Oreo or madeleine?

Q: How is David Foster Wallace like Proust?

A: He isn't.

Although not everyone agrees with me on this.  Here's our old pal Eggers on DFW and Proust in his infamous flip-floppity introduction to Infinite Jest:

...Wallace is a different sort of madman, one in full control of his tools, one who instead of teetering on the edge of this precipace or that, under the influence of drugs or alcohol, seems to be heading ever-inward, into the depths of memory and the relentless conjuring of a certain time and place in a way that evokes — it seems so wrong to type this name but then again, so right! — Marcel Proust.

Forget "so right!" His first impulse was correct.