David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value

LOVE IS no set theory or math equation, but we might understand it better if we imagined it so—or acknowledged the ways, such as referring to a spouse as “my other half,” we already do. This chapter shares a title with an uncollected 1987 story Wallace included in a draft table of contents for the book that became Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (before the “Brief Interview” sequences existed).¹ Three pages long, “Other Math” concerns a boy named Joseph, a sincere naïf in the mold of Mario and Stecyk. Joseph declares to his grandfather that he is “in love with” him in an opening section; he asks his grandmother about romantic love in the second section while dealing with his grandfather’s death (“Other Math,” 287). Finally, in the third section, which moves back in time to continue the first, the grandfather tells a chilling story of a medical-school classmate of Joseph’s father who carried around a cadaver in public, claiming to be in love with it. Like many Wallace narratives, “Other Math” invests in a Lynchian gothicism played for uneasy laughs, meanwhile asking intense questions about love, as in Joseph’s query of his grandmother about couples holding hands, “Do they feel something, when they do it?” Her answer is sobering: “It’s unclear whether things are felt, or whether it’s just a demonstration” (“Other Math,” 289).

The mysterious title, never mentioned in the story, plays on “higher math” and suggests both an alternative mathematics and, perhaps, a method of combining self and other in love: is love two values added together? Or two values hopelessly divided, as Joseph’s grandparents seem to be? Perhaps, given the story’s pairing of a romanced cadaver with the grandmother’s chilling claim that “Grampa’s hand was a dead thing…an extension I never recognized and certainly never held,” the title means that there is an absolute alterity to the love object—even though so much of the discourse of romantic love promises attachment, merger, or, as Joseph hopes, “feel[ing]something” (“Other Math,” 289). Indeed, the title, run together as “othermath,” echoes the obsolete meaning of “math” as mowing shown in this chapter’s epigraph. For Wallace, this story is about the Grim Reaper’s mowing and, by analogy, the human tendency to kill off the other even in the midst of life.

The death of the other, a topic throughout Wallace, is especially meaningful for Brief Interviews because of the permanent silence of the book’s mysterious “Q,” the female interviewer of the Hideous Men, who more than once threaten her with violence. In parallel terms, the horrific encounter of the final subject’s beloved with a serial rapist-killer—the “Granola-Cruncher” story, “B.I. #20”—is an in-interview version of the death of another (miraculously, combated and survived on the literal level). Wallace himself confirms we are to imagine “Q” as a singular being: “Something bad happens to her over the course of the book…something really bad,” he says (CW 90). Tom LeClair’s review persuasively suggests that arranging the scattered interviews chronologically reveals “a unified though episodic story of a woman…who, after being abandoned by her lover, travels America trying to understand” men,² before apparently being attacked in “B.I. #72 08-98,” the chronologically final interview. It abruptly ends “oh no not again behind you look out !” (BI 226). Wallace keeps Q’s fate elliptical, though, expecting readers again to fashion an ending for themselves, just “outside the right-frame of the picture,” as he said of Infinite Jest (CW 145).

In this chapter, demonstrating the interlocking nature of several meanings of Other Math, I explore its varied operations in Brief Interviews, a volume suggestive, often, of certain mathlike relationships at the heart of the experience of reading Wallace’s texts: investigating the “addition” of one character to another in love and sex (or, more often, their “division”), actively converting “random” variables into a more determinate structure, balancing one value against another, assessing fractional selves, and recognizing that the numbers represented in the text become crucial to its linguistic meanings, rather than merely serving as typical page and section numbers. Though atomized into twenty-three stories, with most further divided into multiple and incongruous parts, Brief Interviews is more unified than it appears—and this unity of disparate, “random” parts, as it is attained by the curious calculations of the reader, becomes a central thematic concern tied to the book’s critique of neoliberal political economy and financialization.

If “Westward” proposed as its starting point that we “could love only what we valued” (GCH 234), Brief Interviews investigates the perils of conceiving of love in terms of mathematical value, especially when those terms align with contemporary methods of monetary accumulation—all the ways erotic expectations receive distorted reflection in the mirror provided by modes of value accrual. Such accrual, Wallace asserts, is the sort of Other Math that does reign in contemporary U.S. culture, without the eerie disturbances rampant in his fiction. These dominant forces turn the traditional romantic meaning of “date” into abstract “datum,” for example, as explored in “Datum Centurio” (BI 125). Brief Interviews exposes the unthought assumptions behind such valuation of persons—and even its inherent insanity. Building from the foundation I discussed in chapter 2, this collection refocuses Wallace’s interest in accumulation by pointing to the intimate consequences of a phase of capitalist expansion dominated by financialization, a development begun in the 1980s that Giovanni Arrighi identified in 1994 not as a sign of robust value creation but as the “signal crisis of the US regime[] of accumulation” (a prediction confirmed by 2008).³ Citing the massive growth of securitization, derivatives, and futures trading, Harvey agrees with Arrighi, drawing on the ideas of Randy Martin to state that “neoliberalization has meant, in short, the financialization of everything,” on Wall Street and in everyday life.⁴

Wallace saw this story collection as a unified whole; indeed, mathematically minded, he seemed—as O’Donnell suggests in reading the part-whole relationships of Broom⁵—always attentive to the “sets” that his various narrative parts formed, whether microfictions and longer stories here or the many small, recursive stories making up his novels. Fractions—signifying a part’s relationship to a whole, the ratios at the heart of the rational—mattered deeply to Wallace, particularly when such relationships found reflection in notions of human wholeness and unwholeness. Max quotes him writing to Costello about the integrity of Brief Interviews: “I like the way [the manuscript’s parts] play off one another and the way certain leitmotifs weave through them,” “the child-perspective-self-pity of ‘The Depressed Person’ vs. the parent-perspective-self-pity of ‘On his Deathbed…Begs a Boon’ vs. the more quote-unquote objective intrafamily pain of ‘Signifying Nothing’ and ‘Suicide…Present.’”⁶ Thus throughout this chapter I read Brief Interviews (not just the clearly linked “Brief Interviews”) as an integral, if unwieldy, whole.⁷

Working without a strict sequence in my readings, I first draw together the book’s parts in porous groupings based on value-related subtopics: randomness, work, cost accounting, gifts, coinage, and contracts. I then turn, in a climactic reading, to what in the book’s structure is illuminated by the battle between randomness and financial returns in the computerized stochastic mathematics of currency markets portrayed in “Adult World.” In this diptych story, Wallace aligns the pursuit of financial capital with the image of fractional, incomplete selves, culminating in his rereading, laced with images of finance’s hegemony, of Plato’s famous image of the lover’s soul seeking out completion by its “better half.” As a social-historical corollary to such themes, “Adult World” also extends Wallace’s use of financial crises as fictional backdrops into the late 1990s. His subject now is the threat of devaluation and economic ripple effects brought about by the “Asian Flu,” a phenomenon I examine in light of the neoliberal economics that reinforces many of the suspect valuations of human bonds that Brief Interviews stands against. These critiques of the late-1990s moment lead to a coda for this chapter in which I examine two other writers—Teddy Wayne and Zadie Smith—mounting homages to Wallace that expand his visions of value into realms of post-9/11 global history and gender difference, areas he does not extensively examine.

