The End of the Tour was never going to escape the David Foster Wallace mystique; the famously expansive author has become paradigmatic of the “tortured artist,” to the point that his literature is now almost inextricable from the tragedy surrounding his life and death. He was (it already seems hard to remember) a flesh-and-blood man, but for better and for worse he embodies an archetype in American culture: the misunderstood genius, the voice of an alienated generation, the lotus flower who was too pure to stay mired in the crudities of this world for very long.
Adversion 