I am reminded of the book's timeliness every time I teach it to 21st century undergraduates. Though they are properly dazzled by its mixture of high-tech literariness, pop-culture savvy, and story-telling brio, they are frankly bewildered by the book's urgency and sense of mission, Wallace's authorial adversaries are as obscure to them as Kierkegaard's battle with Danish Hegelians is to the rest of us. For them the 1980s is a comical decade of bouffant hairdos, pastel suit jackets, and conspicuous consumption. Hence it takes some doing to convey to them how diametrically opposed to all of that was the era's prevailing literary ethos, which, in violent counter-reaction to the fabulist excesses of the 19760s and 1970s, embraced austerity and restraint, concreteness and cynicism, brevity and banality. Writers like Richard Ford, Anne Beattie, Bobby Ann Mason and, most importantly, Raymond Carver reclaimed realism from the bad rap it had gotten from Barth and Barthelme, and the growing guild of grad-school fiction writers quickly followed suit--and who could blame them? After all, the Dirty Realist short story, with its emotional obliqueness and less-is-more ethos, was tailor-made for the graduate workshop, not to mention the university-sponsored literary magazine. Minimalism ruled, and Carver was king.