it away. The positive things we hear about Wallace have a curiously null quality, either by vague report or as score-sheets, facts and figures. They all have a statistical turn that fails to explain what made Wallace so paradoxically attractive to the people in his life. Which makes in the end for an unfortunately lifeless life. Smart, well written and elegant, but not alive. It is for this that the phrase Max applies to the first academic studies on Wallace, "some of the early efforts had an improvisatory feel," seems so appropriate for his own work. Every Love Story is the first biography of Wallace, and the first biography Max has written. Someone will soon pull together a less improvisatory and one-dimensional life of Wallace, and it will doubtless go far beyond Max's slim 300 pages. The standard academic biography of DFW has yet to be written. And if Max writes more biographies, they will doubtless be better, richer books than this. There is another side to Every Love Story , however, which is where the meat lies for anyone born and bred outside of the USA. As much as a life of Wallace, Max's book is a snapshot of the whole system of literary production in modern day America. This is a land where students can hand in book-length undergraduate theses, and where they can go on to participate in MFAs taught by writers who themselves did MFAs, and make their money from teaching writing as much as from