Toward an Aesthetic of Post-Boomer Fiction

Zach Gibson reviews Adam Kelly’s “New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age.”

By Zach GibsonApril 5, 2025

• Literary Criticism

NEAR THE END of “E Unibus Pluram,” a 1993 essay on fiction, television, and American irony, David Foster Wallace rejects the “self-consciousness and hip fatigue” that characterized the literary postmodernism of the 1960s and ’70s. Warning of irony’s annexation by commercial television in the 1980s, Wallace urges his peers to turn away from metafiction, calling instead for a wave of “anti-rebels” who are “willing to risk” accusations of “sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law.”

Wallace sharpened his call to arms during a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery, where he names Robert Coover, William Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, John Barth, and Thomas Pynchon as “patriarch[s] for [his] patricide.” Though he cedes that their aesthetic anarchism was “indispensable for their times,” Wallace maintains that its “absorption by the U.S. commercial culture has had appalling consequences for writers and everyone else.”

The television essay, which laments that Gen X writers traffic in nihilistic self-consciousness, takes as its target the later metafictional iterations of the 1980s and ’90s, such as Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) and Mark Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990). Wallace argues that many of the formal techniques that postmodern fiction used to overcome the blind spots inherent in language provided TV with a rhetorical toolbox that allowed viewers a guilt-free pass to indulge their deepest impulses as consumers: they could now do so knowingly.

Though DeLillo and Leyner were “deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching,” according to Wallace, irony’s co-optation by mass media left its satirical bite defanged. Because their work runs in tandem with a televisual culture that absorbed postmodern “sarcasm, cynicism,” and “penchant for ironic diagnosis,” Wallace denies it the status of parody. Instead, he reduces it to blank pastiche. By the time of the essay’s writing, metafiction “was less a ‘response to’ televisual culture than a kind of abiding-in-TV.”

“Unibus” and the McCaffery interview work as follow-up pieces to Wallace’s 1987 novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way.” The story, which works as an intertextual epilogue to John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967), follows the epiphanic experience of Mark Nechtr, a creative writing student, as he struggles against a program of paradigmatic postmodernism imposed by his teacher, Dr. Ambrose (a thinly veiled stand-in for Barth, named for the recurring lead character of several of the author’s stories). As Mark comes to see through his professor’s aesthetics as both “unacceptable confinement” and “utter baloney,” he begins to grope toward a “New Realism” that would transcend both the naivete of classical realism and the cynical disenchantments of metafiction.

In “Westward,” Wallace sought to press recursive narrative toward the “Armageddon-explosion,” as he told McCaffery, that he believed was the logical endpoint of metafiction from its very earliest incarnations. Where DeLillo and Leyner stand as contemporary journeymen laboring to atone for a literary fall from grace, Wallace holds Barth accountable for his initial indulgence in the forbidden fruit of irony. To Wallace, Barth’s original sin led an entire generation of novelists to forgo Wallace’s personal conviction that “fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.”

Writing at a full generation’s remove from Barth & Co., Wallace rejects irony, not only for its masturbatory self-indulgence but also for its complicit capitulation to a consumer society fueled by an appetitive compulsion for novelty. As an author who came of age inside the metafictional hall of mirrors Barth constructed, Wallace no longer sees the funhouse as fun. Nor does he see himself as lost so much as trapped in an interminably self-conscious prison house. By rebelling against the “old postmodern insurgents,” and by risking “the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs,” Wallace sought escape from a self-perpetuating, recursive cycle of navel-gazing solipsism.

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“Westward,” the McCaffery interview, and “Unibus” remain sources of scholarly discussion regarding Wallace’s relationship to his literary influences, as well as the legacy of his own influence. In his 2003 book Understanding David Foster Wallace, Marshall Boswell calls “Westward” an “engaging piece of pretentious juvenilia” that sets forth a “programmatic declaration of intent” for the rest of his career. Lee Konstantinou, in the 2012 essay “No Bull: David Foster Wallace and Postironic Belief,” cites the triad of works as a model for Wallace’s “postirony,” which sought to “decouple the academic and cultural association between metafictional form and ironic knowingness.” In his 2004 essay “Post-Postmodern Discontent: Contemporary Fiction and the Social World,” Robert L. McLaughlin sees in the essay and interview keys to an “agenda of post-postmodernism” that engages “the language-based nature of its operations, to make us newly aware of the reality that has been made for us.” Finally, Adam Kelly, in “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” (2010), claims that Wallace’s heightened attention to “what happens when the anticipation of others’ reception of one’s outward behaviour begins to take priority for the acting self” is indicative of a broader shift toward a “New Sincerity” that took place in the late 1980s and continued through the turn of the 21st century.

