I totally agree re: cynicism and deformity. I think BIWHM was in many ways a follow-up to IJ, a way to gather up some of the loose threads. I've always thought that there are plenty of hideous men at work in IJ, in any case.

I wrote a big chunk of my thesis on Mario to the point that my advisor was like, okay, that's enough on Tiny Tim. Another reason writing academically about Wallace doesn't work well: his project is in the end about empathy, and trying to make arguments about how that works just doesn't work with the supposedly dispassionate way a theory wonk is supposed to see things.