“The litchat take on Wallace was that he was very intelligent, but probably too intelligent for his own good; that he had written a book that was very long, but probably too long; that this book contained a lot of postmodern flourishes (most notably a ton of footnotes), and there was definitely too much of that for any sensible reader to countenance. Above all, Wallace’s writing was too difficult and probably not worth that difficulty. It was all very clever, litchat acknowledged, but it lacked real human emotion.”

– Laura Miller, in “David Foster Wallace and the Perils of Litchat” [from The New Yorker]