For Kelly, Wallace’s prediction of a conscious, concerted break with postmodern reflexivity stands as a manifesto in miniature for authors who came of age as the Cold War thawed. Kelly finds common, anti-rebellious cause with Wallace in the work of “post-boomer” writers (born between 1957 and 1972). His book-length study, New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (2024), continues to develop an analysis of Wallace’s significance, extending his theory to cover the post-boomer generation as a whole.

Kelly’s book argues that Wallace’s cohort worked within a literary climate doubly damned by the theoretical and economic challenges to writing fiction in the 1990s. Wallace’s New Sincerity sought to resolve a twinned pair of problems. It was, first, a response to the seeming impossibility of writing authentically in a reigning academic climate of deconstruction, with Paul de Man defining literature as “any text that implicitly or explicitly signifies its own rhetorical mode and prefigures its own misunderstanding as the correlative of its rhetorical nature.” Second, it grappled with a heightened anxiety surrounding what Kelly calls “the cross-contamination of love and money [that] becomes the inescapable condition of writing in a neoliberal age.”

Writers keenly attuned to the inseparable link between the act of telling the truth and how that truth will be used must accept that a “foreknowledge of those ends necessarily imbues the telling with a level of calculation from the beginning.” Readers jaded by two decades of winking admission to such calculation posed a new challenge to post-boomer authors. By openly airing fiction’s dirty laundry to a suspicious public, metafiction not only raised questions about “the authentic truth of the tale” but also, more damagingly, undercut the perceived “sincerity of the teller.” Faced with a hardened readerly skepticism, haunted by a “specter of calculation,” and conscious of the legitimate challenges leveled at conventional narrative, New Sincerity fiction sought to restore pathos and trust through a restored earnestness that “is not only other-directed but depends for its very possibility on acknowledgment by another.”

Kelly finds in the post-boomer generation a shared ethical disposition that is “deeply informed by politics and economics,” along with an aesthetic sensibility governed by a “self-conscious acknowledgement of complicity” with the prevailing market mentality of the 1990s. New Sincerity distinguishes itself from its precursors and its contemporaries through its ambivalent “admission of uncertainty about ‘actual feeling’ and actual solutions, as a symptom of the imaginative limits imposed by the dominance of normative neoliberalism.”

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Using Lionel Trilling’s “ideal of sincerity,” glossed as a “congruence between avowal and actual feeling,” Kelly highlights the ethical dimension of his project. Trilling takes a longer view of literary self-sabotage than Wallace, looking beyond the experimental fiction of the 1960s to the aloof impersonality prevalent in the high modernism of the 1920s. James Joyce’s dispassionate imperative that the author remain “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails,” set the work of fiction at a remove from its creator.

Authorial distancing rendered the “criterion of sincerity” irrelevant to aesthetic judgment. Though it opened new avenues for innovation, high modernism’s inward turn was, at heart, an aristocratic disposition that ran counter to how the broader reading public consumed fiction. Kelly draws a through line from Trilling’s remark that Joycean distancing failed to “take account of the habitual preferences of the audience” to Wallace’s corrective hope of restoring a sense that the “reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.”

To Trilling and Kelly, literary modernism marks a decisive break from sincere public discourse, not only because of its authors’ indeterminate adoption of authorial personas but also due to its self-involved withdrawal from its own audience. For Trilling, this hermetic turn toward aesthetic autonomy was a misguided, antisocial retreat from public life. It prioritized an ascetic authenticity—“a more exigent conception of the self and of […] being true to it,” as Trilling put it—over a self-transcendent, other-oriented sincerity. Where authenticity, as an end in itself, holds all motivation that does not come directly from the self to be suspect, sincerity, as a means of civic engagement, confidently accepts the social as a valid motivating force.

