Everything we do has its context, as does everything we create. Although far from perfect, our current era provides a better context for this novel's release than did the one that followed Wallace's death 22 years ago could hardly be worse.
His previous novel was a disappointment to many who had expected him to write yet another Jewish novel apparently that's a real genre, or was back then so in this one, he gave them what they had asked for, but not-exactly what they wanted. As David Bowie said, never play to the gallery.
Wallace wrote novels, but his day job was that of a speech writer at a big Jewish PR NGO. At some point, it occurred to him that the director's incompetence presented as great a danger to Jews as had Hitler's policies only half joking. And then he thought, What if it were intentional? Seriously, were, not was proper grammar was second-nature to him, which served to heighten the comic effect whenever he deviated from it. So he began to imagine the role of a covert Nazi at the head of such a non-profit.
He spent over a decade working on this novel about a small foreign infiltration culminating in disaster for NYC, only to be upstaged by reality on 9/11/01. That had happened before. He spent the 1980s writing a novel about the breakup of the Soviet Union, completely unthinkable when he began it, yesterday's news by the time it hit the bookstores.
In both instances, he had seen a full decade into the future, but thought it was only his imagination.
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