<![CDATA[The Writer And The Man]]>Reviews of D.T. Max's David Foster Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, are starting to appear. Scott Esposito describes it as "a book without much human or philosophical insight," but not entirely unuseful:

On the positive side, Max is clearly a diligent and able researcher. He’s dug up all sorts of interesting facts about Wallace and seems to even be familiar with his correspondence (at least with luminaries like Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLillo). There are lots of little gems in here, and I think this would constitute the main appeal for this book to Wallace fans and academics. The depth to which Wallace himself was an addict surprised me, as well as the extent to which fame really did seduce and then mangle him as a young writer who had an enormous amount of early success. These findings do put books like Infinite Jest into a new light.

At Publisher's Weekly, Gabe Habash finds the book limited for similar reasons. In a particularly thoughtful review, Craig Fehrman focuses on Wallace's relationship to the Midwest:

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