Literary star, out of the limelight
The way he spoke -- in tightly wound, fully realized thought, his diction excellent, his tone formal, any high-mindedness kept in check by free-floating jargon -- sort of replicated the experience of reading him. It's not that [David Foster] Wallace is a borg, finally. It's that he's socially awkward and very guarded, and so in person, his intelligence naturally becomes his greatest defense."It's an odd question to ask me," Wallace said, when he was asked if one should worry about never having read certain "classic" works of literature. "I worry about it, but for me it gets very muddled between what are my expectations for myself as a human being and what do I want to read professionally. Totally between you and me, use it if you want, but my mom and I both laugh. Mom teaches literature at a junior college; mom's never read 'Moby-Dick.' I've never read 'The Iliad.' I know I've stood in gatherings and made facial expressions meant to communicate that I've read it, but in fact I haven't."
And yet, it came out, he has read the entire Tom Clancy oeuvre. On airplanes.