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[...] But "Crash of '69," the final title, suggests the theme is the crash of balance itself--note that the 6 and 9, unhinged from reference to a year, denote yin and yang, one's head chasing the other's tail. Wallace thus projects 1929 forward and expands it into a general crash of the American ps…

Wallace had an unerring sense that winners, examined from the oblique angles of his fition, were really losers--not schadenfreude, but a claim that any struggle other than that Kafkaesque one to "establish a human self" was utimately an illusory imposition of games' numbering and geometry on the fl…

[...] when the American winning streak had met another of its periodic, catastrophic ends--busts for a culture that seemed not so much expectant of constant boom as utterly dependent on it. [...]

[...] the open-ended, state-run lottery is a salutary vision: in losing week after week, Lenore is actually paying into a civic fund that is not unlike taxes, a fund of commonwealth that the young Wallace tentatively steps toward here. Many U.S. lotteries have historically been legally set up to su…

N.R.K., Keller's initials, together sound like "anarchy", and this order that philosophy might bring to this nervous boy should allow him to grow up, or somehow rise (keller is German for basement).