Following in the wake of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Infinite Jest (1996), a second wave of David Foster Wallace criticism has emerged. In this deluge, David Hering's monograph, David Foster Wallace: Fiction and Form, is the fifteenth book solely devoted to Wallace's work, and offers timely insight into its structural engagements and overarching form. Drawing on the Wallace Archive at the Harry Ransom Center, UT–Austin, Hering reads Wallace fiction alongside marginalia and letters in a broad examination of several aspects of dialogism: between draft and final text, between Wallace's authorial presence and his contemporaries, and between the text and its reader. The book identifies three motifs – “Vocality,” “Spatiality” and “Visuality” – through which Hering attempts a sustained thematic analysis across Wallace's work, concluding with a final fourth chapter offering an informed chronology of Wallace's final work, The Pale King.

Chapter 1, “Vocality,” examines the voice of the phantasm in Wallace's work that Hering links with the voice of the post-structuralist author. He identifies a preoccupation with possession that colours much of Wallace's early fiction, outlining a progression from the absent yet controlling figure of Gramma in The Broom of the System (1987) to J.O.I.’s wraith, the companionable ghost of Infinite Jest. Here he notes similarities between the wraith and authorial personae, which culminate in the revenant author figure “David Wallace” in his late fiction. The next chapter, “Spatiality,” focusses upon the conflict between setting and institutional spaces that Hering sees in the Mid-western and East Coast vistas of Wallace's fiction. Here, Hering builds upon Mark McGurl's ideas, reading within Wallace's fiction an argument for a retreat into the institutional shelter in the face of increasing environmental toxicity.Footnote ¹ Hering develops this argument with reference to what he calls the institution's “material and cultural elision” (78) of the geography of Oblivion (2004), identifying a colonizing encroachment of the institution into hostile terrain. Chapter 3 offers a comprehensive account of visuality in Wallace's fiction, as Hering draws from Lucien Dällenbach's theory of mise-en-abyme to construct a model of reflectivity, dialogism and mirrors.Footnote ² Of particular interest is Hering's analysis of the mirrored cage as it is employed across Wallace's earlier fiction, which he likens to the fictional mirror in John Barth's “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968), though he also reads Wallace's struggles with recognition and reflectivity as a “breaking of the mirror” and offers extended close reading of multiple examples of reflection and refraction to reveal the authorial personae within the text. In chapter 4 (“Finality”), Hering alters his approach to chronologically track the structural development of The Pale King (2011). Hering's persuasive account centres upon the book's evolution from discrete monologist episodes into a semi-synthesized dialogue, which is achieved through the development of an increasingly prominent authorial persona, “David Wallace.” Pulling together his previous themes of ghostliness and possession, Mid-western institutionalism and a new, complex reflectivity, Hering's final chapter is his most convincing in its analysis of the structural development of The Pale King and its engagement with dialogism as means of reading an unfinished text with coherency and meaning.

By the end, the book's structure is rewarding, for whilst the isolated themes of the early chapters can feel disjointed, the collation of motifs in the final chapter connects the previous studies and presents The Pale King as a culmination of Wallace's fiction. Hering's motifs anchor the monograph to some of the central questions in Wallace scholarship (the complexities of structure, the shift from monologism to dialogism, the relationship between individual and organization), creating a convincing argument for a shift towards dialogism and openness within Wallace's later work. One area where this book might have been slightly clearer is in the author's choice of language. There are occasions where Hering's meaning is clouded by convoluted and distracting vocabulary. In chapter 1, for instance, during a discussion on Bakhtin and dialogism, Hering confusingly refers to “a moment of diegetic temporal simultaneity” to describe simple overlapping scenes (39). There are also inherent challenges in writing about Wallace's unfinished later works; Hering himself notes that “incompleteness makes it impossible to configure a complete … system” (147), and his response to these challenges in many ways echoes his analysis of what Wallace was attempting in The Pale King. Through an “extraordinarily convoluted” form of composition (145), he strives to “substantially address and advance” (3) previous discussions of Wallace's work and, much like The Pale King, the monograph does not completely “cohere” (145) in its analysis of an unfinished work. Nevertheless, Hering engages confidently with a broad range of Wallace's work across several themes, defining a strong literary chronology that will pave the way for further study into the structural subtleties of Wallace's oeuvre.