Oblivion: Stories

The best collection of short fiction from the best living writer in the English language. It demands patience and attention, but the rewards for the effort are incredible. The best story in the collection is Good Old Neon, which is bifercated (by use of footnotes), such that there are two distinct endings, both of which would qualify the story as probably the best I have read this year. These stories coil and bend, and the sentences are often labyrinthine; casual reading really won't suffice. If you do put forth the effort, I think you'll find that they engage the mind and that other thing, whatever it may be, that makes us what we call "human." Truly an outstanding collection.

This was an incredibly well-written book, but of course I mean 'well-written' in the David Foster Wallace sense. Many of these stories take a more serious turn, and prove that even without his expansive sense of humor, Mr. Wallace is a cut-deep writer. I like the fact that he seems to be kicking post-modernism/minimalism in the minimalistic pants. I find Mason, Ellis, Raymond Carver, and that crew pretty tiresome. In their world, nothing has meaning except meaninglessness (which is usually a meaningless pose). Mr. Wallace does take the self-conscious narrator route that John Barth used, but instead of ending up meaninglessly looking into a warped mirror, Mr. Wallace pulls his fiction out of self-reflexiveness by parodying that pose and pushing it out into ultimate meaning. Spiritual, emotional union among human beings is in my opinion the crux of his stories, even if that union is best portrayed by its absence that crushes people's souls.

I tended to read the stories in Oblivion as chapters in a very disparate novel. What's the subject of such a novel? Why, nothing but the nature of humanity, of course! The recurring theme throughout seemed to be the critical mass that post-modernism -- and particularly the John Barth-ian style of po-mo -- reaches when the regressions and self-examinations and irony overload and ultimately destroy the work of art. References abound in Oblivion to infinite regressions, snakes-eating-their-own-tail-type narratives, and many elements converging and interlocking in awesome, and sometimes barely comprehendable patterns. From the more explicit renderings, such as in Good Old Neon, to the breakdown of reason in the title story, to the extended myth of the distant tribe, couched in a Henry James-ish narrative device... I'd say that the tribe's story dramatizes the dilemma in as vivid a way as Wallace has ever put it. Wallace has mentioned in interview that the current generation has "killed" their "postmodern parents," and are now responsible for rebuilding... I see Oblivion as a supreme statement intended to close the book on the po-mo era, by highlighting the worst excesses and detailing the serious repercussions of such a way of thought. Oblivion, I think, is a preamble for some great things that are yet to come from Wallace. Okay, okay, postmodern is done. What's next?

I'm one of those supposedly clueless readers who thinks that Wallace is an exceptional writer in all senses of the word. I like the fact that his writing shakes you up a little, makes you work for your payoff a little, and breaks the critics' rules. Sure, you could hand me any snippet from Oblivion without telling me what it was and I could identify his writing style after the 2nd or 3rd abutting dependent clause, but so what? I love his subordinate-within-subordinate-within-subordinate style. It how I generally think and I suspect it's how most of us think. So while critics harrumph, all DFW is really doing is writing in a kind of mental dialect, instead of the processed cheese most writers give us. If it's not as quickly accessible as other writers' narrators' prose, it's more real and incredibly worth the little extra effort it takes to get at what he's saying. "Good Old Neon" is my favorite. Since the whole story comes spilling out of, ostensibly, Neal's head, DFW has pretty much free rein to use his faux stream-of-consciousness style to its opitmum and he absolutely shines. Few of DFW's characters are ever flat, symbolic, or caracatures, and I think Neal is one of the most fleshed-out DFW has ever come up with. The fact that the listener, the supposed DFW himself, is aware that Neal is his own construct, coming out of his fiction-prone mind as he wonders about his old classmate, doubles the irony. After Neal got done explaining why he did it and what it was like to die, I realized this was one of the most affirming stories I have read by DFW. The ending is incredibly positive and one that only DFW could've come up with; it shows the only way out of Neal's fatal "fraudulence paradox." It flies right up the clogged noses of the critics who love to say that DFW never "ends" anything he writes. I'm no intellectual giant, but I rarely have to read anything twice in DFW's writings. Maybe the pablum other writers have been handing us for centuries has made some people lazy readers. But whatever the case, reading through the clause-within-clause-within-phrase-within-etc style of "Old Neon" was to reading what a roller-coaster is to sitting down. Exhileration, confusing, clarity, joy, surprise turns, sudden jerks: I love it all and hope that DFW will turn out another book of stories soon.

I had read the majority of these pieces in Esquire, Agni, McSweeney's, and Conjuctions, and was somewhat dissapointed that I would only have a few left over to read.Happily, two of the pieces I hadn't read, Oblivion and Suffering Channel, more than make up for that fact.If you buy this book, just open to the first story and start reading. Don't read the back, the inside jacket, etc. A few major plot points are given away, a trend I just don't understand. The only thing the majority of people picking up this book need to know is that Wallace wrote it.Let's hope he turns out another novel before we're all dead.