David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books

In original readings of all of Wallace’s fiction, from The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of financial crises and economic policies.

Jeffrey Severs is associate professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the coeditor of Pynchon's "Against the Day": A Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide (2011) and has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Critique, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Austin American-Statesman.

Brian McHale, Distinguished Arts and Humanities Professor, Ohio State University:
Jeffrey Severs has an archivist's nose for the 'good stuff' from David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center; he has an eagle eye for motifs that circulate from one Wallace book to another; and he is uncannily skillful in making apposite connections between Wallace and his precursors, contemporaries, and successors. Only someone as widely and deeply read in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century literature as Severs could have pulled this off.

Heather Houser, author of Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect :
From this study, David Foster Wallace emerges as a 'rebellious economic thinker,' as well as a literary innovator and cultural critic. Severs has mastered Wallace's fiction and examines it through neoliberal policies to show seams of value—moral and economic—running throughout. Attentive to history and language, Severs demonstrates how Wallace represents work as a form of grace, weight as a means of uplift, and balance as an elusive aim.

Lee Konstantinou, author of Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction:
Since its inception, David Foster Wallace studies has focused on a relatively small set of themes—irony, sincerity, addiction, and the mass media—often centered on Wallace's own descriptions of his literary project in interviews and essays. Severs's insightful new study builds on and challenges this critical orthodoxy, revealing how Wallace was a careful economic, political, and historical thinker. Wallace's writing, as Severs shows in a series of original and bracing chapters that cover the author's whole career, engaged provocatively with the New Deal, the social-welfare state, the monetary system, and the history of neoliberalism. Severs uncovers a new domain of questions that will dominate debates about Wallace's legacy and the meaning of his important art for decades to come.