As the subtitle – “Fictions of Value” – suggests, Jeffrey Severs's new book presents David Foster Wallace as an axiological author who tries to understand how value is developed and grounded. Severs's understanding of Wallace's axiology is historically charged, with sources ranging from ancient Greece to post-structuralism. The notion of the “grounded” is a cornerstone of this reading and it works both literally and as a metaphor; Severs focusses on characters’ relations to their ground, their feet, their weight, how something is rooted or able to stand on its own, while also showing the texts’ critical processes for ascertaining value. The most impressive balancing act that Severs achieves is revealing Wallace's interest in work and commerce as acts of value. Money functions in the texts a sign of community and “language as currency” (129), while coherently adding the author's denunciation of the negative effects of “the intertwining of utilitarianism, consumerism, and neoliberalism, pathological American triplets” (14). It is in this tension that many of Wallace's characters search for the axiological through labour, in the work of a “living hand” (20), to find what Severs describes as “felt value” (89), one that cannot be reduced to abstraction and mathematization. Yet labour, in general, has been subsumed into a market logic where exchanges are impersonal, dehumanized, and “meaningful work has largely been lost as a practice and point of ethical reference.” For Wallace, art is still “alive” and can create meaning, not through the imposition of a will but through “a collective venture of readers,” one that will decide who are their “worthy, democratic moral authorities” (248). This is why Wallace strove to address his readers on common ground, from “the world of ‘mud’ the plane of the thingly” (152), to promote values through “face-to-face encounters between persons” (246). He represents these encounters in depictions of “metareading” where readers are “forming a community of their own, making the rote into ritual, and potentially sharing values as well” (209, original emphasis).

Severs diligently sets his insights in the context of, and in dialogue with, earlier Wallace scholarship, while also adhering to a style that might appeal to Wallace's large audience of nonacademic readers. It seems he presents every published reading that supports his own as well as those that oppose it, for sharp contrast, and weaves the oeuvre together with close readings of details and allusions, listing the various “cultural teachings on what to value and how to value the self” (31). An established Pynchon scholar, Severs focusses on Wallace's Pynchonian games with the initials and etymologies of character's names to define their role in Wallace's grounding of value and to arrange them across his career – for example: “Having begun his career with an idealized reader-analogue named LB [Lenore Beadsman] for the British Pound, Wallace ends it with an idealized SD [Shane Drinion], named for shillings and pence” (236). He also makes use of information from Wallace's life, such as describing the author's relation to work and money, noting, for example, that for a writer who was so interested in work as a “philosophical subject,” Wallace had actually “little personal experience with bill-paying pursuits with which to compare writing,” and that this could help explain “his distance from Marx and Marxism” (259). Still, balancing his tools, Severs maintains that he is far from “impos[ing] any autobiographical reading” (133). In the vein of critics such as Toon Staes, Arthur Cockfield, and Lucas Thompson, Severs uses Wallace's personal archive: his working drafts and library, an example being Wallace's copy of Lewis Hyde's The Gift, which Severs found with “annotations in many different pens suggesting multiple readings,” and which was central to Wallace's understanding of art's role in the establishing of communities (122).

Severs is aware of the historical context in which his book appears, and he asks, “With his canonization increasingly secure, where will the legacy of Wallace take literature, in the United States and among his many disciples around the globe?” (251). In an age of media sensationalism and a disregard for truth, Severs presents himself as a reading technician and offers a work of both diligence and integrity that establishes Wallace as the writer of a literature that aids in establishing moral democratic values.