... a striking resemblance to that horrible guy who was in your college creative writing class - you know the one I'm talking about - the one who never stopped interrupting the teacher and one-upping his classmates; the one who wanted to be a writer because it was good for his ego but who held nothing but contempt for his readers.
"Fiction for me is a conversation between me and something that May Not Be Named - God, the Cosmos, the Unified Field, my own psychoanalytic cathexes, Roqoq'oqu, whomever," Wallace once wrote in a letter to the writer Jonathan Franzen. "I do not feel even the hint of an obligation to an entity called READER."
Remember that guy? I choose the comparison for a reason - Wallace spent his entire life in academia, and one of the biggest problems with literary fiction is that it's now written overwhelmingly by writers who live in academia and write only for other people who are there, too.
People who slave away at soul-crushing jobs, only to come home and slave away at running a household, do not want to spend their precious free moments slogging through 1,200-page novels whose chief purpose is to demonstrate the author's superb understanding of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
These readers want novels with people, and yes, plots, and it is in no way unchallenging or demeaning for authors to offer these things. I wouldn't have gotten through childhood or adolescence - and I sure won't be getting through adulthood - without novels, and I know there are many others who feel the same way.
She's talking about fiction, but without too great a stretch we can imagine a connection between her critique of novelists who are too smart for the bourgeois masses and Jon Franklin's notion of finding a silver sliver in the most depressing real-life events and turning it into a tale.
