Of Loopholes and Black Holes

Early critics of A Naked Singularity have accurately, if superficially, compared it to works by postmodernist heavyweights such as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Wallace himself. True, the novel bears many of the hallmarks of postmodern fiction. Into his loose and baggy monster, De La Pava has stuffed a zany heist plot, mockuments and fictional transcripts, obscure references to philosophy and theoretical physics, his mother's recipe for empanadas, a critique of Television capital T, a hallucinated Uncle Sam and his chimpanzee partner, and an inset biography of the career of the boxer Wilfred Benitez that parallels but does not intersect with the development of the novel's protagonist.