Wallace, more than any other contemporary experimenter outside of perhaps Mark Z. Danielewski, submits readily to analysis in terms of what Gerard Genette calls paratexts and, in a homophone registering their place on books’ edges, peritexts: footnotes and endnotes, the dedication “For L––” in Girl, the acknowledgments of Infinite Jest, and (as we will see in The Pale King) the copyright page’s legal disclaimers.⁸ The table of contents of Brief Interviews, with its mysterious use of numbers, is another such strange peritext. How to account for the many values on display, before diving into the stories? The numbering of anything in Wallace’s work is never an innocent or mechanical endeavor. The collection as a whole seems to present only parts of larger series. Each of the “B.I.’s” is numbered, though not consecutively or in any easily discernible order. Three stories appear under the title “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders” and a different form of numeric notation, Roman numerals—XI, VI, XXIV. Both numbers and title suggest we are seeing only the tip of an iceberg. Seemingly in parallel with the shifts between minimalist and maximalist forms throughout, Wallace will use some of the shortest stories to imply a potentially infinite accumulation: the title and the numbering imply a list without end. Also implied is the discarding of other Examples in producing the book.

“Octet” has a numerical title, but contains, we see, abortive, unconsecutive “Pop Quizzes” that do not add up to eight. Various other oddities of numbering and valuation crop up: the pages start from 0 rather than 1, and surrounding the page numbers in the lower corners of each page are distinctive brackets that, with small bumps on their sides, appear curly. These brackets are also used around the name of the book on the title page and, throughout the text, in place of what would usually be square brackets. These special brackets appear within nesting parentheses, but also, for example, in “Someone once told me of an Australian profession known as

flexion of upraised fingers

chicken-sexing” (BI 100). Wallace was known to be meticulously involved in the look of his pages, and curly brackets are used in designating numerical sets. The reader wonders whether to regard verbal information in the text as she would numbers, something also suggested by the names for characters in “Octet,” X and Y. The idea of a pattern—a key to all Brief Interviews’ mythologies—is naturally enticing, but it is the impression of random values given by this summative view of the text (and not a “solution”) that is important to Wallace’s ultimate game, which concerns stochastic math, financial modeling, and the reader’s discomfort with randomness. LeClair’s review (“Non-Silence of the Un-Lamblike”) wittily suggests the collection “could have an intricate design, perhaps generated by a ‘stochastic’ mathematics” but in ways that can only be revealed by Wallace “or someone who has read the collection thirty times.” After only four or five readings, I argue that the book is indeed stochastic, implicating even the first-time reader in taming its randomness by giving it design.

Much ink has been and will continue to be spilled over whether Wallace is a postmodernist (and exactly what sort of nonpostmodernist he might be). But Brief Interviews locates his work in cultural history under the sign of the “Postindustrial.” The first story, “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life,” provides an overall heading of sorts. “Post industrial” is a term that emerged in the 1960s, according to Howard Brick, and fully flowered in the 1970s. Explicating David Riesman’s work, Brick writes of the postindustrial era, “Work no longer seemed central to people’s lives, but consumption alone provided no meaningful replacement.”⁹ For Wallace, the kinds of ironic social values on display in this opening story are attributable not to the dominance of media or a cultural style held together under the always unwieldy category of postmodernism but, as with the leisure-cultivating figures of Broom and Infinite Jest, an attenuation of the work impulse and its production of value. “Radically Condensed” tells this story through the mathematical and pronominal. Starting on page 0, it describes potential romance followed by actual disconnection and concludes, “One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one”—as though the story, and perhaps the whole collection, is stuck in an initial accumulation of value, too “condensed” to count beyond “one,” both the number of solipsism and the pronoun of ironic self-distancing. Wallace also generalizes the absence of meaningful work in a postindustrial culture into a widespread zerohood, notably marked down at the bottom, or on the “ground,” of the initiating page. In confirmation, “Death Is Not the End,” a meditation on Wallace’s 1997 MacArthur “genius” grant, follows “Radically” with a portrait of the writer idling—here not in a beret or leisure suit but swim trunks.

Seemingly in sublimated compensation for such worries over accolades, work, and self-worth, Wallace in Brief Interviews begins to pursue the melancholy accountant identity for his characters that will prove so complexly powerful in The Pale King. In “Forever Overhead,” for instance, the bite of the title is like that of the joke transcendence and memento mori lurking in Infinite Jest, since we recognize in the seemingly eternal suspension into which the “You” “disappear[s]” both existential thrownness and a term of accounting (BI 16): “forever overhead” means that there is always the cost of doing business, of being alive and submitting to entropy’s debit on the order that makes life possible. The thirteen-year-old of this story, Tennyson-like, is prematurely preoccupied with old age and death; he sees in the adulthood he is approaching a decay and death, the fat older woman’s body in front of him already implicit in the teenage girls he has begun to notice. Barefoot on rough surfaces, he is Wallace’s clearest portrait of the consciousness of feet and embodied weight since Lenore, though here in a tone that makes far more visceral sadness manifest: “The rungs hurt your feet. They are thin and let you know just how much you weigh. You have real weight on the ladder. The ground wants you back” (BI 12). The story awakens this young Dasein to Being-toward-death, as experienced not by the thinking end of the human but its sensitive opposite, its “tender and dented” feet (BI 14). The poolside poet of “Death,” having forgotten these truths, wears “simulated-rubber thongs” (BI 2).

The challenge of “Forever Overhead” is a Kierkegaardian one familiar from Infinite Jest: decide to leap anyway, lift the weight that will someday be a corpse (but not yet), and receive the final line’s echo of the beginning “Hello.” For it is only in this moment of authenticating decision in spite of fear that the second birth(day) Cavell discusses can occur. Only then, perhaps, can this “You” become an “I.” The “little bits of soft tender feet” at the end of the diving board (BI 14) thus offer a dark double for the brand-new feet of “You[r]” newborn sister (BI 7). A redeeming value like Gately’s may be possible, in this pre–Infinite Jest story: a sun “full of hard coins of light that shimmer red as they stretch away into a mist that is your own sweet salt” suggests a natural money the self might absorb—though with the color red and the dissolution into mist, we are reminded again of the debit side of the ledger (BI 15). Such images point subtly to the cost accountant Wallace compared himself to in his 1997 interview with Rose: Wallace’s addiction and troubles in his twenties were not “substantively different from the sort of thing where somebody who wants to be a really successful cost accountant [and] achieves that at fifty and goes into something like a depression…. ‘The brass ring I’ve been chasing does not make everything okay.’” Importantly, a cost accountant’s job is not to balance books on the present or past but to forecast areas of future loss for a firm—operating like this boy and like an actuary in health insurance, a field I show Wallace metaphorizing in chapter 5.

