Wallace had said again and again how much he loved the reader. But how much did he really care wether people found what they were looking for in his books? And how much did he write for himself? One test was his willingness to create a satisfactory plot. He had never liked plot, that tidying up of life in wich, as he had written Howard in 1986, "revelations revelationize and things are cleared up." To rely too much on plot risked seducing the reader; it was like selling Tide. Moreover, plots typically involved the gradual maturation of the characters, and that was not how Wallace saw things. Hid default view of life was more mechanistic than organic. Change in character [...] was usually a binary flip. Yet he knew an unplotted book violated the physics of reading.

Fra Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, D. T. Maxs biografi om Davi Foster Wallace.