a belief in words

David Foster Wallace is a brilliant Rabelaisian fount, but lacks that belief in words, a strong emotional instinct akin to superstition that many perhaps lesser intellectual lights tend toward. Makes him undiscriminating in the way of the "mot juste", the shrine of Hemingway, and why perhaps perceiving the lack he deifies someone like Paula Fox, a believer in beauty and precision, a real lover of the word who for that reason has probably written fewer in the last 50 years than he has in 10. It's the immovable thing in her versus the restless questing. Bellow is more of Wallace's camp, but brilliantly also turns words with such feeling and fluency and deep personal "history" that it's like getting swept up in a personal current. And then again Bellow fell over himself in admiration of the spare and precise Cormac McCarthy, whom he he said wrote "death dealing sentences."