[...] DFW could write high-powered prose better than just about anyone but he well knew the value of mixing it with informal day-to-day English, and, though he was especially good at it, it's worth keeping in mind that he was hardly the first great English writer to do so. For every Milton who kept it all on an elevated plane there was a Shakespeare who knew how to sock us in the chops with some well-timed plain talk (among reviewers with humanities degrees, it also seems compulsory to make some remark--or, just as well, to go on at some length--on "post-modernism," a topic of zero interest to most actual readers).