[...] Another of Wallace's handwritten drafts of "Oblivion" even begins with a sentence referring to Dryden and Prudential Insurance's 1875 origins--as though Wallace considered maing the perversion of the insurance company's mission more explicit in the story [...] In a tale of suburban New Jersey luxury built on Demographic Medicine, Wallace also implicitly links the transformation of Prudential from a civically proud insurance company into a financialized moneymaker with the concomitant decline of Newark [...] into one of the U.S.'s poorest cities.