DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S writing can be bewitchingly smart, funny and caustic, switching between acerbic satire, romping farce and note-perfect spoofing of American academia, media or corporate idiocy with dazzling facility. He may be ‘so modern he’s in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us’, as Zadie Smith proclaims; but his novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite jest, still accept such old-fashioned duties as entertaining the reader and creating memorable, more or less rounded characters.

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