Is there anything else to write about David Foster Wallace? Fourteen years after his death, Wallace may be the most-discussed figure of contemporary American literature, yet despite all this talk — or maybe because of it — almost no one has anything interesting to say about him. You can hear the exhaustion in the title of a recent LitHub article: “The Last Essay I Need to Write About David Foster Wallace.”

The conversation about Wallace has hardened into two dominant views. In one, Wallace is an enlightened guru who calls us out of the spiritual deadness of American life and into a deeper and more fulfilling way of being. “I see him as a great American Buddhist writer, in the lineage of Whitman and Ginsberg,” wrote novelist George Saunders. “He was a wake-up artist . . . who gave us new respect for the world through his reverence for it.” This is the view of Wallace emphasized by products such as This Is Water, a 2005 commencement speech that was posthumously published as a small book with one koan-like sentence on each page, and The End of the Tour, a 2015 film starring Jason Segel as Wallace that was described by one reviewer as “not so much bio-pic as hagiography.”

In the other view, Wallace is an avatar of toxic literary masculinity — Norman Mailer for people who aren’t old enough to remember Norman Mailer. Posthumous revelations about Wallace’s verbal and physical abuse of women have led some to see his fiction as tainted; in Making Literature Now, for example, Amy Hungerford cites Wallace’s misogyny as one reason for her refusal to read his work. On the internet, Wallace has become shorthand for what Molly Fischer calls “literary chauvinism”: