Other Math

In Brief Interviews, Wallace’s most mathematically driven work of fiction, the central lesson is how to value the other in such a way that she is not killed off – not mown down by being remade as a number in the punning meaning behind the Wallace story that gives this chapter its title, “Other Math.” I place this crucial dynamic of combining selves in the context of the many systems of human and economic valuation – from coins, gifts, and contracts to viewing a spouse as “my other half” – that knit together a collection too often read as a disparate assortment of stories. In Brief Interviews Wallace makes his fullest use of paratextual features of story-numbering, series, and page numbers to arrange for the reader an encounter with the stochastic mathematics that drives “Adult World,” which I regard as a take-down of Plato, a watershed in Wallace’s history of unbridled markets and neoliberalism, and the collection’s centerpiece (over the many who have focused on “Octet”). As in chapter 2, a crisis in the value of currency fires Wallace’s imagination, here in a response to the so-called Asian Flu of the late 1990s. Interweaving a genealogy of Wallace’s probability-driven formal experimentation with a history of stochastic math’s importance to modern finance, I describe the dialectic of computerized complexity and balance-scale simplicity that underlies this book’s moral vision.