Kelly opens with a chapter on Wallace that explores how his novella “Westward” navigates the three ways that we outwardly express our inner intentions: by speaking, by carrying out actions, and by creating art. As Mark Nechtr comes to understand his “inner” intentions through retrospective examination of his “outer” words, deeds, and works, he arrives at a social conception of realized motivation that can only overcome self-interest by opening oneself to others. Intention, writes Kelly, “is realized in recognition; sincerity is achieved only in the other’s response.”

The novella’s “unfinishedness” and undecidability, according to Kelly, are emblematic of how New Sincerity texts “invite the reader/beholder to become a kind of co-producer in the aesthetic process.” The novella remains open-ended: it includes summary vignettes of Mark’s forthcoming short story, but these come in flashes that occlude its formal construction. Despite Wallace’s clear affinity for Mark’s perspective, he also never gives a definitive rhetorical victory to any one character’s point of view. “Westward” remains incomplete without the reader’s “interpretation and judgment,” which Kelly sees as a performative staging of sincerity that derives “as much from the outside as from the inside.”

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Where Kelly looks to Wallace for New Sincerity’s philosophical and aesthetic foundations, he turns to Dave Eggers for a symptomatic expression of the “economic underpinnings” that remain a constant preoccupation throughout the book. The strength of the period’s most successful novelists, Kelly argues, lay in how they confronted neoliberal aesthetic challenges, not by a nostalgic retreat into the past but by doubling down on their complicity with the neoliberal paradigm in order to push through it.

The eclipse of what Belgian cultural theorist Michel Feher calls “free labor” by “human capital” is key to the link Kelly sees between literature and the economy during the 1990s. For Feher, free laborers divide their time between the sphere of production, where they sell their work for a wage, and the sphere of reproduction, where they maintain a personal life apart from the labor market. The neoliberal economy that rose to prominence in the 1980s merged both spheres, forcing the wage earner to become either an entrepreneur or an investor in himself. This left workers vulnerable to the invasion of market values at the deepest, most private layers of their subjectivity. Following the collapse of the reproductive sphere, when workers no longer needed to justify behavior in terms of profitability, according to Feher, “domains such as health, education, culture, and the like […] become sectors of the valorizing of the self (understood as capital).”

For Kelly, New Sincerity was unique in its willed embrace of “the logic of ‘human capital’ […] in order to expose its workings and to articulate anxiety about how it operates.” This shows through in Eggers’s repeated attempts to stay several steps ahead of his readers’ assumptions through “regular reflections on how [his writing] has been shaped by the requirements of a potential readership.” Because sincere testimonials demand a degree of instrumentalization to become viable commodities, even the most deeply personal narratives inevitably carry with them a sense of entrepreneurial calculation.

One solution Eggers hits upon, according to Kelly, involves drawing a contrast between a collective readership, “whose generic expectations must be met and manipulated” to gain attention, and individual readers who remain “open and responsive to morally complicating elements in the stories they encounter.” In doing so, Eggers reaches a useful compromise between direct address to both the singular reader and the plural readership. This allows him to invoke an other-directed sense of sincerity while simultaneously ceding his complicit entry into the marketplace. Such a dual acknowledgment, writes Kelly, works “in significant part [as] an act of trust […] for the speaker as much as for their listener(s).”

Writing of Eggers’s 2002 debut novel You Shall Know Our Velocity, which follows childhood friends Will and Hand on an international journey to give away a bundle of windfall cash, Kelly offers an exceptional exploration of how deeply the neoliberal economy came to penetrate art and literature at the turn of the century. He suggests that the novel’s narrative structure, which attempts to “narrate the future as if it were already present or even past,” shares its temporality with the logic of credit and debt.

