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David Gates' appreciation is well-put:
I suspect that Wallace was a genius who happened to be a writer, rather than a writer who happened to be a genius—Hemingway, for instance. You can't imagine Hemingway writing, as Wallace did, a treatise called "Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity" (2004)...If the endlessly self-analytical Hamlet had been a writer (aside from that "speech of some twelve or fifteen lines" he composes to insert in "The Murder of Gonzago," the play within the play), he would have written far more like Wallace than like Shakespeare. Hamlet says that "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams"; it's a line that the author of "Infinite Jest" must have taken deeply to heart.You can see that side of Wallace reflected here, in this animated reading from his book Consider the Lobster. These are the words of someone who finds the world a bit cacophonous for his tastes, and can't quite shut down the part of his brain that is quietly repulsed by humanity. He talks, in this passage, about being unable to fulfill his dream of floating outside and above this loud and dirty realm. The pity is that what made his writing rare is that his genius did remain outside and above, even as he shouldered his way down city streets like the rest of us. Had he lived totally off the grid, he would have had nothing to say. Had he simply accepted civilization, as most of us do, he would have had little to write. But he did neither. And that made him a voice worth hearing.
