A large part of Wallace’s appeal, for me anyway, was that you could always tell that he was kind of an asshole, ever on the verge of being cruel, and not just to himself. Banishing contempt entirely may be a good way to live, but it’s another kind of death for writing. Which is one reason it’s worth remembering, as the image of Wallace as slacker saint and liberal sage hardens into Hemingwayesque concrete, that he was a Reagan voter and a Perot supporter; a jealous guy who once contemplated buying a gun to knock off a woman’s husband; and a person who put to paper both the notion that the “good thing” about 9/11 was that it brought Americans together, and that “AIDS’s gift to us lies in its loud reminder that there’s nothing casual about sex at all.” Wallace never wanted that piece republished in a collection — in fact, he wanted it forgotten. He’d probably be the last person to argue for his own sainthood.
This is the DFW that always has jumped out starkly clear to me from the pages, ever since I hit on the "Yours Truly" chapters in IJ. People who try to spin him as some trans-human wise sage of universalism seem to me like the people who see Jesus in toast.
He was an excellent writer, and he hit numerous home runs ("How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" resonates with me particularly). However, I still think he would've been better if he developed less bland stances than his "apolitical but vaguely pro-status quo" fare. His romanticizing of the goodness of "Middle America", as in "The View from Ms. Thompson's" (about 9/11), is probably him at his worst.