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“... novel. But Lin doesn’t do anything cute with the names: he uses them as straightforwardly as David FosterWallace uses X and Y in ‘Octet #6’, for example, or as Lorrie Moore uses Mother and Baby in ‘People like That Are the Only People Here’. Jonathan Lethem has said that ‘strange character names are an ...”

“... nodding to DeLillo’s coolly precise technical jargon, Pynchon’s loose historical riffs and David FosterWallace’s involuted, self-undermining thought-processes, Moody weaves together a great number of voices into agile and extremely long sentences. He ventriloquises the clinical impersonality of a technician ...”

“... rhinestone of a Juicy Couture sweatsuit. Reading this novel, I thought (warily? unfortunately?) of David FosterWallace, also white, also Midwestern, though the child of college professors. The portal has censured Wallace for his mawkish depictions of trans people, for stalking Mary ...”

“... too much John Hoyer Updike. In a 1997 review for the New York Observer, the recently kinged David FosterWallace diagnosed how far Updike had fallen in the esteem of a younger generation. ‘Penis with a thesaurus’ is the phrase that lives on, though it is not the levelling blow it first appears; one feels ...”

“... a profile in the New York Times cast him as a sort of national shamanic redeemer, heir to David FosterWallace – as a symptom of a collective rescue fantasy in dismal times. Me, I’d be lying if I said I don’t miss the ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David FosterWallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or ...”

“... and messiness cleaned up. Compare, for example, Dyer’s anti-travel writing with that of the late David FosterWallace, another sort-of post-mod sort-of slacker, with many similar interests and of much the same generation. Dyer could not, as Wallace did in ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing ...”

“... satire and sentiment’. The shape of that sentiment became increasingly clear. In a eulogy for David FosterWallace, who killed himself in 2008, Saunders explained his friend’s accomplishment in terms that made it hard not to imagine he was also describing his own aspirations: ‘Something about the prose itself ...”

“... the reason novelists and short-story writers are often quite distinct breeds). The American writer David Means will have none of this. His highly original stories are coats that have been reversed to show their linings. Rather than lightly hint at an exquisite pattern or organising symbol, he likes to accentuate the pattern, to dash it in the reader’s ...”

“... in the New York Observer, headed ‘Twilight of the Great Literary Beasts’, Sven Birkerts and David FosterWallace lament the decline in quality of the work produced by America’s greatest living straight white male novelists, citing Bellow, Mailer, Roth and Updike. Neither mentions Kurt Vonnegut, even though ...”

“... Or Jonathan Lethem’s stoned underachievers, with their mad ideas that turn out to be right. David FosterWallace gave us protagonists who shunned the physical world in favour of the knottier, more intractable challenges of the mind; George Saunders offers comic heroes who fail excellently. Turn the book ...”

“... the capacious context of such postwar avant-garde novelists as Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago and David FosterWallace, only to acknowledge that, despite a shared affinity for ‘very long, breathing, unstopped sentences’, Krasznahorkai was ‘perhaps the strangest’ of them. The writer is ‘peculiar’; his work ...”

“... which is where you’ll be shopping if you decide to follow your dream of becoming the next David FosterWallace – who did have to work, incidentally, like the rest of us. (At Pomona College, Foster Wallace’s ‘Prose Fiction’ class consisted entirely of getting ...”

“... and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and self-sabotage, published his first novel, Jernigan, in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as ...”

“... education company called the Blended Learning Enhancement Project. They have a pair of twins, David and Lisa, the latter of whom spends much of the novel in a coma after Fraz drops her while spinning her around, leading to another of Lipsyte’s recurring scenes of panic and heartache at the side of a hospital bed. As in The Ask, there’s a portrait of a ...”