“Cost” is where the central sequence begins conceptually. In moving from the “Brief Interviews” published in the October 1998 Harper’s to the book version, Wallace dropped a short opener, such that the first line of the collection’s “B.I.’s” became “It’s cost me every sexual relationship I ever had” (BI 17). “Cost” makes Brief Interviews cohere; as we read we learn distinctions between the monetary terms many write onto themselves (especially in dealing with deficiencies—for instance, a shriveled arm as “the Asset” [BI 82]) and cost conceived in a more human, possibly unquantifiable sense. In “Octet,” for instance, the “writer” attempts to define this human price that many of these stories drive toward, in a passage Zadie Smith aptly seizes on as definitive.¹⁰ In a very long sentence that requires excerpting to be critically manageable, Wallace writes that the pieces of “Octet” (and, I suggest, those of Brief Interviews)

all seem to be trying to demonstrate some weird ambient sameness in different kinds of human relationships, some nameless but inescapable ‘price’ that all human beings are faced with having to pay at some point if they ever want truly ‘to be with’ another person instead of just using that person somehow…a weird and nameless but apparently unavoidable ‘price’ that can actually sometimes equal death itself, or at least usually equals your giving up something (either a thing or person or a precious long-held ‘feeling’ or some certain idea of yourself and your own virtue/worth/identity) whose loss will feel, in a true and urgent way, like a kind of death…

(BI 155–156)

At the same time, in a more hopeful turn, “your giving up something”—a refashioning of Hal’s oblivion-oriented “giving our lives away to something”—can also become the site of bonding with the other. While the title “Octet” seems to refer to the projected number of quizzes, Wallace, always seeing microscopic heat transfers as the ultimate arbiter of connection, also points to the Octet Rule of chemistry. According to it, atoms of a low atomic number tend to combine in such a way that they have eight electrons in their valence shells. The carbon and oxygen atoms in the carbon dioxide we breathe out each have eight electrons surrounding them, with the central carbon “giving up” electrons to share two covalent bonds with the oxygen atoms. Such electron sharing suggests that the reader’s responses to the story’s Quizzes might help it add up to the desired eight (a number that might be taken for infinity, as Orin’s date proves [IJ 47]). More concretely, the Octet Rule is the basis for the body heat one addict offers to another in the opening Quiz, possibly giving up his own life in the process. Thus when Wallace (in a written interview) describes feelings of loneliness and inferiority as “the great valent bond between us all,” he understands the shared etymology—the Latin valere, “be worth”—between electrons’ bonds of valence and the values we often assume to be merely abstract (LI 58). In “Octet,” his economic atavism and refusal of conventional value transfers—with money stripped away and only a single coat to share between two dying people—show us value as shared energy, as (co) valence.¹¹

Wallace’s stories often remind us of what Wendy Brown says about neoliberalism “not presum[ing] the ontological givenness of a thoroughgoing economic rationality for all domains of society” but actively seeking to construct and disseminate such rationality.¹² Indeed, Brief Interviews relies at times on a quasi-folkloric idiom that resonates with the work of Hyde, Campbell, and anthropologists of value such as Graeber and Michael Taussig, who question contemporary Western capitalism by attending to the rejection of money’s rationality by more “primitive” societies. In the first “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” for instance, a wise farmer (a figure almost entirely silent at the Avis counter in “Westward”) provides a punchline on the slavish devotion to allegedly rational price when his son asks for the “lesson” to draw from their inability to give away a tiller: the father “said he figured it’s you don’t try and teach a pig to sing” (BI 71). The line may be a throwaway, but what might a pig (“like a reader…down here quivering in the mud,” in the words of “Octet” [BI 160]) know about use value that these tiller-skeptics do not? This father is selling an implement for the working of the ground, and in the brief tale lie traces of the decline of a farming economy Wallace often uses to index the maddening departure into price as value. The “devil” of this story, never mentioned, is not some all-purpose evil figure but, perhaps, the one that Taussig, in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, hears invoked by Bolivian miners who, upon first confronting capitalism, understand the “fabulations that the commodity engenders” as inherently satanic.¹³ In what sense is the devil a “busy man”? This twice-used title (both times for stories in which gifts are thwarted) is Wallace’s reply to the folk wisdom “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” for his devil’s busy-ness is the world of business the utilitarian Steeply adored, not productive labor. The narrator’s father is giving away the tiller presumably because it is now useless to the family, the potential buyers of his food in the thrall of (the devilish possession of?) negotiating prices and being microfinanciers.

With these markers of value in place, let me knit together more of Brief Interviews through, again, coins, which in Brief Interviews (as with the pennies of chapter 3) become associated with low self-worth, with abject and morose states. The executive washroom attendant of “B.I. #42” is a good example: sacrificing himself over decades to a humility job that Gately could hardly fathom, this man works, his son ruefully says, “for coins” (BI 89). His father’s “effacement cannot be too complete or they forget he is there when it comes time to tip. The trick of his demeanor is to appear only provisionally there, to exist all and only if needed” (BI 89). Small currency thus underscores yet another radical attenuation of a self’s ontology. Here, though, Wallace’s allegory of small change and work gains important social contexts: he returns to the topos of slavery in the Hegelian sense, granted new dimension by the fact that the speaker is African American, meditating on a history of subjection by white wealth along with his father’s particular suffering.¹⁴ “Effluence. Emission. Orduration, micturition, transudation, emiction, feculence, catharsis—so many synonyms: why? what are we trying to say to ourselves in so many ways?” (BI 88). For Wallace, as in the Infinite Jest word-inflation scene to which this paratactic bathroom moment is kin, the generation of so many synonyms for seemingly valueless waste points to a redemptive wealth in language’s plenitude. His source here is End Zone, where Gary finds in the Texas desert a pile of waste and muses on its names: “defecation, as of old women in nursing homes fouling their beds; feces, as of specimen, sample, analysis, diagnosis, bleak assessments of disease in the bowels” (the list extends for eight more lines).¹⁵ Like DeLillo, Wallace formally undermines the perspective that sees “nullity in the very word, shit” (End Zone, 88).

