Country: USA
Genre: Literary
Pages: 329
Synopsis:
This is the last short story collection published of David Foster Wallace's living. Contains eight stories, about fifty pages long and some have rather alarming titles. The legions of dedicated fans the author possesses like to think there were telltale signs of his depression and subsequent suicide in the collection.
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
I like David Foster Wallace. I know it has become a meaningless statement over the years, but I do. Most Wallace fans I know vow him an unconditional love, but cannot really explain why. At least three times when I bought his books, the cashier was this guy with skinny jeans and ear stretch who told me: "You know that guy's a genius, right? Have you read Infinite Jest? I've read it with literally a dictionary at my side. Took me three months and I didn't understand the majority of it, but it was sooo good." I'm not even doing a parody here. Every single time, he told me the same thing. It had become chic to love David Foster Wallace, the same way it is to hate Nickelback. He has urbanite prophets to spread his gospel. I liked OBLIVION. I wasn't overly in love with it, but there were some very solid stories in it. Some of his best material. Not all the stories are good though and I will try to beak it down for you the best I can.
The opener is a story called MR. SQUISHY, about a focus group for a new candy bar. This is about the worst way you can open a David Foster Wallace story collection. In all of OBLIVION, it's the story that shows the most Wallace's influence of the avant-garde writers like John Barth and Donald Bartheleme. It's a long (over sixty pages), dritfting portrait of a focus group reunion where time seemed to have slowed down and Wallace uses his trademark omniscient vision on every member. It gets overbearing with mundane details quite fast. It's a good think it was followed by THE SOUL IS NOT A SMITHY, one of the best stories he's every written, where a young student is having an existential moment as his teacher is having a psychotic episode on the blackboard. Wallace's pacing and sense of humor make this story an absolute delight. His deep and complex interior life clashes with the emergency of the situation and his debonnaire descriptions of his horrific situation, embedded in between long sequences of daydreaming are really endearing.
The other story that caught my attention is GOOD OLD NEON, that got him an O. Henry Prize in 2002. The narrator is at a counselling session and explains his feeling that he's "always been a fraud". This is the most conceptually charged story of the colleciton and it's delivered with such sharp wits, it's fun. Basically, the narrator feels this way because his happiness is the product of everybody's efforts since he was born and since he doesn't have anybody to make happy, he feels that he's a fraud for being so. Therefore he's not really happy and feels he has left his people down. But as the story progresses, it becomes a little less evident to what he's exactly become. When everybody wants you happy, you don't have all the bearing to know exactly what happiness is and Wallace exposes this very issue in an absolutely brilliant manner. It might just be my favorite David Foster Wallace short story.
For my own part, I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven. I knew, even then, that the dreams involved my father's life and job and the way he looked when he returned home from work at the end of the day. His arrival always between 5:42 and 5:45, and it was usually I who was the first to see him come through the front door. What occured was almost choreographic in its routine.
I won't waste too much time on ANOTHER PIONEER, which was a disaster. It's a very witty story, but it's conceptually witty. In terms of content, it's really painful. INCARNATIONS OF BURNED CHILDREN is an interesting apocalyptic little snapshot, but it's also really short. OBLIVION was also interesting, as it exposes how something really mundane such as snoring, can latch to something transcendent like love and drag it down. THE SUFFERING CHANNEL is a really confusing way to end things. It's not bad per se, but it's a wild and abstract story about poop. It displays Wallace's love for poop humor and it's laugh out loud funny at times, but it's a really unsettling, bizarre story. I liked it, but it was a little crazy and iconoclast sendoff. There was another story, PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE, which was a rewrite of an older, previously published short story. Not bad. It was more exhaustive and fluid than the first time around.
OBLIVION is a good collection that displays the strengths and the weaknesses in David Foster Wallace's writing. He was a great writing indeed, but he was also a tormented man with a spirit like a bottomless pit. I think the love Wallace receives has a lot to do with who he was. A smart, charming, witty and yet unsecure fellow. The perfect romanticized idea of what a writer should be in this day and age. I have yet to tackle THE PALE KING, but his fiction has soaring highs and the steepest falls, sometimes within the same story. I do think it was a priviledge to see the blossoming and also the fall of such an exceptional mind over my lifetime. To see him at his most vulnerable made him more human, like he was your friend or your little brother.
THREE STARS