In the novel’s preface, the narrator claims to be “aware of all of the book’s flaws and shortcomings”; its appendix, titled “Mistakes We Knew We Were Making,” remarks on the novel as “self-conscious about being self-referential, [and] also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality.” Velocity runs on an anticipatory logic similar to that which, according to French theorist Jean-Joseph Goux, governs banking: it “uses time and expectation, uses the future, as if all these activities were overwhelmingly calculated in advance.” By speaking both to the internal readership that Will, the narrator, imagines and to the external reader that Eggers imagines, Velocity inscribes a future moment of reading into the present moment of its writing.

Kelly suggests that, in doing so, the novel stages a “pure economy of self-consciousness […] in which time appears to be neutralized or canceled as all future possibilities are absorbed into present awareness and authorial intent.” The novel’s characters go a step further than simply selling the human capital they have in the present, instead attempting to invest the unrealized human capital they hope to accumulate in the future. Kelly marks this as a drift from an entrepreneurial selfhood toward an indebted selfhood. The economic intrusion that runs through Eggers’s novels, for Kelly, reflects “the contemporary American novelist’s own political unconscious” in relation to the “global economic situation that supports his work.”

In Sacrament, a recast 2003 version of You Shall Know Our Velocity, Eggers supplements the original novel with an additional section in which a character admits that where the original narrative was not fabricated, it was performed: “what we had planned was a book conceived, then acted out, then transcribed, then ostensibly made into art. […] [W]e were therefore actors performing in a book not yet written.” The confession goes beyond merely collapsing anticipated future reading into the moment of writing, as it shows how an anticipated future writing can come to govern one’s conduct in the present. By laying out the tension involved in a life locked into the performative obligation of satisfying narrative debt, Kelly sees in Eggers an active demonstration of the challenges posed to sincere expression by the hegemonic logic of human capital.

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Kelly observes that the long shadow Wallace and Eggers cast over the New Sincerity paradigm has led critics to characterize the movement as “the preserve of privileged white males.” Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts, in their 2017 essay “White Guys: Questioning Infinite Jest’s New Sincerity,” take Kelly himself to task, claiming that he ignores “how Wallace’s fiction […] presents as universal an experience that it in fact implicitly codes as white and male.” In a response article, also published in 2017, Kelly maintains Wallace’s centrality to the post-boomer generation, but he also points to work by Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, and Zadie Smith to resist the claim that Wallace’s perspective should be taken as universal.

Kelly’s new book follows through on considering “the complex relationship between New Sincerity aesthetics and questions of gender and race” that he teased in his response to Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts. In addition to the well-trod ground of Wallace’s and Eggers’s position as key figures in New Sincerity, Kelly broadens his scope to include lengthy discussions of Egan, Whitehead, and Helen DeWitt. Through these chapters, coupled with a steady commentary on Zadie Smith’s work, Kelly offers a correction to mischaracterized readings of his earlier scholarship and to misrepresentations of New Sincerity as a whole.

Specifically, he approaches Egan’s Invisible Circus (1994) and Look at Me (2001) as “feminist reworkings of the themes and formal innovations” put forth by Wallace and Eggers. Egan, whose work straddles the line between experimentalism and more conventional realism, remains thematically postmodern in exploring the inherent paradox that accompanies the use of fiction as a vehicle for sincere expression. For Kelly, the language of commerce that looms large in Egan’s writing stages the “colonization of the private [subject] by the public persona.”

Corporate branding grows so omnipresent in Egan’s novels that even characters who refuse to sell out to the market reaffirm “a residual sincerity [that] morphs into its own kind of literary brand.” Kelly remarks that, for Egan’s female narrators, this experience is in keeping with “an entire cultural history that has denied sincerity to the female subject and the woman’s voice and has enforced division in that subjectivity and voice.” He praises the author for her “hybrid approach” that effectively uses all of the tools at her disposal to explore sincerity as a problem peculiar to the very form of the novel, “from its historical origins to its gendered dynamics to its particular entanglement with fictionality.”

Kelly turns to Whitehead’s early fiction to examine racial questions through the lens of New Sincerity. Whitehead’s 2009 novel Sag Harbor, he argues, offers a direct engagement with W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness—the “peculiar sensation” of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” Black “two-ness,” writes Du Bois, is a struggle, in one body, between “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” In Sag Harbor, Benji Cooper, an upper-middle-class black teenager in the 1980s, belatedly encounters Du Bois’s writings after a lifetime of hearing his mother’s admiration for the author.