For Wallace, the point of placing coins alongside waste and this lowly man among the uncaring wealthy is to agitate interviewee and reader to the point that an attunement to the uncertainty of one’s foundational values (in Freudian terms, the liberated unconscious and an Oedipal drama) becomes possible. For how can the interviewee reconcile the support of his upbringing those coins represented with the seeming total evacuation of dignity in the work, that sense the speaker has that the job compromised his father’s personhood, that “he brought his work home,” in “the face he wore in the men’s room,” which his “skull conformed to fit” (BI 90)? Is this work that exacts more human cost from a person than can ever be balanced by money? In this general atmosphere of value agitation the speaker of “B.I. #42” wonders what moral values his father’s work held: “do I admire the fortitude of this humblest of working men? The stoicism? The Old World grit?…Or do I despise him[?]” (BI 90–91). This is a version of the ur-memory the narrator of “Signifying Nothing” has of his father “waggling his dick,” though here with the power dynamic inverted (BI 75). In his last line, after notably reemphasizing that the father worked “for coins,” the interviewee seems to abandon the stark duality of choice he has just laid out: “What were the two choices again?” (BI 91). This deluded man has already made his choice of how to regard his origins, not having seen his father “since 1978” in an interview set in 1997 (BI 89). This speaker’s hideousness is hard to discern compared to that of many others, but it must lie in what Kierkegaard means in Either/Or when he calls the delaying of fundamental choice impossible, since the choice effectively gets made in spite of what the delayer (dwelling in “aesthetic irony”) may say.¹⁶

Wallace returns to images of existentialist contingency and thrownness and connects them with the coin in the very brief “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders (VI),” about “Mr. Walter D. (‘Walt’) DeLasandro Jr.’s Parents’ Marriage’s End” (BI 211). Young Walt’s thrownness is literalized in the form of a coin toss: dividing up property in a divorce, with one offering to trade Walt for ownership of a truck, his parents decide to flip for him. There may be no greater caricature of a living transaction in all of Wallace, no greater instance of an undividable good (for this story inverts the scene of wise Solomon suggesting a child’s division). Does Walt hear them, or is the scene “reconstructed” in a different sense? The ambiguity speaks to Brief Interviews’ motif of primal scenes so traumatic they almost must be consigned to an oblivion (to anticipate a later title) for the subject to survive, even if pain necessarily remains, ready to erupt.

We do see the parents’ coin, in both its dilution of tough decision making and its troubling commodification of the human, as it marks Walt into adult professional pursuits—as though he continues to be paid in the trauma that coin signifies. His first appearance in the collection is as an older man in “The Depressed Person,” where, a “professional arbitrator” and “highly respected Conflict-Resolution Specialist,” he charges the title character’s parents $130 an hour to resolve not an emotional question but a financial one: who will pay for her orthodonture (BI 46). Walt’s job titles emblematize legalism papering over the essential existential drama, and given the valorization of choice in Wallace, “professional arbitrator” is particularly offensive—while “arbiter” would be correct, this form sounds a “-trator”/“traitor” pun. Appropriately, given his shadowy relationship to his parents’ separation, through monetary structures (and the porous borders between these stories) Walt becomes an absent presence in “The Depressed Person,” seen only in the form of “his business card” and essentially returning psychically to the arbitrary fate of his child self by mediating his clients’ lives (BI 46).

The depressed person herself, reliving childhood as a grownup, has tried to convert her radical uncertainty about love into the surety of a paid relationship, encountering another instance of Other Math and marking Wallace’s return to the deforming effects of the contractual. The “contracted hourly $90” she pays the therapist makes the “relationship’s simulacrum of friendship…[an] ideally one-sided” arena for sharing her neediness (BI 56n5). Yet those exact conditions of an imbalance “purchase[d]” with money produce in her emotional ledger feelings of patheticness over being allowed to fulfill her “narcissistic fantasies” of not having to “reciprocally meet” or “give” to an other—an other who might as well be dead and ends up literally so (BI 57n5). With a name that echoes the legal category of Displaced Persons of World War II, who were stateless and stripped of identity (her childhood is “a battlefield or theater of conflict” [BI 39]), the depressed person is yet another Wallace character who seems to be denied existence. The name the story gives her both identifies her completely with her illness and seems to require continual reassertion, lest she slip into insignificance (read: nonsignification). 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.). Expanding on the ineffectuality of contracts for those who feel worthless (recall the Suicide Contracts of Infinite Jest), Wallace parodies legal specificity here in a prose that ends up otiose. The abbreviated id est, usually translated “that is,” increases the sense of abstraction: est, meaning “is,” makes this a highly indirect version of Wallace’s “I EXIST” refrain, but id, meaning “that,” is a word assigned to objects—id in another grammatical context would be “it.” The invertebrate girl of Infinite Jest lurks in the margins.

Across almost all these stories, as the discourses of psychoanalysis and self-esteem are crosscut with those of school, contract, and finance, those who become deeply identified with the terms of external valuation—especially of money and market—suffer the same functional dementia and debilitation that the Fed Chairman, beset by gold-standard questions, did in “Crash of ’69.” His brain injury has spread outward: in “Adult World (I),” Jeni’s “Former Lover” works for the aptly named “Mad Mike’s” auto dealer, whose salesmen, under great pressure to sell, are each made to wear a “hospital gown and arrow-through-head-prosthesis” (BI 182). The ranting, hospitalized father of “On His Deathbed…”, who reduces his child’s life to a matter of accounting, is the Chairman’s second coming, now shifted from philosophical to familial skepticism, in keeping with Wallace’s general move toward personalizing abstract themes. Through her “inner fund of loathing,” the mother of “Suicide as a Sort of Present” leads her child to perversely “repay the perfect love” with his death, a sadistic gift recalling those in Infinite Jest (BI 286). “N.B.: hammer home fiduciary pun,” Wallace writes in “Adult World (II),” identifying a method of character construction he follows throughout this collection—and, indeed, his whole career (BI 187).

When tasked with characterizing that whole career, critics have most often turned to the primer of “Octet,” a potent summary of sincerity as call to arms that has a relationship to Wallace’s oeuvre (especially Infinite Jest) similar to the one Pynchon’s compact The Crying of Lot 49 has to his much longer novels.¹⁷ Let me loosen critical homogeneity by instead giving my most sustained reading to “Adult World,” where Wallace was forging ahead rather than staying in what Boswell in 2003, even without knowledge of the new Wallaces to come, called Brief Interviews’ mode of “consolidation[].”¹⁸ As Pietsch reveals,¹⁹ Wallace began “Adult World” as part of The Pale King, probably within what Max reveals was an intended pornography business subplot (Every Love Story, 321). Anticipating insertion into the interstices of private and public economies in the tax novel, “Adult World” shows Wallace attuning his abiding question of value and the moral to the complexities of economic causation, captured in the stochastic fluctuations of currency trading, a prime example of the proliferation of tenuous financial value that Arrighi and Harvey criticize.

“Adult World” concerns the Other Math—the presumed combination of selves—known as marital love. Sadly, for married couples, one does not equal two, and two will never truly become one. On such distinctions the fundamental order of numbers depends, we learn when the collection climaxes on the psychopath of “B.I. #20,” Wallace’s most horrifying nihilist and his refashioning of figures from horror novels by Thomas Harris and Stephen King that he surprisingly listed among his favorite books (and sometimes also taught).²⁰ The rapist-murderer’s “forehead’s [bloody]mark” in “B.I. #20” “was not a rune or glyph at all…but a simple circle, the Ur-void, the zero, that axiom of Romance we call also mathematics, pure logic, whereby one does not equal two and cannot” (BI 314). Here is a grim summation of the essential distance between one and an-other: the page 0 that connoted an ironist’s value in the opening story (where two people also fail to become one) has, more than three hundred pages later, the direst implications (the finger-flexing sadist is an intermediate step in this progression). Madame Psychosis made an equally pessimistic claim in Infinite Jest: there were “two really distinct individual people walking around back there in history’s mist,” and “all difference descends from this difference…. No Zen-type One, always rather Two” (IJ 220).

