In his introduction to Marshall Boswell's The Wallace Effect, series editor Stephen J. Burn points out that where early Wallace scholarship focussed its attentions on literary aesthetics, “an increasingly vital task” for more recent interventions “has been to situate [the author's] fiction and ask questions about its place in larger contexts” (xii). The first volume in Bloomsbury's David Foster Wallace Studies series, Lucas Thompson's Global Wallace (2016), took on this task in relation to world literature; Boswell's study, however, returns to the American context to examine Wallace's place within the contemporary literary imagination. As his title suggests will be the case, Boswell (a prolific contributor and editor within Wallace studies since its earliest formations) argues that the author's circulation in the public sphere has produced a specific effect in contemporary literature. But even as he appositely identifies the mixture of “envy, hagiography, and resentment” which “mark Wallace's presence” (1) in discussions of American writing, Boswell makes no promise to identify the sources of these disparate affects, nor to “trace Wallace's artistic influence on the contemporary literary imagination” (10). Rather, in a departure from much previous scholarship on the writer, Boswell's volume “registers a provocative pattern of resistance to Wallace's literary dominance” (10).

He does this in two well-researched and thought-provoking sections. The first, “Toward Wallace,” examines the author's work in relation to familiar intertexts – novels by John Barth and Richard Powers. Boswell sets his contribution apart, however, by framing these chapters as a “gentle correction to the emerging conception of Wallace's breakthrough as largely singular and unprecedented” (10). This is an important undertaking, and Boswell effectively undoes some of the shibboleths of earlier Wallace criticism in his discussions of Barth's The Tidewater Tales (1987) and Powers's Prisoner's Dilemma (1988). By beginning his book with two chapters that repudiate claims about Wallace's novelty, however, Boswell makes it harder for himself to convincingly make an argument for the author's exceptional effects on contemporary literature. Furthermore, and not uniquely within the volume, the chapter on Barth contains a long digression which is not linked back to Wallace entirely convincingly, in this case discussing Barth's response to charges of sexism in his early work. The chapter's original publication in an edited collection on Barth is conspicuous at this moment, and raises questions about the book's structural unity, even as Boswell provides intricate arguments and valuable insights into these comparative texts.

The book's second section, “The Wallace Effect,” will be of more immediate use to Wallace scholars. Boswell charts a breadth of responses that Wallace has inspired in other writers, and does well to draw out connections between the authors he surveys (Jeffrey Eugenides, Claire Messud, Jonathan Franzen, and Lauren Groff). The picture of resistance that emerges is an interesting one, and Boswell's study reveals as much about contemporary literary production as it does about imagination. The strongest chapter is on Messud, a writer who has not been substantially attended to in Wallace studies previously. Mining Messud's 2006 novel The Emperor's Children for fresh ways of understanding recurrent references to Wallace across literary culture, Boswell employs impressive close reading, and builds convincingly on subtle textual references in a way that his other chapters sometimes lack. The chapter also draws out how the resistance that Boswell charts is often “less about Wallace than about what Wallace has come to represent for his generation” (86–87). This observation fuels the study's final chapter, which begins with a discussion of responses to Wallace published on a number of literary blogs. Boswell dismisses these pieces without compunction, before spending more considered time rebuffing Amy Hungerford's argument in her controversial 2016 article “On Not Reading.”Footnote ¹ Boswell's discussion of these contributions to debate lacks the sensitivity and articulacy of other recent interventions, such as those of Clare Hayes-Brady, but is valuable nonetheless for its full-throated defence of “the actual experience of reading” Wallace's work (131).

The fact that Boswell addresses these ongoing debates in his closing chapter (debates which other scholars might have seen as a starting point for discussion of Wallace's effects on literature in our current moment) highlights an important element of his approach. His book reminds us that the contemporary literary imagination is never exclusively contemporary – it is also historical, rooted in and emerging from prior knowledge. The Wallace Effect is a stimulating contribution to Wallace studies, but perhaps most useful as a contextual primer, one which situates some of Wallace's most recurrent interests in relation to other writers’ treatments of them.