared his concept of reform. In 2000, McCain tried to be a liberal's conservative, holding stream-of-consciousness press conferences on his bus, bashing right-wing preachers as "agents of intolerance" and opposing repeal of Roe v. Wade. Republicans were unimpressed, so when McCain finally won their nomination, he picked as his running mate a woman who had less than two years' experience as a governor -- a woman young enough to be his daughter, or his third wife, even -- but who belongs to a Pentecostal church, baits the Washington media and wouldn't allow any woman to have an abortion.

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The action, much of it fairly pointless, takes place over a 30-or-so-year span between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and just after the First World War. It centers around the three sons of Webb Traverse, a Colorado union "organizer" (his political activities seem to consist entirely of blowing things -- and presumably people -- up) who is brutally killed by a couple of thugs hired by an industrialist named Scarsdale Vibe. The Traverse boys -- Frank, Reef and Kit -- spend most of the book drifting in and out of a purposeful determination to avenge their father's murder. Dropping in (literally) every now and then are a troupe of pubescent boy balloonists called the Chums of Chance, whose exploits fighting "the Yellow Fang" and other antagonists are also recorded in a series of "boys' own" pulp novels that the other characters occasionally read.

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During the fishing season that culminates in the fall, more than 60 million pounds of lobster are pulled out of Maine waters. It's a catch that supports hundreds of lobstering communities and thousands of boats all over the Gulf of Maine. Maine lobster is known around the world and has become one the most distinct delicacies in our national cuisine. During the Christmas season, thousands of lobsters are stuffed into 747s and flown to France, where the crustacean is a popular holiday meal.

Lobster is unique in our cuisine for another reason. It is pretty much the only remaining animal we kill in the kitchen before eating. Many people are understandably squeamish about plunging a live fellow creature into a pot of boiling water -- even if it looks like a giant bug -- and the ethics of this practice have been disputed for decades.

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Whole books were dedicated to denouncing this trend and the master's of fine arts writing programs that were accused of popping out graduates who in turn popped out minimalist stories like a chain of identical and tasteless breakfast sausages. The days of minimalism's preeminence, if it ever truly had that, are gone, but the habit of raising a hue and cry about the state of contemporary fiction has proven addictive. We read different kinds of novels now, and so we have a different sort of critic to denounce them.

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Wallace can still be funny, but his humor has been creeping away from the playful, omnivorous sort on display in his first three books ("The Broom of the System," "The Girl With the Curious Hair" and the reputation-making novel "Infinite Jest") and toward a bleaker variety -- as if he were making a slow switch in allegiance from Thomas Pynchon to Samuel Beckett. His style remains maximalist, but his focus has narrowed and deepened. "Infinite Jest" seemed a bulgy monster, a gathering of enthusiasms that were always threatening to escape the corral of the novel and go feral. "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," the story collection that followed it, was a grab bag of experimental vignettes and more-conventional efforts that nosed around the problem of human malice. "Oblivion," by contrast, is of a piece, relentlessly trained on the things people do and say to bear the unbearable.

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Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody's memoir "The Black Veil"; calling the book "lies" and "criminal," and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as "heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is 'Ulysses'; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov ... the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis ... wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's ... and the stupid -- just plain stupid -- tomes of DeLillo."

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If you've ever thought much about numbers or talked with a preschooler learning to count, you've probably encountered some of the questions that led to Cantor's discovery a century ago. How many natural numbers are there? (Naturals are just the numbers we count with: 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on up forever.) And what about the even naturals: 2, 4, 6, 8 and so on? Infinitely many in both cases, right? OK, but are there more naturals than evens? Clearly every even natural number is a natural number, but there are plenty of naturals that aren't even -- namely the odds: 3, 5, 7, 9 and so on. Does that mean that the set of naturals is bigger than the set of even naturals?

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And for campaign spokesman, please consider James Frey, the rising author who has, in effect, done the thing he swore never to do: He has traded in one addiction for another. That is, he has written a ballsy, bone-deep memoir about coming off drugs -- titled "A Million Little Pieces" -- which he is now promoting with such hopped-up, synthetically fueled mania that reading his interviews becomes a form of retox.

"A Million Little Pieces" has all the hallmarks of a Publishing Event. An eye-grabbing cover: the Buñuellian image of a human hand sheathed in micro-pills. A movie-ready subject: the near-death spiral and phoenixlike rebirth of a rich suburban kid. (Boy, Interrupted.) A string of high-profile blurbers: Pat Conroy, Bret Easton Ellis, Gus Van Sant. And, most telling of all, a publicity Anschluss, engineered by Random House's genteel Nan Talese imprint.

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I don't really know. I was wasn't there and someone of my age, 39, grew up precisely at that time ⁵ when we began to actually question the motives, the actions, the deeds and the (in sum) point of the oh-so-sacred activities -- the songs, the protests, the sit-ins, the riots, man -- of the 1960s; and I even went to Berkeley where you were indoctrinated into the utter righteousness of the guys who were on the very real front lines of a battle with cops and sometimes worse (National Guard troops!) with shields and bayonets and tear gas and actual guns ⁶; but I seem to remember that amid all the protest over, the clamor about, the hatred for the war one thing that a lot of people felt strongly about (beyond the dislike of Nixon, or Johnson, the debate of whether or not there were dominos dropping in Southeast Asia, whether the protests at home might be the catalyst for something bigger, something new, politically, that might change everything and really, for the first time, put power into the hand of the people) was the feeling, again I would think felt by just about everyone against the war, that amid their comforts, their stability, the opportunities open to them to do whatever they wanted, be what they wanted, in the most luxurious place in the most luxurious country in the most luxurious time in the history of the world, that there was something somehow off in the fact there was concurrently going on the expenditure of extraordinary sums, vast sums, lots of money, on steel, on rubber, on circuitry, on computers, on radar, fuel dials, switches, rotors, cams, pistons, stabilizers, all sorts of complicated stuff like that, all in the service of "delivery" -- as the word of the time went, as some Pentagon apparatchik might have put it -- of bombs up the asses of Vietnamese civilians.

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In "The Ex-Files," editor Blake Ferris has assembled what must be history's
first anthology of screeds and homilies to former boy and girlfriends. It's a
book rich with tenacious, if fictional, Avas. These creatures have inspired no less than Dorothy Allison, David Foster Wallace and Junot Diaz. But strange to say, by the end of the collection it still may not be entirely clear who counts as an "ex." Maybe that's why they're hard to forget; they're hard to identify.

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The publicity that surrounded Wallace and that difficult, brilliant, heavily promoted but little-read novel provides a good working example of the differences between the agent-editor-media matrix's vision of a serious writer and one who actually is serious. In the happy publicity vocabulary of Nice Cover Quotes and glossy mag author profiles, Wallace is a soulful Gen-Xer with long, light brown hair, an eccentric bandanna, a girlfriend, a tennis background and the added glamour of deep thoughts and a successful rehab history.

In reality, however, Wallace is a strange, very intelligent man with bad clothes who looks in public as if he'd prefer to be wearing a full mask but makes do with a scarf over his head. He also happens to be one of the most ambitious and talented writers of his generation. His work is bitingly funny and remarkably, even wildly, imaginative; at the same time he aims for very large psychological, emotional and social issues, issues of how we live or fail to live, love and fail to love, survive or destroy ourselves.

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