[...] the harrowing David Lipsky piece Rolling Stone published after his death, wherein we find Dave confessing to Jonathan Franzen that, in Jon's words, Dave had a "notion of not having an authentic self. Of being just quick enough to construct a pleasing self for whomever he was talking to. I see now he wasn't just being funny--there was something genuinely compromised in David." He evidently came at this "'meta'-stuff" not from a Modernist perspective, in which difficulty becomes a kind of aesthetic merit badge, or from the John Barthian "literature of exhaustion" perspective, in which literary sophistication equals seeing through literary devices, but rather out of his personal struggle to find within his own mind an authentic, honorable artistic self. In no other Wallace book is this struggle so painfully clear. The pieces have no formal connection; what they have is a metaphysical connection. In this sense they go beyond Modernism and beyond Postmodernism and into a realm for which we do not yet even have a name, though I have often wondered if it might not be called a form of literary postlapsarianism.