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[...] Many times, to Kafkaesque comic effect, the story adds "(i.e., the depressed person)" after pronouns that already clearly identify her (i.e., the depressed person--you get the gag) (BI 50, e.g.). [...]
[...] In "(I)" a reader can get away with disdain for Jeni and her shallowness, but "(II)" makes palpable what Smith observes: "If one is used to the consolation of 'character,' ... Wallace is truly a dead end. His stories [are] turned outward, toward us. It's our character that's being investigated (Changing My Mind, 273).
about the unusual two-part structure of Adult World, and Zadie Smith's thoughts on it
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.
[...] Wallace did not sign the story initially, using the pseudonym Eliabeth Klemm, his new attempt to write as a "NOBODY". [...]
The pen name DFW used for the original McSweeney's publication of Mister Squishy (and possibly other works too). Hilarious because anyone who reads Mister Squishy knows right away who the actual author must be
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.
the story about sleeping (Hope and Randy) is apparently also an indictment of insurance companies ... the book Randy brings into the sleep clinic is Kurt Eichenwald's Serpent on the Rock, which exposes 1980s securities fraud at a subsidiary of Prudential-Bache
[...] 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).
about Chris Fogle's chapter in TPK