Sincerity

Relatively close to the beginning of David Foster Wallace’s 2001 short story, ‘Good Old Neon’, the narrator’s psychoanalyst, Dr. Gustafson, outlines the basic problem of ‘sincerity’ faced by the piece’s protagonist:

‘If I understand you right’, he says, ‘you’re saying that you’re basically a calculating, manipulating person who always says what you think will get somebody to approve of you or form some impression of you you think you want’.

(Wallace 2005: 145) While Neal, the story’s narrator, notes that this is an overly simplistic representation of his mental state, he confirms its basic accuracy in the story and goes on to give his theory of a ‘fraudulence paradox’:

The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside – you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were.

(Wallace 2005: 147) In this chapter, following the cue of Adam Kelly, I will argue that the problem of ‘sincerity’ raised here sits at the thematic heart of a body of post-boomer authors, including David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, George Saunders, Rachel Kushner and Jonathan Franzen (Kelly 2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2016, 2017a, 2017b). As I will show, this is no accident but, instead, a calculated, reactionary response against a perceived fraudulence paradox within a specific style of mid-to-late twentieth-century writing: ironic postmodern metafiction, to which I will turn later. Finally, however, I will also complicate the straight narrative of a turn to ‘sincerity’ as overly simplistic; it is never just a case of sincerity or irony and the two can co-exist.