It is the best and worst of times for David Foster Wallace scholarship. The fact that less than a decade after his death we can describe “Wallace studies” as an emerging field is a testament the speed and enthusiasm with which critics have flocked to his work. Yet the race to declare Wallace the next big thing in US letters has, perhaps inevitably, often allowed for a lack of adequately rigorous analysis. The nature of his death – suicide by hanging in 2008 – continues to befog much commentary on his work, whilst his percolation in the media as a wise and shaggy sage helps to deflect more sceptical evaluations. Gesturing toward Reality: David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, and David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels are in many respects indicative of the promise and limitations of Wallace scholarship as it currently stands. Both published by Bloomsbury within a month of each other, these volumes’ contrasting approaches suggest an ongoing debate over what particular strand of Wallace's multifaceted career is the most important. For The Long Thing his novels are paramount; for the contributors to Gesturing toward Reality his status as a thinker should guide analysis. That similar essay collections could examine Wallace's short stories, his journalism, his use of mathematics, or even his pop-cultural persona signals the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for those taking stock of his work.

The Long Thing's genesis in a Wallace-themed double issue of Studies in the Novel is itself confirmation, in Adam Kelly's words, that “it should no longer be necessary to argue for Wallace's place in the literary canon” (4). Contributors are writing in the light not only of Wallace's canonization, however, but also of canonical readings of his work, particularly in relation to his critique of postmodern irony in the essay “E Unibus Pluram.” As Toon Staes observes in “Wallace and Empathy: A Narrative Approach,” the “zeal with which critics have since latched on to [this] essay … has given Wallace's work an uncomfortable air of the holier-than-thou” (25). Wary of critical tendencies to read Wallace's fiction as formulating a new “moral(izing) impulse” (25), Staes instead locates Wallace's concern with empathy in a longer historical narrative through astute comparisons with George Eliot. Elsewhere David Letzler's notion that Infinite Jest manipulates encyclopedic “cruft” – “junk text” (131) that is “basically pointless” (130) – offers a welcome break with readings that fetishize that novel's minutiae in the hope of unlocking its secrets. Nonetheless, Stephen Burn's deft analysis of The Pale King demonstrates the continued rewards of reading Wallace closely. Despite his admission that “we are clearly still in the prototype phase of Pale King criticism” (149), Burn's essay – alongside others by Marshall Boswell and Ralph Clare – establishes a rich ground from which studies of Wallace's unfinished novel can move forward.

As much as The Long Thing points towards the future, however, the collection also displays imbalances and preoccupations that continue to stymie Wallace scholarship. The all-male contributor list, for instance, implies that the field is still something of a boys’ club. This becomes more worrying when we consider arguments lauding Wallace's apparently humanist intentions. Conley Wouters, for instance, commends Wallace's “lush plea to stay human” (182) without accounting for what a “fundamental, functional humanity” (176) entails – and for whom in particular. This reluctance to scrutinize Wallace's investment in the “human” is perhaps attributable to a general hesitancy about diminishing his work's affective urgency. To gender Wallace's sincerity, for example, will potentially reduce its applicability or even desirability. In the absence of more negative estimations there is a temptation to overvalue Wallace, as Allard den Dulk does when he declares that his work displays “the challenges to becoming a coherent self and realizing a meaningful existence amid the fragmented plurality of the contemporary Western world” (43). So much remains implicit in this statement (“self,” “meaningful,” “Western”) that it risks becoming too unwieldy to substantiate, despite Dulk's otherwise admirable existentialist analysis. None of these caveats fatally undermines The Long Thing, of course, but they do imply the need for more diverse and less enamoured perspectives that will interrogate, rather than reify, Wallace's artistic goals.

Gesturing toward Reality unfortunately offers various examples of hagiography supplanting analysis. The most egregious examples of this entail questionable readings of Wallace's work as indicative of his mental state. Take Andrew Bennet's notion that “writing for Wallace is itself a kind of bandana, both concealing and revealing the inside of his head” (70), or Blakey Vermeule's image of Wallace as “an acutely sensitive consciousness trapped and thrashing in a hostile world like, dare I say it, a highly intelligent lobster in a pot” (110). A cloying cocksureness about Wallace's intentions appears throughout this book, as is clear in Alexis Burgess's remark that “DFW would actually ultimately agree with most of this” (15). This is all the more startling in Burgess's case, given his admission that “I never finished Infinite Jest … Part of the problem is obviously that the book's so long” (14). Such a cavalier attitude towards Wallace's fiction – and in the opening essay of the volume, no less – points to a wider problem with this collection's rubric. Working from the assumption that Wallace formulates a consistent and overarching philosophical project, what Robert K. Bolger goes so far as to call “a Wallacian theology” (46), Gesturing toward Reality sifts his writings for declarative and pious messages to the detriment of its value as literary art.

In light of this emphasis on how Wallace's work apparently transmits, in Bolger's words, “his own spiritual philosophy of life” (32, original emphasis), it is not surprising that This Is Water pops up a lot. The book's focus on this 2005 commencement speech, in which Wallace extolls the value of being emotionally aware of our surroundings, too often collapses a complex literary career into the enunciation of simple moral imperatives. Moreover, an eagerness to emulate Wallace's voice – which Leland de la Durantaye rather gauchely describes as “that of the uncle who gets high with you” (24) – consistently mars analysis with a misplaced jokiness, as in Robert C. Jones's warning that “this FN will almost surely not survive the editing process, but here goes” (95). The few essays that avoid these pitfalls, such as Patrick Horn's “Does Language Fail Us? Wallace's Struggle with Solipsism,” are all the more surprising given the general lack of quality on display. Preceding Horn, for instance, is Ryan David Mullins, who in addition to making near nonsensical remarks – “most of philosophy (or foolosophy?!), then, since Kant was indeed mainly because claims about reality were unwittingly taken as claims about our claims about the reality!” (222) – duplicates an entire paragraph on two separate pages (227 and 230). Whether due to editorial oversight or Mullins's indifference, this mistake compounds Gesturing toward Reality's overall poor execution.

It is tempting to conclude that The Long Thing offers a model for how Wallace studies should proceed, and Gesturing toward Reality an example of the dangers that critics need to steer clear of. The Long Thing is no doubt the stronger of the two collections, in terms of both the quality of contributions and the influence it will have on future studies. Overall the book makes a convincing case that Wallace's greatest achievements, and his continued attraction to scholars, lie in his work as a novelist. However, Gesturing toward Reality, despite its many weaknesses, remains worthwhile for showing the possibility of alternative ways to approach Wallace. Granted, its contributors do not stray far from established readings, but the volume's liveliness – if deeply flawed and at times misguided – at least demonstrates that Wallace's work remains a vibrant area of enquiry. As a valuable misfire, then, Gesturing toward Reality complements The Long Thing not just by virtue of its failures, but also for signalling how open the field still is. Canonization might be appealing, but it risks codifying particular texts and “proper” interpretations. Whether through reading groups, various Internet forums, or fan appropriation and adaptation, Wallace has always overspilled frameworks through which we traditionally consider the “literary” work. If Wallace studies is to thrive it should not settle for the author's academic legitimation alone, but rather encourage the diverse and perhaps unconventional voices that will be vital to keeping the conversation going.