What do we value? Why do we value it? And in a neoliberal age, can
morality ever displace money as the primary means of defining
value? These are the questions that drove David Foster Wallace, a
writer widely credited with changing the face of contemporary
fiction and moving it beyond an emotionless postmodern irony.
Jeffrey Severs argues in David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books
that Wallace was also deeply engaged with the social, political,
and economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A
rebellious economic thinker, Wallace satirized the deforming
effects of money, questioned the logic of the monetary system, and
saw the world through the lens of value's many hidden and untapped
meanings. In original readings of all of Wallace's fiction, from
The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections
and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly
political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of
financial crises and economic policies. As Severs demonstrates, the
concept of value occupied the intersection of Wallace's major
interests: economics, work, metaphysics, mathematics, and morality.
Severs ranges from the Great Depression and the New Deal to the
realms of finance, insurance, and taxation to detail Wallace's
quest for balance and grace in a world of excess and entropy.
Wallace showed characters struggling to place two feet on the
ground and restlessly sought to "balance the books" of a chaotic
culture. Explaining why Wallace's work has galvanized a new phase
in contemporary global literature, Severs draws connections to key
Wallace forerunners Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and William
Gaddis, as well as his successors-including Dave Eggers, Teddy
Wayne, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith-interpreting Wallace's
legacy in terms of finance, the gift, and office life.
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