Just seen this very long criticism of David Foster Wallace - a few points -
Firstly the criticisms are generally contradictory, it's the scattergun approach to criticism, and given the long and unwieldy nature of the piece it's no wonder that logic is lost somewhere (I'm wondering whether the long and unwieldy nature of the piece is a nod to David Foster Wallace's style of writing, if it is it certainly makes the point of how hard it is to write in such a style successfully). So he criticises DFW for being pretentious, too clever by half, and purposefully opaque. But on the other hand he criticises him for being over-simplistic and for making stupid mistakes with facts. There's also the claim that DFW is "anti-intellectual," but this is immediately followed by a snide comment about people who like DFW - "Hobo torture porn for postgraduate smirkers." Maybe I misread this bit but it seems to be suggesting that people read DFW too intellectually - which seems like an "anti-intellectual" stance.
There's a bizarre bit where the writer slags off DFW for his musical taste. And then slags him off for not liking things ironically, because that's we we generally slag off "hipsters" for, and he actually likes things! And yes, read the piece, if you can get through to that bit, it does slag him off for liking music.
It also lumps together DFW with other writers (laziness). Dave Eggers, I've never been a fan of, but DFW is an infinitely better writer than DE. Just by mentioning them together doesn't prove shit. DFW questions more, uses irony in an entirely different to DE.
A lot of the criticism amounts to "DFW grew up comfortable white and middle-class" and yet what DFW is trying to do is to transcend that, it's a slef-criticism of that. A desire-to-feel, a desire for their to be something else. By the standards of this criticism DFW wouldn't be able to win, if he didn't write about feelings of wanting to escape then he'd be considered ultimately smug, he does, so he writes from a position of smugness.
It's a similar thing with the criticisms of the little mistakes DFW made in the details which are pedantically listed, again, perhaps as a nod to DFW's writing. Here we should turn to The Pale King, where the battle seems to be to render the boring in literature. How does one do it? And here the answer seems to be by including large sections that are boring. One works through these sections, the pedantry and the details. It is boring, but then the brilliance emerges afterwards, in the writing elsewhere.
The whole thrust of The Pale King seems to be in finding creativity in the boredom, not being creative as a distraction from the boredom. The details of these sections, do they matter? I'm not sure they do In Infinite Jest aren't the footnotes and the details there to get us lost in the labyrinth and to feel the book as a thing. So the criticism of this piece that DFW wants to find something away from the intellectual is only half true: he may want to find something else, but it is through reason, through the intellect that one must find it, otherwise he'd have settled for writing little pieces of homespun wisdom (which to be fair, some of his later non-fiction pieces were in danger of becoming, but this shouldn't distract from the fiction).
