I knew the late David Foster Wallace a very little bit—not much to speak of, really, but I wrote about his work often. An interview that I did with him during the book tour for “Infinite Jest,” in 1996, achieved a surprising longevity. I reviewed his essay collection “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” for the New York Times Book Review, and his last short-story collection, “Oblivion,” for Salon. Until he committed suicide, in 2008, when anyone asked, I’d say that he was my favorite living writer, a statement that was typically greeted with astonishment and skepticism. So while I was barely acquainted with David Wallace the man, his reputation was another matter.

These two things aren’t the same, not in the case of any writer: a notion that many people would agree with in principle but that everyone has a hard time bearing in mind on a daily basis. Even the reputation of a reputation is subject to distortion. That Wallace was not widely regarded as a “great” writer during his lifetime is quickly being forgotten. Of course, a writer’s reputation changes over the years—that’s to be expected. Literary works grow or shrink in significance as the moment in which they were created recedes and as new readers bring new sensibilities to bear on them. But our memory of a reputation’s evolution itself changes, or at least that’s what seems to be happening in the case of Wallace. As more than one critic has observed, Wallace’s death, and the private suffering that it revealed, has led to the formation of an iconic posthumous public image that some of his friends have taken to calling “Saint Dave.” The critic Christian Lorentzen wrote in New York that Saint Dave is David Foster Wallace “reduced to a wisdom-dispensing sage on the one hand and shorthand for the Writer As Tortured Soul on the other.”

Yet even Lorentzen himself isn’t entirely immune to this sort of drift. In his review of “Purity,” the new novel by Wallace’s friend, Jonathan Franzen, he contrasts Franzen’s reputation for “being kind of a prick” with Wallace’s. Although Franzen had remarked upon the lack of “ordinary love” in Wallace’s fiction, Lorentzen writes, “The paradox was that Wallace’s readers felt loved when they read his books, and in turn came to fiercely love their author.”

Perhaps this was true for Lorentzen; as much as I loved Wallace’s work myself, I’m not sure that I’d describe my relationship to it (let alone to the author himself) that way. As for the idea that feeling loved by Wallace and in turn loving him back describes how most of his readers connected to his work during his lifetime—that contradicts everything I remember of the period. I edited a books section and fielded many queries from Wallace's admirers seeking a chance to write about his work. These supplicants—typically high-spirited young men intoxicated by Wallace’s fusion of complex ideas and forms with an apparently loose-limbed conversational prose style—were certainly enthusiastic. They wanted to rhapsodize about how smart Wallace was, to supply interpretations that explained what Wallace had to say about art and alienation and the need for serious writers to question the artificiality of consumer and entertainment culture. They wanted to celebrate how funny he was. They adored that he could be so brainy and yet also indulge in dopey scatological jokes like “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” But they never spoke of love. In fact, references to any profound human emotion (apart from alienation) were notably absent from these pitches, which, of course, often featured footnotes.

This vexed me. Wallace’s most ardent readers, I felt, utterly failed to make a case that effectively disputed the common, dismissive attitude toward his work that was expressed by many people in the literary circles I knew. Here is where this account becomes a bit tricky, because concrete evidence is scarce. In the long run, a writer’s reputation consists not only of how much he’s read but also of the number of in-depth critical studies about his work, as well as the institutional and scholarly interest in his papers. All of that can be tracked and measured. But in the short term, a writer’s standing is more elusive. It can be judged in part by the length and placement of reviews, and the number and tone of interviews and profiles in major publications. Still, much of a writer’s rep emerges informally, in the conversations that writers, readers, and critics have amongst themselves. Whether another writer is spoken of respectfully, whether you get the impression that “everyone” is reading his or her new book enthusiastically, or how well people think he or she comes across in interviews—these and a dozen other imponderable factors constitute a reputation during a writer’s lifetime, particularly in the early part of a career.

This stuff—let’s call it litchat—may be ephemeral, but it absolutely shapes the formal reception of a writer’s work. If everyone in your M.F.A. workshop or the last book party you went to mentions an established author’s name with reverence, you’ll be that much more likely to lay it on thick should you ever be asked to review her new book. Or, conversely, if you decide to prove your independence of mind and go contrarian on her, you’ll be aware of the inertia of all that acclaim and feel the imperative to push back with corresponding force. Reviewers don’t like to admit that they’re influenced by such factors, but unless they live cut off from other readers, writers, and critics entirely, they can’t really help it.

In fact, litchat has assumed an ever-greater role in criticism because so much of what once happened privately and fleetingly is now public and preserved. Social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the main sites where this litchat happens today, and conversations on both spill over into digital and print journalism, which takes remarks made in interviews that generate Twitter responses and then amplifies them, spawning even more Twitter responses. All this, the positive and the negative, in turn, becomes part of a writer’s media persona, and something it feels obligatory to address when reviewing her work. When authors tweet—and most publishers urge them to do so—the line between work and persona can become almost impossible to draw. The poet Patricia Lockwood, for example, may be justly celebrated for her poems, one of which brought her to widespread attention after it was published online and blew up on social media, but it was her Twitter account (and 53,000 followers) that made her the stuff of a Times Magazine profile.

The same goes for authors whose personas are vilified on social media. Well over half of Lorentzen’s piece on Franzen, for example, consists of litchat: things Franzen has said about his writing and the writing of other authors, things other authors have said about him, autobiographical material gleaned from his personal essays and a new biography, statements he’s made about social and environmental issues, various scandals and feuds he’s been involved with, gaffes he’s been accused of, the failure of a TV project he was involved with, reviews and profiles he’s gotten for past novels as well as the new one, and so on. By comparison, “Purity,” the ostensible news peg for all this attention, is treated almost as an afterthought.