David Foster Wallace has been dubbed everything from a "hideously talented writer," according to Jonathan Levi in the Los Angeles Times, to the "master of voices, a writer whose sense of history and politics and morality makes itself felt in repeated, almost compulsive acts of mimicry and impersonation," as Vince Passaro noted in Harper's. Wallace is the kind of writer whose talent leaves critics groping for the proper artistic comparison. Writers Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and John Irving, filmmaker David Lynch, and even comic David Letterman have all been invoked as readers tackle the sardonic humor and complicated style that have led Wallace to be cited as Generation X's first literary hero. Wallace, according to Frank Bruni in his New York Times Magazine profile, "is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that...