Reality Bites as the Source for Infinite Jest?

Robert Harrison’s recent Entitled Opinions episode about David Foster Wallace reminded me of an interesting coincidence I discovered last year.1 In 1994, two years before the publication of David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest, the generation X cult classic Reality Bites appeared. (Spoiler Alert: I’ll ruin thematic and plot elements of both works in …

John McPhee and the Irregular Restrictive Which

It’s been a busy few weeks with research and the end of the semester. I promise I’ll get to writing substantive posts very soon. In the interim, I’d like to express my incredulity at John McPhee’s ignorance of the “irregular restrictive which” until it was pointed out to him by New Yorker editor William Shawn: Mr. …

Allusion and Undertones in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I wrote in my introductory post that I am ambivalent about much of contemporary fiction. Well, it’s wonderful to come across as singular a counterexample as Mohsin Hamid’s beautiful novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This is the sort of work that reminds you why you read; I heartily recommend it to all. (A word of advice: …

Letters to the Living Dead

The eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s Herzog spends his days writing letters. Moses Herzog1 is writing to “everyone under the sun…to the newspapers, to people in public life, to friends and relatives and at last to the dead, his own obscure dead, and finally the famous dead.”2 Later, he pauses during one his letters: He …