David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books by Jeffrey Severs

Author:Jeffrey Severs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020, Literary Criticism/American/General, LIT024060, Literary Criticism/Modern/21st Century
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

FICTIONAL FUTURES, STOCHASTIC ART, AND DIFFICULT GIFTS

For all its merits, the moral project of Brief Interviews remains, admittedly, rather esoteric and difficult to extract, especially for the reader seeking direct indictments of the fictions underlying finance and neoliberal value. As a coda to this chapter, let me examine two writers who, like McCarthy, both pay homage to Wallace and take his examples in newly productive and bracingly vivid directions, extending concepts of value from this chapter (and previous ones). The first, Teddy Wayne (born 1979), represents a rising generation of writers that encountered Wallace at college age and is likely to have taken him as a gateway to the postmodernist predecessors he challenges. Wayne was a Wallace scholar first: his 2001 undergraduate thesis at Harvard, a Wittgensteinian reading of Infinite Jest, is quoted in a few later articles.32

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

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