Oblivion signals that Wallace, while still holding work to be sacred, has largely given up his faith in the powers of the Protestant call to work that echoed throughout his writing up through Infinite Jest. Less prominent in Oblivion and after is the writer who allegorizes work in terms of Lenore's swichboard and foot-pounds, while newly emergent are dull, long-term workplaces, rended in detail and at length: advertising agencies, insurance offices, demographic systems. Jobs themselves now spread out to form characters' mental ground, and work no longer really works for one's well-being. As Walter Kirn writes in his review of Oblivion, "Often the jobs we do end up doing us." If, in Infinite Jest's Hegelian code, transcendence potentially lay in absorpotion, in Oblivion all is distraction; no one really forgets himself, except perhaps the narrator of "Smithy" (to his peril). [...]

[...] human decision can no longer disentangle itself from computing's complexity. Wallace seems to have been led to this point by Tor Nørretranders's The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, a book he heavily annotated and source of an idea central to his style in the last two books of fiction: "Every singe second," Nørretranders writes, "every one of us discards millions of bits [of sensory information] in order to arrive at the special state known as onsciousness."

[...] An extension of Wallace's indictments in "E Unibus Pluram" and his Updike essay of the 1960s' "brave new individualism" (CL 54), "Smithy" laments the passing of a 1950s family-values-driven Lassie episode (a clear analogue for the enframed windows tale) and a future of destroyed communal bonds in the Vietna War, deadly for some of the students. [...] the unraveling of the U.S. Constitution in the insertions of "KILL THEM ALL" by the psychotic Richard Johnson (named for the U.S. presidents from 1963 to 1973, leaders of the Vietnam War) (O 91). [...]

[...] His chronic "nightmare" from childhood is not a recurrence of the classroom scene but an anticipatory vision of the insurance-office desk order that awaits him--a room the size of a soccer field, "utterly silent" and with "a large clock on each wall," counting out an unbearable time (O 103). This insurance office is not just a workplace but an existential landscape, complete with a bygone sense of ethical duty.

[...] 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.

[...] Part of Fogle's narrative occurs in 1977, and here Wallace plays one last time with presidential rhetoric on commonwealth themes. In one scene, Fogle's father returns home unexpectedly to find his son and friends stoned and with the heat turned up, creating another hothouse, perverting the oikos and hoarding the general benefit. Fogle scrambles "to turn the thermostat back down to sixty-eight," feeling "like a spoiled little selfish child" (PK 173). The reference is to the "energy conservation" (PK 172) policies of not just Fogle's father—who Wallace of course notes "grew up during the Depression" (PK 169)—but the United States as a whole. In one of the most enduring memes associated with his presidency (and with 1977 in particular), Jimmy Carter gave his "sweater speech" on February 2, 1977, shortly after his inauguration. In it he called for "cooperation," "mutual effort," and "modest sacrifices" from the American people, who by keeping thermostats at 65 in the daytime and 55 at night could "save half the current shortage of natural gas." The nationally televised speech (a latter-day version of FDR's fireside chats, in spirit and setting, with Carter appearing next to a roaring fire) is remembered for the president's sartorial choice: he wore a cardigan, implying it was the clothing of civic caring (especially for those without big fireplaces?). Appropriately, Fogle at the beginning of his memoir vaguely recalls "Jimmy Carter addressing the nation in a cardigan," a memory that slides in the same sentence into apathetic gossip about Carter's brother (PK 166). In a finished Pale King, revisiting 1970s energy politics might have developed into a captivating dialogue with the Iraq War, tense U.S./Middle East relations, and climate-change denial amid which Wallace worked on the novel—which Pietsch says "came alive" again for him in spring of 2005, the period of the "Author's Foreword" and a time with no shortage of chicanery from "the Decider" and his cabinet in the news. With Spackman's changes proving "attractive[] ... to the free-market conservatives of the current administration" looking to "deregulate" the IRS like any other business, Wallace may associate sweater-clad Carter with a last gasp of commonwealth values before neoliberalism took command (PK 115).

[...] It is in The Circle, though, that Eggers finally writes his Infinite Jest, the book he had the honor of introducing in its 2006 edition. [...]

In a country that builds endless opportunities for "connection" but no longer makes anything, The Circle's endorsement of essentially Thoreauvian economic values comes through Mercer Medeiros, the protagonist Mae's Luddite ex-boyfriend, who stands for inefficient artisanship (he makes antler chandeliers) and rants about what The Circle does to in-person interactions. [...]

The Circle is among the first Pale King-influenced novels as well, applying Wallace's insights into mechanized labor to the fully digital era. While there are no "Tingle tables" here (PK 276), Eggers satirizes the endless streams of stressful, pointless, and self-obliterating work in a supposedly hyperefficient age [...] A feckless and Fogle-like character, Mae-as-May embodies the perverse new liberty implied by the word neoliberal: applied to technological formations, liberal now essentially refers not to citizens' rights but to the freedom they grant corporate systems to instrumentalize their tastes and habits. Crime prevention and many other civic domains are soon to fall as well under The Circle's corporate control. If Infinite Jest told us in 1996 where digital entertainment "choices" would lead us, The Circle predicts the neoliberal dystopia to which today's wave of (social) media saturation is headed. It also offers a far more detailed account of the technocorporate methods by which the American social contract is being sundered, a subject The Pale King addresses in much more mysterious terms.

[...] Like "Mister Squishy," §16 is one of Wallace's many multitrack narratives in which an oral discourse describes one thing while a wandering mind (despite being engaged by the external talk) explores something else entirely; our mission as readers--reconciling incompatible ideas, as in Freud's unconscious--is to ferret out the connection between the two tracks. [...]

[...] Wallace gave his characters new names "constantly," writes Pietsch (PK xiii), but other REC names--the forest (sylvan) in Sylvanshine, the land and river valleys (glen) in Glendenning, the bloom in Blumquist, the fish in Fisher, the deer (hind) in Hindle, the bus in Bussy, and the bond (to pay for public works) in Bondurant--suggest that a finished Pale King might have had much to say about many different public resources, natural and infrastructural. [...]

[...] Consider David Cusk, the compulsively sweaty accountant: as he seeks release from self-obsession through what is essentially an inner thermostat to regulate his temperature, he replies to all those solipsistic hoarders of energy who have preceded him, from Lenore Sr. (who lacks such an inner thermostat) to Fogle (who keeps an external one on high). Cusk knows that paying attention to things outside him, things other than his fear of an "attack," can stem his sweat's flow but also that such outward attention is heavy lifting: "Paying attention to anything but the fear was like hoisting something heavy with a pulley and rope--you could do it, but it took effort, and you got tired, and the minute you slipped you were back paying attention to the last thing you wanted to" (PK 320). Cusk is learning here the concluding lesson of This Is Water: the willed choice to pay attention is the "job of a lifetime, and it commences--now," taking up every minute of every day, the call to real American work (TW 136).