The Mrs. says what Maribeth needs is choir practice followed by a nice quilting bee. In better times I would have taken the quilting-bee idea and run with it. But now there's no budget.

-George Saunders, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

This old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes "Morning boys, how's the water?" and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, "What the fuck is water?"

-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

YOU NEEDN'T VENTURE far into A. O. Scott's New York Review article on David Foster Wallace (February 10, 2000) to see the writing on the wall. Scott begins by ripping from its context a fairly unattractive quote that concludes with the ominous sobriquet and subsequent ruling metaphor, "Secret Compulsive Masturbator." He then moves on to a clever bon mot: Wallace, he writes, is suffering from what Harold Bloom labeled the "anxiety of influence." But in the case of Wallace and his postmodern literary forebears, "anxiety may not be a strong enough word; panic is more like it." In the debunking that follows, Wallace is read through the prism of his predecessors and found to be trapped in a literary paradigm – "postmodern self-consciousness" – that has run its course.

Like most critiques of self-consciousness, however, Scott's runs up against the problem that its self-conscious subject has anticipated the criticism. As a result, there is a lot of knowing going on: Scott knows that Wallace knows that we know what he knows. Given all this knowledge, why write about Wallace at all? The answer seems to be that it isn't exactly Wallace that's being written about, or, if he is, it's as a metonym for certain trends in what we might call late postmodernity; he's made to answer not only for the sins of his postmodern fathers but also for his own indebtedness to them. The problem is not, of course, with metonyms – after all, critics have been setting up and knocking down straw men for ages. Rather, it's that Wallace is a straw man to reckon with, and that Scott's larger agenda pulls his specific arguments out of alignment. Scott's diagnosis of Wallace's aims is accurately, even eloquently rendered, but an odor pervades the piece, not so much of corruption as of opinions already formed. Scott's allegiances are to a tradition even more barren of profitable lessons than postmodernism, and the end result of his article is a resurrection of the very oppositions – between irony and sincerity, self-consciousness and artifice – that Wallace and the best of his contemporaries are trying, at last, to destroy.

What keeps Scott from appreciating this is a certain aggressive disdain for postmodern consciousness – not irony itself but its persistent peekaboo-ish flaunting in the text – a mode that has had an unfortunate vogue in the academy these last twenty years. This may be because Scott cut his teeth at Lingua Franca, a magazine that garnered recognition as a progressive answer to the academy's most egregious excesses. He is both a sensitive reader of fiction and, as his recent appointment to replace Janet Maslin as a New York Times movie critic suggests, a generalist, concerned as much with the broader culture as with any abstract theory of the novel. So while there is a definite element of generational betrayal to his critique – that of a smart young man reassuring a readership raised on Updike, Mailer, and Vidal that they have been right to dismiss Wallace and his peers – his literary-historical lament might also be said to voice the frustration of a large segment of intelligent readers who find postmodernist jouissance, with its insistence on opacity and recursiveness, alienating and unsatisfying. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, they have built a funhouse, but who would want to live there? Not Scott, for whom much postmodern writing is "formal and stylistic invention for its own sake, an empty set of quotation marks, a self-consciousness without selves."

THIS IS WONDERFULLY put, but is it the geography Wallace really inhabits? In a sense, Wallace brings Scott's overly historical reading upon himself, for the novelist seems altogether obsessed with his place in literary history. But, again, this is not the bane Scott reads it to be; you cannot step into the same river twice, and if Wallace steals a trick here and there, he tends to carry it further downstream. Besides which, Wallace has already dramatized his struggle with the postmodern father. For anyone who grew up in the name-dropping poststructuralist academy, there is nothing more familiar than this language, as Pynchon once put it, "of proper nouns."

Scott, however, is fairly intent on his own game. Confronted with a specific text, he plots it as a point on a literary-historical map, and dismisses it largely, it seems, on the basis of its landing alongside some of the worthless epigones of postmodernism. Remarking among her contemporaries a similar tendency to view literature as a teleological progression, Woolf noted in 1919 that "the analogy between literature and the process of making motor cars scarcely holds good beyond the first glance. It is doubtful whether in the course of centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature." It is interesting to see that Scott applies a similar analogy, though to the driving of cars rather than the making of them. Postmodern irony, he writes, is a "blind alley," its mannerism a "cul de sac." It is, like the building of motor cars, an optimistic metaphor, suggesting that the cultural climate in which we find ourselves is one we've gotten to through a series of wrong turns, and is therefore, presumably, possible to retreat from. This sort of reverse is what Scott seems to suggest when he invokes the un-ironic author of For Common Things, Jedediah Purdy, as well as certain "very interesting writers," who have simply "turn[ed] around and walk[ed] in another direction." But he does not indicate who these writers are, or where they might be walking to. Nor does he explain how, at this late date, we might unlearn the postmodern vocabulary and recapture some pre-ironic way of being – how we can, in effect, start playing dumb.

