Across these reviews, Wallace consistently prosecutes his own emerging aesthetic project. He engages largely with experimental and postmodern texts that, in one way or another, lose the plot, become too self-involved, too inward-looking. As his review of Acker suggests, there are certain literary artifacts that only an academic could love, and who could love a text that only academics love? Wallace is clearly doing the thinking that will pave the way for Infinite Jest.
Would a book like Infinite Jest only meet the approval of "professional readers," graduate students in everything but name, festooned with guidebooks and eager to do online detective work, or is the form of a book like Infinite fest a route not to a cartoonishly large "churn-like" emotional and intellectual life, but rather a perfectly normal-sized-fully and merely human existence?