SOURCE: "The Road to Babbittville," in New York Times, March 16, 1997, p. 71.

In the following review of Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Miller sees the writer fulfilling the promise and allaying the suspicions generated by his much-discussed novel Infinite Jest.

Many readers young and old (but especially the young and media-saturated) regarded David Foster Wallace's mammoth novel, Infinite Jest, with suspicion. Jaded by too many middling writers heralded as the Next Big Thing, they wondered if, as its title intimated, this daunting tome wasn't just a big joke. Infinite Jest itself didn't quite clear things up. Messy, demanding and stubbornly unresolved, it was also frequently brilliant. Yet Mr. Wallace's penchant for pointed satire and flashy tricks often obscured the book's passion. Ultimately, Infinite Jest felt noncommittal, leaving some readers unconvinced that Mr. Wallace offered anything more than a lot of energy and a dazzling but...