[....[ In the end, I can't think of another writer whose work was more engaged with the difficult demands of simple human decency. Wallace was a Midwestern Kafka, the Borges of Normal, Illinois, and, for the rest of my life, I know that whenever something interesting happens, culturally, politically, or literally, I will sit back and wonder what Dave Wallace might have made of it. I can't think of another writer more emblematic of this, of our, time. Part o what I know about being alive now feels like I owe to him. And now--certum est, quia impossibile--he is gone.