SOURCE: "David Foster Wallace," in American Energies, William Morrow and Co., Inc, 1992, pp. 386-92.

In the essay below, critic and educator Birkerts sets Tom Wolfe's call for a return to fiction of social realism on the nineteenth-century model against contemporary techniques of story-telling to present Wallace as the exemplar of a viable alternative for a new approach to serious literature in our age.

Tom Wolfe, as we all know, has a positive genius for wetting his index finger and getting it up there into the weather. In his recent essay in Harper's, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel," he raised a call for a return to subject matter in fiction. Wolfe holds that in our postmodern and minimalist era the art has all but withered away. Novelists and storytellers are busy with academic exercises; they are ceding the job of transcribing reality...