But we subscribe all the time, Brief Interviews knows, to a mythology of love relationships that shows two magically becoming one—Other Math as the addition of one to an-other. This insidious philosophical story regarding love and value arises from Plato, with whose images Wallace plays throughout. The time-stopping sexual fantasies of the Soviet boy in “B.I. #59” recast the Republic’s discussion of the ring of Gyges (and the moral dilemmas of invisibility). This and other Socratic dialogues are a distant precedent for the Brief Interviews, with the Hideous Men often playing sophists, no Socratic questioning in sight (except from the reader, filling in Q’s). In a revision of Plato’s cave, the depressed person feels a “life-or-death need to describe the sun in the sky and yet [is]able or permitted only to point to shadows on the ground” (BI 59n5). That state resonates with the entrappedness of “Yet Another Example…(XXIV),” which replies to the cave allegory with a silent battle between twin brothers: one has his hair cut while the other, reflected in the pantry door, “cop[ies]” his expressions, making them “distended and obscene” (BI 319–320). With the stove “scorching” behind the shorn boy (i.e., the fires that throw shadows onto the cave wall), he operates with the maddening awareness of the images’ irreality that Plato’s figures do not have (BI 320). In a final Platonic example, “Octet” turns upon a distinction between two locations: “down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us”—the domain of “a reader”—and “some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ,” the presumed place of “a Writer” (BI 160). In Plato’s terms, the latter godly space is the heaven from which ideal forms emanate, the world of “mud” the plane of the thingly. Wallace wants that distinction undone.

Let me illuminate this Wallace critique of Platonism through a brief interlude on a pointed homage in Tom McCarthy’s remarkable experimental novel Remainder. About a fifth of the way into Remainder the amnesiac narrator—seeking a purpose after winning a huge legal settlement for an accident he does not recall—attends a party given by a man who never actually appears, David Simpson. A David with a Scottish surname: code for David Wallace, who, from Bruce in “Here and There” to Barry Loach, used many Scottish self-references. The connection is sealed when the narrator replays Joelle’s freebasing in the bathroom at Molly Notkin’s party, about a fifth of the way into Infinite Jest. In Simpson’s bathroom, though, the narrator meditates not on crack cocaine but on a crack running down the wall. Simpson “had stripped the walls, so there was only plaster on them, plus some daubs of different types of paint where David had been experimenting to see how the room would look in various colours. I was…looking at this crack in the plaster when I had a sudden sense of déjà vu”²¹—in plot terms, the conjuring of an uncannily similar scene that launches his first of several elaborate reenactments of half-remembered events. But in metafictional terms, the description points to McCarthy’s memory of David experimenting in Infinite Jest, now regarded as a blank canvas on which to try new colors.

Simpson’s party is a housewarming for a flat he “has just bought…on Plato Road” (Remainder, 35). A crack in a new apartment equates to a crack in the metaphysical edifice. McCarthy suggests many things here (the non-viability of Platonism, Henry James’s bowl…) and also challenges my reading of Wallace as a seeker of ground. McCarthy, emphasizing more his deconstructive habits, sees Wallace as a writer who continually observes the cracks in metaphysical systems, identifying persistent lack. In conversation with Max, challenging the biographer’s account of a writer who decided he could not be a postmodernist, McCarthy characterizes Wallace as a Derridean mind who argues consistently that “a metaphysical belief system does not work” and seeks “an aesthetics of commitment that would not subscribe to a notion of authenticity on one hand or pat irony on the other.”²²

McCarthy uses his Wallace and Plato references to launch a descent into extreme solipsism and simulacral life—more ultrapostmodernism than postpostmodernism. But in Brief Interviews it is the Plato of love and idealized union that draws Wallace’s most acid parodies. “Adult World” toys with the famous Symposium imagery of Zeus slicing humans’ ancestors in half. In a metaphor with tremendous staying power in the Western tradition, Plato’s Aristophanes observes that love “draws the two halves of our original nature back together and makes one out of two…Each of us [has] been cut in half like flatfish, making two out of one, and each of us is looking for his own matching half.”²³ “My other half” or “my better half”: many millions in history have cited this maxim, having no clue about its Platonic provenance or the visceralness and narcissism the metaphor entails, and as many have lost sleep over the myth of finding a “soul mate.” Wallace, always interested in why certain clichés take hold, probes the limits of the self interpreted in these mathematical terms in “Adult World,” which is full of “flatfish,” half-people with “inner deficits” (BI 184) alienated from each other but without the Platonic happy ending. The schizoid self-division Burn sees throughout Infinite Jest²⁴ has a renewed persistence in Brief Interviews, which uses the “B.I.” abbreviation to signify “bi-” and thus bivalency, split identities. In “Adult World,” the imbalanced halves range from the “slight asymmetry” (BI 173) of Jeni’s breasts to her former lover’s “facial asymmetry” (BI 179–180) and the “emotional asymmetry” of rampant “misconnection” (BI 184). Jeni’s husband has “insecurities about his right profile” and prefers being seen from the left (his sinister side); his “turn[ing] his face toward Jeni” as he drives an ambulance in her dream becomes a moment of “obscene” horror (BI 179). These figures are “ideally one-sided” in the sense that they live in realms of abstraction inspired by the logic of money and contract.

Even the story is riven—I/II or ½—and the choice of parenthetical Roman numerals, “(I)” and “(II),” makes a visual joke about the attempted addition of one solipsistic self to a second, forming two separate Is, rather than the promised “ONE FLESH,” the subtitle of “(II)” (BI 183). Wallace also loads the split story’s ending with many ironic suggestions that Plato’s vision of combined halves has been thoroughly subverted. “Binding them now,” the end of “(II)” says, “is that deep & unspoken complicity that is adult marriage is covenant/love → ‘They were now truly married, cleaved,’” a word meaning both unity and division (BI 188–189). The equally ironic last line suggests they “‘…were ready to begin, in a calm and mutually respectful way, to discuss having children

together

’” (BI 189; ellipsis in the original). The joke is that the “together” part may be optional for these atomized individuals, probably headed for divorce. But in the context of Other Math as the possible combination of self and other, the near-curly brackets become especially meaningful, both here and in the earlier mention of “one flesh,

a union…

”: in set theory, which the term “union” brings up, curly brackets with no numbers between them—{}—would signify the empty set, and thus this couple, the chicken sexer and the heavily bracketed Depressed Person (who is “frightened for herself, for as it were ‘

her

self ’” [BI 68]), are subject to an utter negation or erasure. Naturally, market value accompanies this ironic Other Math: the marriage, so fraught before, now “afforded Jeni O. Roberts a cool, steady joy” (BI 189)—an image of reliable cash flow, product of the revelation that she has not only resigned herself to masturbation but secured a “separate investment portfolio” (BI 187).

