Watching the interview, it’s clear Wallace, who died by suicide in 2008, bristles at being pressed to purvey rank punditry on the popular culture at large like some kind of dancing monkey. But the exercise revealed how Rose, and large swaths of American intellectual culture circa the late-1990s, thought of Wallace. He was an all-purpose Big Brain who could alight on anything, from politics, to avant-garde authors, to the ethics of shellfish eating, to warmed-over Oscar bait. It is a consummate performance of erudition, shot through with prickly self-consciousness—arguably as impressive, and influential, as Wallace’s whole literary output.