SOURCE: "'Maximalist' Short Fiction from a Talented Young Writer," in Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1990, Sec. 14, p. 7.

The following review highlights Wallace's distinctiveness from his predecessors, "the metafictionists," and his contemporaries, "the minimalists."

David Foster Wallace is probably the most talented of the writers under 30 who have been forced on the reading public over the past five or so years by publishers excited by the commercial success of such books as Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero.

Most of the work of these writers has been forgettable, in some cases even regrettable. But if the work of Wallace's contemporaries mostly consists of thin, under-nourished volumes that together form the body of the so-called "minimalist" school of American fiction, his work is resoundingly maximalist.

A 1985 graduate of Amherst, he developed his senior thesis into The Broom of the System (1987), a novel distinguished by the...