Jeni’s currency-trader husband is referred to throughout as “the stochastic husband,” a name that both repeats the nonidentity trope of “The Depressed Person” and juxtaposes contrasting moments in economic history: “stochastic” describes a form of probability making possible postmodern, lightning-fast financial accumulation of the sort that Arrighi analyzes (and that I mentioned in chapter 2), while “to husband” means to grow land and animals, or to use economic resources conservatively, steadily accruing value. Like the poet of “Death Is Not the End” and Rick Vigorous, this onanistic husband is postindustriousness, his so-called work space a fraud. “Sometimes the husband would arise at night and use the master bathroom and then go out to his workshop off the garage” to pursue “his hobby of furniture refinishing” (BI 168): the sophomoric joke is that sanding furniture covers for his compulsively—my finger flexions—“worked wood” (note too the trace of “masturbate” in “master bathroom”). Part of Wallace’s effort to write “poorly” in “Adult World (I)” is not only to belabor the implausibility of Jeni’s singular epiphany but to indulge in transparently Freudian metaphors, from this woodshop to its denizen’s embodiment of Bluebeard. The husband’s fake artisanship points toward the sterility of his job in the immaterial finance economy of monitoring the yen. In a traditional version of “Adult World,” the story might resolve itself by forcing the husband’s yens back from masturbation and market contingencies to more stable husbanding. But instead Wallace pushes the Roberts couple onto the global financial stage, turning his eye for economic apocalypse to the Asian currency crisis that began in July 1997.

Spreading from major devaluation of the Thai baht brought on by rumors that it lacked sufficient backing in dollars, the “Asian Flu” raised fears of a worldwide economic crash and, in one year, led to $600 billion vanishing from Asian stock markets.²⁵ The global effects of this crisis in the “rupiah and the won and the baht” ripple through “Adult World” (BI 163): Mad Mike’s “pressure” to move Hyundais on the last three banking days of each month stems from the dealership’s South Korean affiliation (BI 181), and Jeni’s “hi-tech mastrbtory [sic] appliances” are industrially “manufactured in Asia” (BI 188). Naomi Klein argues that there was potential in the Asian Flu for “a crisis of 1930s proportions”—though Clinton, confirming his neoliberal credentials, blithely called it “a few little glitches in the road” (Shock Doctrine, 320). The crisis proved a case study for the neoliberal principle of viewing collapse as endemic to capitalist systems and occasion not for repair but exploitation. Klein, anatomizing “disaster capitalism,” which extracts value and rewritten laws from “shock,” argues that the Friedmanite economists in charge of U.S. policy, who called for market correction over bailout loans, saw the misery as “an opportunity in disguise” to demand deregulation as the price for bailout offers (Shock Doctrine, 320). Harvey says the 1997–1998 crisis “exacerbated” the already “declining ability of the state to discipline capital during the 1990s” (Brief History of Neoliberalism, 110). The global economic impact was dire, but—in a premonition of 2008 outcomes—social losses produced large private gains.

Expanding on his image of an entire life determined by a coin flip, Wallace uses the currency crisis to globalize his portrayal of the subject as contingent, especially when pegged to the “Ever-Changing Status” of monetary values (BI 161). “Stochastic meant random or conjectural or containing numerous variables that all had to be monitored closely”—much like, we notice, the reading of characters’ fates in Wallace’s fiction. The husband, in another association of financial value with dementia, jokingly adds that his job “really meant getting paid to drive yourself crazy” (BI 167). Stochastic mathematics, based on early 1900s work on French bond prices by Louis Bachelier but not fully implemented until the mid–twentieth century, makes the risk taking and massive value accruals of contemporary markets possible by reducing uncertainty in predicting prices (often called their “random walk”) within a continuous timeframe.²⁶ Stochastic math, in essence, enables financial capital by increasing assurance of “Return on Investment” or “ROI” (BF 183n11). But so too do stochastic models enable the stark opposite of cost-accounting’s conservatism: “casino capitalism,” a description of finance that has grown increasingly common since 2008’s gambles were revealed. The Sierpinski gasket, which Wallace revealed had structured Infinite Jest, is based in stochastic math,²⁷ and Wallace is also building on Pynchon’s example of human moral agency in the thrall of, and anterior to, systems: Gravity’s Rainbow’s Roger Mexico grows frustrated trying to explain why his stochastic charts confirm a pattern of probability for V-2 hits but cannot predict a spot for the next one.

In my terms, the stochastic provides a metaphor for being an active reader of Wallace in the neoliberal age. The important maneuver of the stochastic predictor involves fitting random points on a graph to a line or a smooth curve, approximating what a reader does in moving from page 1 through to 981 and trying to order even the most disparate events into a causal chronology. These are maneuvers that long, important endnotes turn into a difficult and self-conscious affair, requiring “random” movement from, for example, “point” (page) 23 to 983 or 64 to 985 (for a nine-page filmography), as well as decisions about when to follow intraendnote references. Chronologically reordering the Brief Interviews to determine Q’s fate is another such move. Stochastic math reminds us that straight lines, like narratives, are always constructions, products of “fit” and imposed, after the fact, on a flux of points (which offer no clear path to the telos of an epiphany). We might also consider the complexities of stochastic narrative as Wallace’s rewriting, outside the idiom of analytical philosophy, of his undergraduate refutation of fatalism in Fate, Time, and Language.²⁸

Wallace has played with such meanings often in previous short fiction, without explicitly naming the field. Stochas, the Greek root, literally means a pointed stick at which archers aim their arrows in target practice, and thus when he riffs in “Westward” on a writer like himself aiming an “off angled target arrow that will stab the center, right in the heart,” Wallace refashions a common illustration in probability textbooks and calls fiction innately conjectural and stochastic (GCH 294). “Little Expressionless Animals,” at the other end of Girl with Curious Hair, scatters events across time, expecting the reader to order them. Reflecting that act, Julie claims of her childhood habit of playing with the “straightedge” that her abusive mother locks her away with, “I could make worlds out of lines. A sort of jagged magic”—and thus the often acute angles at the head of each section must be hers (GCH 10). We should see the suicide’s razor hinted at in this language and in the angles’ sharpness, though, along with a Tractatus-inspired approach to “worlds” as line-drawn pictures (or cases) that Wallace hopes this story will transcend. With her straightedge Julie mimics the action of the stochastic mathematician who, faced with a random array of points, follows the method of linear regression to find the least jagged line to connect them. When the final drawing, three pages from the end, violates the “rules” of linearity and forms a triangle, graphed abstractions (and Jeopardy! data) meet the flux of living, with the triangle’s three lines gesturing toward connection and even three-dimensionality (GCH 39).²⁹ Finally, the uncollected “Order and Flux in Northampton” names the poles between which stochastic stories cause readers to vacillate: underscoring the fallacy in Barry Dingle’s plan for falling in love, this story dissolves into a log of loosely connected events occurring worldwide—fittingly random precursors to Barry’s final moment, which ends up being a dog bite to the genitals instead of a kiss.

