Growing Sentences with David Foster Wallace

If we want to know what American normality is -- what Americans want to regard as normal -- we can trust television. For television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror. Not the Stendhalian mirror reflecting the blue sky and mud puddle. More like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors his biceps and determines his better profile. This kind of window on nervous American self-perception is just invaluable, fiction-wise.

His style begs to be parodied but this is a facile attempt, in my opinion.

It sure does help to have the ideas to back up the style, though.

[1] (Here I should mention a habit of hers I had long noticed but never commented on, which habit was that she would walk through churches after weddings, employing her falcate digits to retrieve the spent grains of the matrimonial offering.)

http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/parody.htm

Making lighthearted jokes about Wallace's syntax and verbosity are the common first steps I've watched people make when they begin reading his prose, but it usually doesn't take very more reading at all for these people to see that even attempting to parody Wallace on a humorous, surface level would require the kind of introspection and effort that takes a near-lifetime and of the sort that probably isn't the most satisfying or healthy way for a person to spend their time.