Michiko on DFW: “These moments, sadly, are engulfed by reams and reams of stream-of-consciousness musings that may be intermittently amusing or disturbing but that in the end feel more like the sort of free-associative ramblings served up in an analyst’s office than between the covers of a book. Mr. Wallace’s previous work shows that he possesses a heightened gift for what the musician Robert Plant once called the ‘deep and meaningless.’ But in these pages it more often feels like the shallow and self-conscious.”

Count the adjectives in those last two sentences.