SOURCE: A review of Infinite Jest, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1996, pp. 141-42.

In the following positive review, Moore places Wallace firmly in the tradition of encyclopedic American novelists like William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gass.

While reading William Gass's The Tunnel last year at this time, I feared I was witnessing the last of a dying breed, the encyclopedic American novel that began with Gaddis's Recognitions in 1955, hit its stride in the sixties and seventies (Giles Goat-Boy, Gravity's Rainbow, Gaddis again with J R, The Public Burning, LETTERS), went baroque in the eighties (Darconville's Cat, Take Five, Women and Men, You Bright and Risen Angels), then raged against the dying of the light in the nineties with Powers's Gold-Bug Variations and Gass's massive masterpiece. Who was left to write such novels, or to read them at a time when some scorn such books...