Kelly sees the “present-day acts of historical interpretation” that drive the novel as Whitehead’s attempt to narrate the experience of negotiating the tension between racial inheritance and class privilege. Benji, who knew that Du Bois “fell into the category of Famous Black People” long before reading him, displays what Kelly calls a “revised form of double-consciousness” shaped by a cultural canonization, rather than a rejection, of Du Bois. Neoliberalism, which served to pull African American art toward the commercial center, wrought deep class divisions within the Black community. Whitehead’s novel, to Kelly, offers a “nuanced engagement with literary blackness” that sorts through “new problems of complicity and sincerity for black writers” that undermine “the kind of critical work that black art has traditionally been asked and understood to do.” By addressing its incidental cooperation with the uneven “uplift” that the neoliberal economy offers to people of color, Sag Harbor extends the New Sincerity paradigm to include issues of race and class.

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Kelly is successful in drawing a “generational portrait” of how American fiction developed between the end of the Reagan presidency and the 2008 financial crisis. The book is at its best when it stays closest to its material. All six case-study chapters offer careful investigations of the uncomfortable position New Sincerity held as both a symptom of and a response to its socioeconomic climate, underscoring the peculiar concerns and constraints shared by post-boomer authors. Borrowing Trilling’s conception of sincerity greatly clarifies Kelly’s adoption of the term by distinguishing it from its colloquial resemblance to authenticity and an existential anxiety over “bad faith.” The extension of New Sincerity’s priorities beyond Eggers and Wallace is a welcome contribution to the reading of Egan and Whitehead that helps to fill the field’s blind spots on questions of race and gender.

Despite its overall success, however, New Sincerity is not without its weak points, most of which stem from an insufficiently critical engagement with Wallace’s expressed relation to both irony and postmodernism. The book reframes the central question Kelly posed about Wallace in his 2010 essay: no longer at issue is whether Wallace’s “brand of sincerity” was genuinely novel so much as whether Wallace and his contemporaries pushed the implications of “poststructuralist ideas about language” toward creating “something ethically traditional but aesthetically novel.” Despite drawing compelling links to the symptomatic relationship between post-boomer fiction and its cultural climate, Kelly overlooks its continuity with the recent past and overstates its novelty. Though he makes a strong case that the post-boomer generation was “Sincerely Neoliberal,” his argument that it was “Sincerely New” is far less convincing.

During his 1993 interview with McCaffery, Wallace pointed out that after an initial wave of “pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end.” In its stalled-out, crank-turning form, postmodern fiction walked in lockstep with commercial television, which has “been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative,” as Wallace outlines in “Unibus.”

Wallace was, at least in part, correct in pointing out that advertising and MTV had absorbed and blunted his predecessors’ accomplishments. However, he makes a genetic error that conflates figures who resemble what Ezra Pound called “inventors,” “masters,” and “diluters.” In Wallace’s construction, a generation of inventors, who (in Pound’s words) act as “discoverers of a particular process,” and masters, who endow preceding inventions with “some special character of their own,” are held accountable for a later wave of diluters—latecomers who “produce something of lower intensity, some flabbier variant, some diffuseness or tumidity in the wake of the valid.”

Wallace’s personal indebtedness to an earlier generation of postmodernists, including Barth, Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Coover, appears to lend a privileged perspective to his polemic. Apart from his bellicosity, however, his arguments against self-conscious irony are not unique. Troublingly for Kelly’s analysis, they are also not new. Wallace caricatures the pro- and anti-postmodern camps as, respectively, snidely hip nihilists and naively sentimental philistines. In doing so, he collapses more than two decades of scholarly debate and puts forth thin, watered-down versions of Gerald Graff’s Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (1979), which anticipated Wallace’s comments on metafiction’s self-destructive telos, and Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979), which preempted Wallace’s links between solipsism, irony, and mass media.

