Mediagenic writers like Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz once held the limelight with modish novels about fast life in the 1980s. But those authors have now faded into their own material, symbols of the superficialities they exploited in their fiction. One explanation is that literature is no more immune to changing fashions than any other form of entertainment. Novels that reflect only the glittering moment usually turn out to be artifacts, not art. Another reason is that literary fiction of the past two decades, good at dramatizing personal crises, has rarely attempted to engage the tumult of the wider world.
Social disorder is handled more efficiently in nonfiction, journalism or seductively moving images.
Fiction writer Jonathan Franzen faced that fact last year in a long, fretful article in Harper's magazine. Only two months after Franzen's complaint, Wallace made a connection with Infinite Jest, his 1,000-page opus about an early 21st century North America splintered by drugs, fanatics and a business ethic so venal that even the months of the year have product names. Writing about subjects as unrelated as tennis, Dostoyevsky and Caribbean cruise ships, Wallace again demonstrates powers of split-screen vision and information processing that should be measured in megabytes rather than IQ points. Franzen and the others may benefit from Wallace's success. Franzen displays a striking talent for turning an implausible plot into a convincing omen.