"Let me see if I have this right: Weary of converting past experience into currency, Jonathan Franzen goes on a vacation, which he immediately converts into a lengthy article for the New Yorker. The article, ‘Farther Away,’ which eviscerates his ‘friend’ David Foster Wallace, appears very nearly on the publication date of Wallace’s unfinished novel. Franzen, who claims that Wallace committed suicide as a career move, responded to Wallace’s suicide at the time by asking, ‘Does it look now like David had all the answers?’ Franzen is horrified on behalf of all of us that there’s a difference between Wallace’s persona and his actual existence. Perhaps the difference that Franzen should contemplate instead is the one between Wallace, who delved, heroically, into the darkness of his own soul, and his ‘friend’ Jonathan Franzen, whose oeuvre (and this article in particular) is devoted to fighting off any insight into himself and locating instead all shade and shadow elsewhere, out there, the next precinct over."