Why does work often feel futile in a postmodern and neoliberal society? Why do even many highly rewarding jobs seem dehumanizing and attenuating amid superabundant wealth and leisure? Philip Mirowski argues, "Not only does neoliberalism deconstruct any special status for human labor, but"--in terms resonstant with my readings throughout--"it lays waste to older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in the labor theory of value, and reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of 'investments,' skill sets, temporary alliances." These are some of the areas of a fully ascendant neoliberal culture that Wallace probes in Oblivion. "Probably all jobs are ... filled wth horrible boredom and despair and quiet little bits of fulfillment that are very hard to tell anybody else about," Wallace said in an interview about Oblivion in 2004 (CW 129). As he read the post-9/11 American economy, Wallace was willing to extrapolate his own work conditions into another of his hoped-for universalisms, the notion that all jobs led to the despair that increasingly characterized the position in the office of literary art he had decided to take in 1985.