SOURCE: "Verbal Pyrotechnics," in Chicago Tribune Books, March 9, 1997, pp. 1, 11.

In the following review, Stern examines Wallace's collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and equates Wallace's accomplishment with that of the classic essayist Montaigne.

'I go out of my way," wrote Essayist Number One, "but by license not carelessness…. I want the material to make its own divisions … without my interlacing them with words, with links and seams put in for the benefit of … inattentive readers." As to style, "I love a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as in the mouth … succulent and sinewy, brief but compressed … better difficult than boring … irregular, disconnected and bold."

Montaigne's 400-year-old prescription works to describe these wonderful essays by David Foster Wallace. The best essays—blends of fact, scene, observation, analysis, portraiture and commentary—Wallacesays, are often written by fiction writers, "oglers" who "watch over other...