"This is what I was attempting to convey to the reporter from the New
York Times who wrote the first obituary they published: that while his
work got described as ironic, it never used irony as a self-protective
gesture, a mode of maintaining a pose of disaffection or distance from
genuine emotions. Rather, his writing was always brave enough to wallow
in the muck of real human life, with all its ugliness and pain. And
it’s that bravery that made his work stand out for me — while his work
had all the stylistic panache and uproarious humor and analytical savvy
of the best of postmodern fiction, it also taught me, in a way that the
work of no other postmodernist ever could, something about what it is
to live."

-- Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence and English Dept. faculty at Pomona College