"One of the wincing pleasures of Max’s biography is reading excerpts from Wallace’s correspondence, especially with his close friend and combatant Jonathan Franzen, but also with just about every white male writer he might ever have viewed as a rival or mentor. Aggressive self-abasement, grandstanding, veiled abuse, genuine thoughtfulness, thin-skinned pandering — it’s all there. As the correspondents compete about who is making genuine human connections and who and what is really nice and good, they seem to be in some realm far from most kinds of human connection save for that of heated testosteronic battle. In this bizarre arena, niceness becomes just one more mode of competition, thereby undermining itself."
(via michelledean)
