[...] 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. [...]

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 flux of interpersonal experience and its essential lottery effects [...]

[...] 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 psyche and language.

[...] Yes, it's great, this voice says, but might another product be greater? In this way Wallace expands the problem of use value and taste Karrier encountered: pursuing exhange value, especially as financial instruments grow more "advanced," almost inevitably leaves the body and feelings behind. On the personal level, "It's great" is the voice of a depressive denying his condition, but allowed to dictate the entire nation's conception of value, the forces of "It's great" are what produce the mania of pricing and stock-market crashes and widespread unhappiness. Wallace is preparing for Infinite Jest, where depression and a consumer culture of limitless, greater-and-greater choices will prove mutually reinforcing and utterly disastrous.

[...] Watching an episode of Hawaii Five-0 leads J.D. to posit that the popular TV story of "white guys flying around in helicopters restoring order to his oriental island" reflects American anxiety over the Vietnam War (GCH 318). That is Wallace's invitation to read his novella--and its awkward inclusion of stereotyped "Orientals" at the Collision airport (GCH 302)--as an allegory of 1980s east/west competition: DeHaven, wearing the Ronald McDonald suit, represents a burger-flipping service economy but also, with his broken-down, homemade car, beleagured American auto manufacturing in the process of being overtaken, Wallace implies, by Japan. Hence the car full of Japanese people that speeds past the stranded, oilless main characters, leading to a racist rant from J.D. [...]

[...] For Wallace, his 1980s generation may have inherited plenty of spending power from their parents, but again, in the realm of moral values, the children have been left with "an inheritance of absolutely nothing," with useless credit. [...] "Westward" places "credit," a term of finance, in the plane of human relationships. The pedantic D.L., confronting the Avis agent, gets the point across: "'Though the credit is unlimited,' [D.L.] says slowly, 'it's not ours, you're saying. It's unlimited, but it's not about responsibility, and so in some deep car-rental agency sense" (and, Wallace suggests, deep moral-philosophical "agency" sense) "isn't really credit at all?" (GCH 274). As with the farmer's grain evoking the Depression's devaluation of currency, Wallace ingeniously strips money away, laying bare the questions of honoring not the credit card but the credibility of the persons themselves. In this context, we should regard Mark himself as living currency: his name plays on the German mark (famous for 1920s hyperinflation), and his climactic realizations center on ideas about the "self's coin" (GCH 369), seemingly the medium honored in the "living transaction" of Wallace's fiction.

[...] One resonance of Gately's DG initials is the decigram, a common measure for drug sales, the "tenth of a gram" cocaine customers beg for [...]

Thus when Hal says in the book's stark, one-line second paragraph, "I am in here" (IJ 3), rather than a statement of location, it is the cry "I EXIST," familiar from Wallace's Markson review (BF 83). I hear in this remark "I ... in-here" or "I inhere", meaning there is a substantialness to Hal's valueless self [...]

As the analogies betwen tennis and capitaist striving mount, we imagine the E.T.A players as young workers who have difficulties--and who are systematically kept from--balancing their massive physical exertions with mental labor on the question of what all this body-work is for, the "question[] of why" (IJ 900). [...]

NAFTA, negotiated throughout the late 1980s and ratified in December 1992, is widely seen as a signature extension of the logic of neoliberalism from the Reagan-Bush years into the Clinton era. As James McCarthy writes regarding the deregulatory and antistate logic behind such agreements, "These common neoliberal prescriptions [are] contributions to an overarching goal of increasing the flexibility and profitability of capital." McCarthy also notes the dire effects of such agreements for environment regulation and health, which Wallace toys with in depicting the Great Concavity. [...]