Yes, I’ve read all 7 volumes, and yes, I buy into the hype. Thousands of pages of his work beyond that - yes that too. Somewhere between the 6th epitaph and the 4th story, there is a line about a grandfather in Omaha . . . Let me just give you the whole story, after the break:

Not many writers could convince a large, multinational publisher to go forth with a 680-page short-story collection about death, putrefaction, ghosts, and cancer, but [___________]’s career has never really cohered to any preexisting template.

. . . .

Along with the Internet and e-mail, [__________] also foregoes cell phones, credit-card use, checking accounts, and driving.

. . . .

After a career of hanging out with neo-Nazis, pursuing sex workers, doing drugs, dropping thousand-page books the way Updike dropped short stories, and being suspected of being the Unabomber, [__________], without even meaning to, had managed to cross the last line of decorum. He had dared to abdicate his masculinity.

. . . .

[__________] tried to be characteristically charitable when imagining the FBI’s interest in him: “One reason that the FBI thought I might be the Unabomber is that I believe probably the thing most likely to save us, and save the planet, would be a massive epidemic. Because we can’t regulate ourselves. If fifty percent or ninety percent of the humans died, maybe the rest would be better off. Would I push the button to release the virus? Probably not.”

. . . .

“His books are too long in the way the Petronas Towers are too tall, the way foie gras is too rich: the manner of their excess is central to their essence.

. . . .

In his own words:

“Have you ever wondered whether this world is wrong for you? A death, a lover’s unabashed indifference, the sufferings of innocents and the absence of definitive answers – don’t these imply some hollowness or deficiency? For my part, the wrongness struck when I was 4 years old. I was at my grandmother’s house, and I saw a cat torture a baby bird.”

The ever-present autobiographical vignette: when he was a child, he was charged with watching his 6 year old sister. She was in the water. And she didn’t make it out alive.