Likewise, “Adult World” dissolves into a set of “points” that asks the reader to take the active role Wallace usually demands to a higher level. “Adult World (I)” may seem on the surface a well-ordered, realistic representation of mind and event, while “(II)” smacks of robotic, computer-program-like directives, what the narrative calls “schematic/ordered” (BI 183). Yet that is only because of the reader’s conditioning by “Workshop Hermeticism,” with its “epiphan[ies] whose approach can be charted by any Freitag on any Macintosh” (another set of lines undone by Julie’s odd angles) (BF 40).³⁰ “Adult World” makes us think anew about what we mean when we call an ending predictable. “(I)” is indeed “dramatic/ stochastic” (BI 183) because drama tends to turn random flux into predictability, a familiar line that—as underscored by the metacommentaries on when Jeni’s realizations occurred in relation to “lived experience”—simplifies the Beckettian eventlessness that Wallace’s anticonfluential plots record (BI 177). With spellings like “mastrbtory” and “hmn race” (BI 187) in “(II),” the reader fills in blanks in the same way she must on the level of narrative. In the same way, the many graphic arrows nod to stochas and signify not obvious causation but narrative construed as an arc of events dependent on a reader’s sense of the probable. In “(II),” the reader—looking through the restaurant’s window frame as though at a TV, reading through a “Schema” that sparks associations with screenplays—must acknowledge his complicity in shaping the mechanistic, soap-opera-like plot of secret sex and melodrama (BI 183). 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).

Armed with the stochastic, we can finally return full circle to the table of contents, which begins to make greater sense as an investigation of our character, our expectations of being guided toward order, and our related ways of defining moral values in the era of financialization. Wallace gives the reader at the outset, in the various noncontinuous numbers and systems, an array of random data, suggesting that the stochastic method of fitting a line to certain data points and necessarily discarding others (such as all those apparently left out of the “Yet Another Example” and “Brief Interviews” series) might characterize both the writing of this book and its reception by the involved reader. Yet such valuation of many variables, once the reader gains intimacy with the people behind those titles and numbers, should also give way to a moral calculus that reduces to simpler choices, often starkly binarized: in “Octet,” this is the rhythm of the Quizzes’ conclusions, “Which one lived,” “Is she a good mother,” and “So decide” (BI 131, 135, 160). That last imperative tellingly appears at the midpoint of this balancing book, its exact center (160.5 pages—remember to count page 0—is half of 321). It is as though a balance scale is constructed by the materiality of the book as well as its themes, the fulcrum of “decid[ing]” always at the center.

In the introduction I claimed Wallace’s work tries to extract a balance scale from a world dominated by not only market principles but computerized systems of decision making, which according to Wallace inevitably have a distancing effect on the close-up work of human valuation and moral living. Brief Interviews, conceived as an interweaving of computerized stochastic valuation and balance-scale valuation, proposes that achieving a fiction of moral values in postmodernity involves working simultaneously through both types. The title “Octet” contains a faint trace of this dual task: in computing, an octet is another term for a byte, a unit of digital information consisting of eight bits, a state of systematic completeness this human, fallible story aspires to but fails to reach—while hoping that “the 2 + (2(1)) pieces add up to something urgent and human” (BI 154). With the ending “So decide”—decide about the sincerity and thus, essentially, the humanity of the narrating voice—Wallace also obliquely evokes the Turing test, in which a computer may be regarded as a human being if its auditor decides it is based on its language use.

As he combines postmodern technique with old verities and values, Wallace knows that the writer who continued penning didactic tales of moral mimesis in 1999 without acknowledging the dominance of computerized systems would be like the Arizona teacher in “E Unibus Pluram” who, numb to historical changes to consciousness, insists on fiction of a “Platonic Always” and refuses to admit how technologies like TV are now “part of reality” (SFT 43). Wallace hopes, in this dialectic, to combine valuation old and new through what “Octet,” after portraying a quasi-stochastic process of discarding quizzes, describes with the more fundamental mathematical operation of reduction, that means of simplifying fractions or clarifying the two balanced sides of an equation: “these apparently different and formally (admit it) kind of stilted and coy-looking ‘Pop Quizzes’ could all reduce finally to the same question (whatever exactly that question is)” (BI 156). The desired effect—the goal of a postmodern moralist—is for the reader, oscillating between complexity and simplicity, to ask not what “exact[]” moral question a text didactically poses or answers but how a text, through the accumulation of its provocations, sharpens her ability to define moral values herself. The exact moral questions are personal to the reader, to what she puts in the blanks left by Q. All this occurs within a world that hardly ever thinks about value outside the market’s terms, and the values discovered undercut neoliberalism’s assumptions that bonds to others, on personal and communal levels, can always be subjected to the market’s math.

In what may be his clearest refutation of Pynchon’s legacy, then, Wallace tends ultimately toward embracing reduced complexity and the balancing effects of binarisms, led by his sense that a renovation of moral decision making now takes priority over Pynchon’s 1960s mission of upsetting rigid, technologized thought—those “matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones…hanging like balanced mobiles right and left,” that Oedipa sensed in San Narciso.³¹ “It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation,” Wallace says in 1993 (CW 60). Finding greater verbal complexity beneath the apparent order of a numbering system, the reader of Brief Interviews moves toward a decision making and sense of “values” that employ the precision of the intellect but do not allow for the calcifying of “intellectualization.” Likewise, by falling short of the symmetry the numbered parts imply in “Octet” and the “Yet Another Example…” series, Wallace also undermines the reader who might try to avoid values by admiring a distanced aesthetic perfection. Moral art, in postmodernity, must be ugly, asymmetrical art, down in the mud of the trench, if it hopes to keep the other alive and unmown.

Wayne’s first novel, Kapitoil, pays tribute to its inspiration while also, in its story of immigrant striving, adding dimensions of racialism, globalism, and realpolitik lacking in Wallace’s vision. Its protagonist, Karim Issar, is a prodigious mathematical mind and programmer just arrived in the United States from Qatar in the fall of 1999 to work on the Y2K bug in the World Trade Center offices of Schrub Equities, for which he develops a lucrative oil-futures algorithm he names Kapitoil—combining capital, oil, and his initial K but also, with the ending “toil,” unconsciously questioning the ambivalent status of work, class, and even slavery within this world. Wayne invites us to read his novel as an allegory of the United States and Middle East before and after 9/11: the villainous boss Derek Schrub (i.e., Shrub) is George W. Bush, and Karim, taken as a son by Schrub as long as he promises to give up the assets of his financial model, represents the site of Bush’s post-9/11, oil-focused imperial project (not to mention the elder Bush’s). All this occurs in such a way that (as will be the case in Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel”) we read with the dramatic irony of 9/11 in mind for those Karim leaves behind in late 1999, when he returns to Qatar and the novel ends.

