The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace

“The Prodigious Fiction of Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace,” by Tom LeClair, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 38, no. 1 (Fall 1996). “Powers, Vollmann, and Wallace deserve essays of their own. I have chosen to treat them and their most remarkable novels—The Gold Bug Variations (1991), You Bright and Risen Angels (1987), and Infinite Jest (1996)—together because fundamental similarities among the authors and these three works illustrate their relation to and differences from Pynchon, as well as other large-minded novelists of Pynchon’s generation….”