In a pithy formulation, Steven Connor has quipped that "[b]eing modernist always meant not quite realizing that you were so," whereas "[b]eing postmodernist always involved the awareness that you were so" [...] I would suggest, being a "post-postmodernist" of Wallace's generation means never quite being sure whether you are one, whether you have really managed to escape narcissism, solipsism, irony, and insincerity. Again, this uncertainty is structural, allowing as it does for a genuine futurity that only the reader can provide. Hence Zadie Smith, in her introduction to a recent collection of stories by Wallace and his contemporaries, is right when she claims that their texts are primarily "attempting to make something happen off the page, outside words, a curious thing for a piece of writing to want to do" (Introduction xx). It is only by invoking this future off the page that dialogue can be engaged, and that both reader and writer can be challenged by the dialogic dimension of the reader experience. This call for a two-way conversation characterizes not only Wallace's work, but all the fiction of the New Sincerity. [...]