What famous writers are quite overrated?

David Foster Wallace.

Brittanica summarizes him thus:

American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose dense works provide a dark, often satirical analysis of American culture.

Thus far, I think he stinks. I’m not as familiar with the man’s oeuvre as I probably should be—I’ve read a couple of the essays he published in Harper’s magazine and elsewhere, but not his doorstopper of a novel, Infinite Jest, nor any other of his fiction works. In regards to Wallace’s nonfiction writing, however, I have come to the following conclusion: though eloquent and evocative, the man is severely overrated.

Wallace, to me, seems to be to essay-writing what the elderly George Carlin was to stand-up comedy. There’s no pithy insight here, no profundity, no subversion of expectations—just one man’s petty complaints. Much like Carlin’s routines, Wallace’s essays are just plain old bitching papered over by snappily delivered witticisms and pop culture references. The fact that Wallace’s references—and his diction—are a great deal more erudite and sophisticated than Carlin’s doesn’t change the fact that he’s just whining about stuff he doesn’t like. Wallace’s works are not so much excoriating satire as they are a world-weary idealist’s halfhearted, shortsighted, subjective, and more-than-slightly misanthropic kvetching about the world and the people who live in it.

I scanned the text of Wallace’s article “Shipping Out” (about life on a Caribbean cruise liner) carefully. There’s one word that he repeats more than any other: despair. There’s a heck of a lot of projection (a trait lamentably common amongst postmodernists) going on here. Wallace, never in the best of mental health, sees all the goings-on on a cruise ship through the grey-colored glasses of his depression, and attributes symptoms of that depression to his fellow passengers, and even the cruise industry itself. It rapidly becomes tiresome.

And then there are the political ramifications of Wallace’s works. To refer once again to “Shipping Out,” Wallace has some wholly unflattering statements to make in regards to the cruise industry. He comes to see cruise lines, and the people who patronize them, as symptomatic of some great and wholly obscene species of greed, which he puzzlingly conflates with Americanism. (Let us not forget that anti-Americanism is also a postmodernist trait, and one indelibly associated with contemporary wokeism.) Just about everything his fellow passengers do, and that the cruise line offers, triggers Wallace somehow. He seems to think that, in a more perfect world, cruise lines wouldn’t exist, and people wouldn’t need to take these adolescent fantasy joyrides on humongous ships to struggling nations, and would have more respect for themselves than to do so. Early on in the essay, Wallace relates a word used in the cruise line’s brochure—pampered—to the diaper brand, very un-subtly comparing cruise ship passengers to infants wanting to be swaddled and coddled.

And that’s not the only example, either. Wallace just comes across as an insufferable snob (again, as postmodernists are wont to do). When he isn’t comparing trapshooting to the Challenger disaster, he’s making snap judgments about his fellow passengers and cruise line employees—as if by dint of his lucidity and disdain for the whole affair, he occupies some sort of higher moral ground. This is another thing that annoys me about postmodernists in general. They’ll make observations about other people and pretend that this single attribute they've observed tells them everything they need to know about that person’s character, intelligence, political beliefs, and moral rectitude (or lack thereof). Early on in his article “Shipping Out,” Wallace mentions a man wearing a baseball cap that says BIG DADDY. He says nothing further about this man, but we are left with the impression that Wallace disapproves of this, and his taciturnity on the subject leads one to believe that the act of wearing a ball cap that says BIG DADDY is such an obviously and unconscionably shameful act that it requires neither explanation or condemnation on Wallace’s part. It’s the postmodernist version of the “begging the question” fallacy. Instead of writing, “While boarding the cruise ship I saw a fat middle-aged white man wearing a BIG DADDY baseball cap,” Wallace merely lays the cap in front of us and invites us to—no, demands that we—join him in judging this nameless cap-wearer for his sartorial choices and the boorish qualities they imply. Wallace’s essays are full of stuff like this, and it’s maddening. Irascibility and brutally honest commentary are traits I admire in travel writers like Paul Theroux—but Theroux, at least, is indiscriminate in his targets. Everyone he meets on a journey across a continent is liable to come in for some sort of criticism or insult. Wallace, on the other hand, whose journalistic endeavors seemed to consistently land him in the midst of middle-class white people, comes off as uncharitable and unfairly biased.

Here’s the thing, see. Wallace’s observations—much like George Carlin’s latter-day stand-up routines—fall completely flat…unless you already agree with what he’s saying. That’s really the problem with both Wallace’s satire and Carlin’s comedy (and, in fact, all of modern comedy). It’s not designed to be generally funny. To appeal to a wide audience. It appeals to only a certain segment of the audience. The left-leaning and cynical, generally. Some of the centrists in the audience might have the occasional chuckle, but the other half of the crowd just sits there in stony silence, waiting for something funny to be said. (If, that is, they’re not feeling downright attacked.) And that’s pretty much how I felt reading “Shipping Out” and to a lesser degree, “Consider the Lobster.” I got the sense that I was reading the diary of a man who, much like the progressives of today, lets far too much about other people’s behavior bother him, and puts what he believes to be a humorous and mocking spin on it that comes off as arrogant and mean-spirited and thoroughly unfunny.

To be perfectly frank, reading Wallace’s essays, I get the impression that he was a sad sack of shit who was no fun to be around, and was the sort of person whom nobody wanted to invite to any sort of gathering or function for fear that he’d ruin it with his antisocial behavior, peculiar obsessions, and off-the-wall questions and comments. A total killjoy, who—with his incessant fretting about the moral implications of all he saw—sucked the fun out of everything, be it a lobster festival in Maine or a Caribbean cruise.

And yet, for some strange reason—probably political correctness—Wallace is hailed as a genius. His novel Infinite Jest was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels written between 1923 and 2005. The Los Angeles Times called him “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years,” probably for the same reason people say old George Carlin was funny—they didn't actually think he was funny, they just agreed with what he said, and would pay good money to hear him say it. Even Wallace’s untimely demise is a feather in his cap of sorts. His name now carries the same cachet as Kurt Cobain. People’s hearts go out to those sensitive, artsy types who tire of living in this sinful world and take their own lives. The Virginia Woolfs. The Vincent van Goghs. The Anthony Bourdains.

It’s a terribly sad thing that Wallace took his own life, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t think it’s fair to put him on a pedestal for that, or laud his works merely for being trenchant and politically fashionable. There should be some substance to a person’s work. They shouldn’t win plaudits merely for being stylish.

There. I’m done. Tirade over. You can go and read Infinite Jest now and try to forget that I’ve poisoned the well. I’m certainly going to attempt to. Maybe Wallace’s fiction has a bit more appeal than his nonfiction. But I can already predict the sort of comments this answer will likely receive. Some folks will say that it’s easy for me, an unpublished wannabe writer, to sit here and critique a far more successful scrivener. They’ll accuse me of envy. Or they’ll insist that my political beliefs have clouded my judgment, and that I’m prejudiced against Wallace for his views, and that he really wasn’t a postmodernist, and that I need to chill. Or they’ll just say that I’m a dickhead who’s penned a hit piece about an author almost two decades dead and unable to defend himself.

Setting all that aside, all I’m doing is answering the question. I think David Foster Wallace is quite overrated as a writer. So far.