The book is pretty biased towards male figures. The footnotes on the Incandenza's father's (Him's) oeuvre are more nuanced, labored character development than pretty much anybody else gets in the entire book. It's worshipful and cathartic in a way that reminds me a lot of the kind of relationships most white, male authors have with their fathers in modern literary fiction as authority figures first but with human flaws esp. w/r/t things typically associated with masculine performativity ie worklife, competency, reservedness, and distance (see the neurotic father in The Corrections or the gang leader in Motherless Brooklyn).
With regards to the old flame war comment posted by Jake, it reminded me a lot of the behaviors described in Robin DiAngelo's paper on cognition by whites who are dominant in power structures of their privileges and the obeisance to whiteness as default. There's a black character, sure, but he's described in such an incredibly white, middle-class frame, almost as if he's a mythic demigod of self-assuredness and action. The same with the trans character. They're all approached with that heavy DFW overtone of neurosis and analysis that renders them academically sterile, almost as if you're reading a psychologist cum theorists diagnosis of their backstory and motivations.
Wasn't a huge fan of the book but people love themselves DFW in spite of DT Max's bio's unveiling of his attitude towards, in his words, 'audience pussy.'
