Author of TFA here. Discussing that very Wallace–Silverblatt exchange with a friend is one of the reasons I picked this as a Contextmas topic. I’m delighted to

Author of TFA here. Discussing that very Wallace–Silverblatt exchange with a friend is one of the reasons I picked this as a Contextmas topic. I’m delighted to see someone else picking up on it. To me, “Infinite Jest” feels a lot like folk art in this way. This also connects with DFW’s zoom effect, at least the way it feels to me: he keeps getting deeper and deeper into a topic or situation, and you keep seeing the same structures go by (or are they quite the same?), and before long you don’t really know where you are in relation to the starting point, but it doesn’t matter. I think the numbing effect that critics like James Wood complain about, analogous to the “but so what” feeling of fractal zooms, is exactly what he’s going for. Or at least part of it. The topic that I didn’t want to actually dig into, but I hope I point the reader at obliquely a couple times, is how people use synecdoche and metaphor in fiction. I don’t know how to talk about this in a way that seems fresh, clear, and honest. So instead I talked about things on either side of it. It’s a writing style I’ve been experimenting with lately that seems to scratch certain kinds of itch I get.