Worse, Wallace lumps a diverse set of writers into a homogeneous mass by painting a monolithic metafiction in overbroad strokes. Moreover, he also ignores their continued growth in the 20 years that intervened between the publication of “Lost in the Funhouse” and “Westward.” During this period, Gaddis, Coover, Barth, William H. Gass, and John Hawkes continued to publish new fiction that looked drastically different from their output in the 1960s, along with criticism that indicated a self-conscious reorientation. Starting as early as the ’70s, many of Wallace’s targets had already reached similar conclusions about the results of their literary experiments.

For example, Joseph McElroy, in a 1979 interview, described his work as an effort to create a “collaborative network” with his readers, to narrate the simultaneous experience of multiple sensations in a medium that is linear by its very nature. For his part, Gass fought tirelessly to quarantine fiction from instrumental imperatives by defending it on aesthetic grounds. The novelist, he writes in Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), “creates an object, often as intricate and rigorous as any mathematic, often as simple and undemanding as a baby’s toy, from whose nature, as from our own world, a philosophical system may be inferred.” Barth preempted Wallace’s anti-rebellion in his 1980 essay “The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction,” which described his ideal author as one who “aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than […] late-modernist marvels” without “lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naïveté.”

Near the end of his 1989 essay “Nostalgia for the Present,” Fredric Jameson suggests that “what follows upon a strongly generational self-consciousness, such as what the ‘people of the sixties’ felt, is often a peculiar aimlessness.” Jameson goes on to suggest that the “crucial identifying feature” of the coming years might reveal itself to be “a lack of just such strong self-consciousness, which is to say a constitutive lack of identity,” resembling the directionlessness that he sees as a hallmark of the post-Vietnam era. The accelerated rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, for Jameson, tossed new “political straws in the wind” in a tempting, if misguided, hope for a return to the “serious historicity” of 1960s radicalism.

On its face, Wallace’s account of metafictional crank-turning may appear to caution against Jameson’s “wearing of the costumes of the great moments of the past.” Despite his critical posture, however, Wallace’s parade of caricatures draws him into one of the most emblematic traps that Jameson identifies with postmodernity: he reinforces a “weakening of historicity” that reduces the 1960s to a series of “dusty spectacles.” Rather than mounting an active critique of his forebears, he attacks a “recombination of various stereotypes of the past.”

With this weakened sense of historicity comes a lack of self-awareness about the present. Wallace’s aversion and the crank-turners’ nostalgia are two sides of the same neurosis that Timothy Bewes, in his 1997 book Cynicism and Postmodernity, attributes to “postmodern preoccupations” that “see our historical circumstances as unique.” At its most extreme, Bewes sees, in the “urge towards nakedness and clarity,” a revanchist retreat from mediation. Kelly is right to distinguish Wallace’s brand of sincerity, which is far more confident in its acceptance of what Bewes calls “the contingencies of representation, the pragmatics of political reality and the split, or disunified subject,” from a cult of authenticity. However, in letting Wallace’s dehistoricized literary history go unquestioned, Kelly lets the author off the hook for indulging in a peculiarly postmodern strain of cultural amnesia.

Wallace closes the McCaffery interview by expressing a strong sense of paternal angst. He bemoans the fact that metafiction bequeathed a generation of “literary orphans,” compares the 1980s and ’90s to the “cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel” of a high school party, and wishes that “some parents would come back.” But Wallace was not a literary orphan; he was a literary runaway. By obfuscating his relationship to his antecedents, Wallace projects rupture over continuity. “Westward,” “Unibus,” and the McCaffery interview constitute not so much a paradigm shift in the debate over postmodern irony as a delinquent interruption in a careful, considered conversation that continues into the present day.

A more generous reading of Wallace’s early work might approach the novella, essay, and interview as acts of reformation in revolutionary clothing. Despite his belligerent disavowal, Wallace’s project was marked less by disjunction than by development, continuity, and course correction. In a 2014 essay, Charles B. Harris argued that “Westward” was a “self-aware misprision, a knowing enactment of the anxiety of influence, as well as a fulfillment of the putatively unrealized possibilities of Barth’s fiction and postmodern fiction in general.” While New Sincerity would have benefited by working to bridge the gap between Wallace and his patriarchal forebears, Kelly’s careful examination of how the post-boomer generation developed postmodern means to meet neoliberal challenges makes a compelling case that such a bridge is worth building.