En route there are numerous allusions to Wallace, particularly to the pitfalls of technical mastery and logical coldness. “My mathematical brain makes me very skilled at racquetball,” says Karim as he plays Schrub,³³ sounding much like the Wallace of “Derivative Sport.” Earlier, in a Tractatusesque list of points, Karim calculates that he could fit 3.5 million racquetballs inside the court, if he could get rid of the space between the spheres—but this “ideal cannot exist, because then they would not truly be balls anymore” (Kapitoil, 85). Like Hal, Karim has thoroughly repressed the traumatizing death of a parent: Wayne doles out the story of Karim’s mother’s death from breast cancer when he was thirteen (Hal’s age when Himself commits suicide [IJ 248]). Wayne mines Nabokov’s controlling, nonnative English speakers for Karim’s hilariously awkward voice, but it is Hal and Bruce of “Here and There” (of which Wayne is a devotee)³⁴ who form the template for Karim’s robotic attempts to treat English as a mathematical system. Speaking often of language as “deciphering” (Kapitoil, 4, 120) and taping his daily life on microrecorder, Karim ends each chapter with a list of words he has learned, with each definition involving an equal sign—thus often pointing, unintentionally, to Wittgensteinian precepts regarding contextualization.

A late chapter featuring Karim making out with his girlfriend to Bob Dylan ends with a lyric they discuss that shows the limits of the linguistic mathematicization that Brief Interviews also courts: “warehouse eyes = an example of a metaphor that may not have a directly logical meaning” (Kapitoil, 232). Remembering lyrics to a Beatles song will prove integral to Karim’s true grieving of his mother’s death. Such emotional and aesthetic learning for Karim necessarily coincides with the unraveling of Kapitoil, since its algorithm converts language into data, making oil trades based on word frequency in news coverage. As a child Karim discovers his abilities by observing “parallels between the cracks and the arrangement of glass on the ground” (Kapitoil, 18) when he breaks a window; later he compares an algorithm’s exclusions of certain data in reading the market to sorting through the “layers and colors and patterns of paint” in a Jackson Pollock exhibit he attends (Kapitoil, 24). Wayne thus finds new ways to work in Wallace’s realm of the stochastic, the fractal, and the Sierpinski gasket, where certain forms of complex postmodern art innately dialogue with financial markets’ models of data evaluation.³⁵

Karim = generous, in Arabic, and Wayne, again following Wallace’s lead, resolves his difficult allegory of global tensions in part by dissolving the political and offering Karim the emotional gold standard of Rebecca Goldman, who grows from officemate to Dylan makeout partner. The arc of generous Karim may not be that of Don the gift, but Kapitoil does push back against market and mathematical values with those of generosity. Wayne makes much of Karim awkwardly saying “It is my gift” when paying for his and Rebecca’s first coffee date (Kapitoil, 31), and Pollock-inspired art reclaims stochastic beauty when Karim gives Rebecca the “gift” of his “algorithmic drawing” remapping the colors of a watermelon (Kapitoil, 221). At Thanksgiving, Karim gains a new set of black friends who contrast with his white-dominated workplace (and add further texture to the Islam/Judaism fusion he and Rebecca represent). Free of equal signs, Karim coins a verb phrase at the feast: “I would like to thanks-give to you and your family for inviting me” (Kapitoil, 203). “Possibly I should learn not to view my values as a series of binaries and instead find a compromise,” he later says to Rebecca—that is what “relationships are about,” she confirms (Kapitoil, 242). Wallace would nod as well, perhaps while noting that his disciple has found a new avenue of globalism and post-9/11 politics down which to pursue his techniques.

Another globalizer of Wallace is Zadie Smith, whose brilliant reading of Brief Interviews, “The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace,” I have cited in this chapter. In a memorial tribute Smith says Wallace had no “equal amongst living writers,”³⁶ and she too shares his love of Hyde’s The Gift (Changing My Mind, 290). Her novel NW (2012) pays several tributes to Wallace: a section titled “Host,” references to “oblivion” at key moments,³⁷ and a system of numbering for the contents of the book’s first part, “Visitation,” that seems indebted to Brief Interviews’ table of contents and theme of contingent values. Four sections numbered “37” are randomly interspersed amid twenty-three other sequentially numbered sections. The sections numbered 37 unearth the secret and unconscious: one concerns white coprotagonist Leah’s abortions; another, set in her lesbian past, explains that the number 37 has a “magic about it”—“watch for it…in our lotteries, our game shows, our dreams and jokes” (NW, 42). Such remarks speak to NW’s intense scrutiny of the luck of class position, the randomness with which one is granted privilege: “Could things have been differently arranged, in a different order, in a different place?” as another 37 section asks, questions resonating with the divergent fates of white Leah and her black best friend, Natalie, who becomes a successful lawyer (NW, 74). In a book titled for a postal code and exploring the unexpected (but also seemingly fated) encounters that take place within it, Smith wants to wed Wallace-inspired, postmodern contingencies to the tradition of urban tumult in the English novel (Dickens is always on Smith’s mind, and in this book of many daytime affairs and city wandering, Ulysses is a primary reference point).

In the final section 37, Leah repeats her name to a store clerk who cannot find her photos, only to be given pictures of Shar (read: share), the downtrodden woman who starts the text by knocking on Leah’s door with a plea for money. A novel about the distribution of lottery funds (Leah’s office job), NW is a commonwealth text too, evoking elements of The Broom of the System.³⁸ Those contrasts evolve through juxtapositions of charity in Leah’s office and neighborhood existences; in the latter, she is haunted by the initial request from Shar, which will not sit within the lottery office’s institutional framework. Leah’s surname, Hanwell, has the title’s postal designation at its heart, for the random others in one’s city actually constitute the self, points that resonate with Smith’s multicultural themes and her own interracial background.

Smith proves on the whole more incisive than Wallace in describing issues of social welfare and charity, without so many of the allegorical abstractions and moral fables he brings to bear. She argues most thoroughly with the examples of Wallace and Hyde on the issue of gender and gifts. NW is about the suffering of women who turn down the rewards their culture insists they should be grateful for, from a stable relationship (Natalie does not bank on boring Rodney Banks and later jeopardizes her marriage to the more exciting Frank with Internet hookups) to motherhood (Leah struggles to tell her mate she does not want children). Having recognized Wallace’s circumspection regarding artistic gifts (she says he viewed his own “as a suspicious facility to be interrogated”), Smith in NW focuses on the particular ways women negotiate giving, talent, and gratitude (Changing My Mind, 256). After Natalie muses about a pop singer from their neighborhood who says she does not “own” her beautiful voice, Smith writes an “Aphorism” that echoes the title of her essay on Wallace, but in a register that nuances the gendered affect surrounding gifts: “What a difficult thing a gift is for a woman! She’ll punish herself for receiving it” (NW 346).