Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find them sort of wickedly fun to listen to at partics, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a
300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.
[David Foster Wallace, E unibus pluram (1993), p. 33]