For insofar as postmodernism, irony, and self-consciousness describe the way we live, they are not merely mistakes or constructs – they are the very stuff we breathe, the language in which our battles all are fought. Scott's "very interesting writers" remain anonymous, and one suspects they may not exist; instead, they form Scott's reader-consumer ideal, developed before literature's fall from "single-entendre" grace, the sort of novelists he'd like to see appear over the horizon, but who are historically impossible. It's as if he's ordering lunch in the pizza shop of Parnassus: "Give me a Dostoevsky, but hold the religious proselytizing and the Insulted and Offended, okay? And a small Kafka to go."

SCOTT'S STRENGTH as a critic, which is considerable, derives in no small part from his aversion to the literary and academic post-next-new thing; but here this aversion leads him to mistake the materials of Wallace's fiction for fashion. Because it is one of Wallace's primary insights that, for many of his readers, those very intellectual fads have become part of the landscape and the language; they are the given with which a serious novelist must now work. This may very well be anathema to the ghost of Raymond Carver, which hovers over this piece in silent rebuke. It is in part Scott's allegience to Carver which leads him to mistake Wallace's sarcastic dismissal of New Realism's emotional sleight-of-hand – "Some of the most heartbreaking stuff available at any fine bookseller's anywhere" – as an endorsement. This is unfortunate, given that our writing programs and literary journals are only now beginning to emerge from the dark years of the Ford-Carver administration.

This mode – stories of inexpressive people drinking inexpensive drinks – achieved its height in the eighties but proved irresistible to a generation of imitators, becoming virtually synonymous with the pre-manufactured fictions churned out by MFAs. Although largely ignored, for obvious reasons, by English departments, this is the style that poses a real threat: it has, after all, some accouterments of the human – do we not drink a great deal? do we not speak in chopped, meaningless phrases? – but its dim, thin view of our lives threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If this is the nourishment of our literate public, what possible vision of the human might they produce? As Wallace has put it, "We can all of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?"

Yet Wallace has, for his part, been even harder on the metafictionists, who strike him, because of his own formal concerns, closer to the quick. The heroine of his long story "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," for instance, introduces herself as a "postmodernist" but ends up writing ad copy. She is a vicious send-up of the pretentious avant-gardist circa 1988, but for all of Wallace's skepticism, conceptualism remains a primary concern both in his work and his criticism. He has recently praised writers as different, but also as conceptually interesting, as George Saunders, who writes stories about pathetic human longing ensconced in sci-fi simulacra, and Ken Kalfus, who practices a realist style but maintains close contact with the fantastic.

The trick, for Wallace, is not to find a return path to prelapsarian ideals, but to incorporate the complexity of human relations into the framework of a fiction that, in its formal intelligence, makes itself recognizable to people living in a technologically overbearing world. His great strength resides in his ability to imbue philosophical thickets with real thorns – if you prick his metaphysics, they will bleed. "Westward's" writer-protagonist "hopes, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die. Maybe it's called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn't know. He wonders who the hell really cares." The truth is that no one does, and that we all want to write it – as countless writers have said over the years, the best work is Realism, no matter its form. Scott believes that Wallace "can't have it both ways"; that he must either choose between his pomo tricks or his emotional intensity. But it is the courage, if also perhaps the folly, of Wallace's latest collection that it demands both. It might be that Wallace has reached, as he has elsewhere put it, "some line's end's end" and will have to retreat and retrench; the collection is, in some ways, a series of increasingly desperate "raids," as Eliot has it, "on the inarticulate." But it has properly been called "heroic" because it holds so steadfastly to its ground; and one thinks that if Wallace ever decides to write about intelligent, emotionally capable characters whom he does not feel the need to parody, it will be on this ground that his greatest work will come.

Nearly all of Wallace's own criticism has been directed toward outlining the contours of this synthesis, somewhere beyond both postmodern "no-handsism" and conventional realism's earthy tones. It is in this regard unfortunate that the conclusion to his justly famous essay, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," is probably the most quoted passage in his oeuvre. Not only because there's a great deal of fiction that wants reading, but because his musings on what the "next rebels" might be like, and their embrace of "single-entendre principles" seems to be a rhetorical jest. Like Fredric Jameson declaring in the 1970s that the next new thing would have to be... Realism, Wallace is proposing a logical conundrum, or a joke, but by no means a call to arms.

The next real rebel, to return happily to Wallace's phrase, will not be Jed Purdy, but someone who fits the culture of irony so comfortably that she could forge from its discontinuous shards a sincere language and work upon it a sort of Barthelmeic magic; who could transform our language of apathy into a cri de coeur. In any case, Wallace's famous pronouncement has had the baneful effect of encouraging the frenetic "what's-next" quality of our criticism, which re-creates in publishing house editorial meetings the atmosphere of a high-pressure, high-tech investment fund. So we cast about for heroes: Is Wallace our savior? Is Rick Moody? The KGB Bar on 4th Street, with its Stalinist kitsch and now anthologized reading series? Like the Whitman that Allen Ginsberg conjured in a California supermarket, we approach every new grocery clerk with desperate, incommensurate hope: "Are you my angel?"