Oblivion: Stories (original 2004; edition 2005)

Pervasive dread. Brilliantly written. It makes me miss him terribly. ( )

Sometimes I find David Foster Wallace a little hyper-intellectual and what I mean by that is he has many great ideas that get lost in his own hyperbolic self. Some of the appeal of the greatest writers of our time-take Hemingway or Kerouac for instance is that they were able to write novels that anyone with interest in literature could grasp and understand. Wallace is (was) a bit of an elitist in this respect. He writes novels for the highest literary echelon to try to fathom and after awhile it seems almost pointless..it's a sake of writing to impress and it's, quite bluntly, wankery. It's akin to hearing a 20 minute reeling guitar solo that signifies absolutely nothing besides how fast someone can use their fingers. I know Wallace can write a slew of big words, but can he make me feel something besides? That's where the bottom line comes in for me.

Of course, Oblivion is insufferable to the reader in many ways and Wallace was certainly oblivious for not seeing how over 60 pages of tiring descriptions of corporate product focus groups and marketing would inspire anyone to do anything besides take copious quantities of Ibuprofen. If you can get past this first story entitled "Mister Squishy", it does get better. The story about the insane substitute who starts writing KILL THEM all over the chalkboard during a Bill of Rights lesson for instance is quite interesting (The Soul is Not a Smithy). It's also not surprising that one of the student hostages taken (a protagonist) is a perpetual day dreamer. There's also the story (The Suffering Channel) of the very anal man who excretes literally works of art every time he uses the toilet and Style magazine has to decide whether or not to run an article about it. Of course, it's set about a month from 911 and the offices are high up in the World Trade Center so you have to figure all of the execs making the decisions will be passing away soon anyhow, making it seem like a rather futile story just like all of Wallace's stories inevitably do seem. Some of the complexity of a relationship crossed with paranoid delusions and possible hallucinations are explored well in "Oblivion" Probably the best story is "Good Old Neon" which is about a man who feels so fake and like a fraud he must kill himself.


Wallace has some excellent ideas and I'd really like to rate this collection higher but ultimately many of the emotion and the feeling of what he could bring out gets lots in pretension. That's not good writing in my opinion. It's frankly a waste of talent.


Give me Dostoevsky instead any day of the week. There's an intellectual that could write with the kind of feeling that helped the reader understand the deep nature of his darkness. ( )

Phew - what a collection.

I can see traces of DFW's later work in here - the first part of the beginning story reminds me of the tedium of jargon in The Pale King. He's still fumbling a bit, and some of these stories seem rambling and pretentious and just bad compared to the rest of his work (!), but his incredible talent with language is here, not a doubt.

As for my humble recommendations, Good Old Neon, The Soul is not a Smithy, and Incarnations of Burned Children were brilliant. ( )

This book was my introduction to David Foster Wallace. I enjoyed the first story but felt as if someone had given me an assortment of wildly diverse paperclips to sort...and by the end I still had a bunch left unsorted. I started relaxing into his long sentences and amazing vocabulary during the second story. Loved some of his words. I've never seen "thermi" (plural of thermos) used before!! ..which was oddly exciting. I can't see interpreting the shortest story as anything but tragic, but the others have a tragic / humour double edge... Woody Allenesque maybe. I hope DFW had some fun writing these stories. ( )

** spoiler alert ** The eight stories that make up David Foster Wallace's Oblivion are perhaps the bleakest I've read from him. Just looking at the title can tell you that. An infant trapped in a scalding diaper, a mentally deranged substitute teacher, a marriage teetering on the outcome of a snoring diagnosis...His characters tend to project a sad sack-ish nature bordering on some kind of mania. They're also difficult reads. They're tersely written stories and as much as DFW has confused me with his prose his ability for garrulous paragraphs that seem to extend forever are constantly pushing the limits of what the reader would put up with (sometimes comprising an entire story in a single paragraph (Another Pioneer).

Perhaps the most daunting is the last, The Suffering Channel, which centers around the (I hope) fictitious exploits of the very real InStyle magazine leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Observing a workplace that seems populated with nothing but female interns it's one of the paid male employees, Skip Atwater, who goes to Indiana to follow up a story about a tradesman (Brint Moltke) that has a certain skill for being able to manipulate bowel movements into works of out, that forms the bulk of the action. When it becomes apparent that the offices are located at the World Trade Center it makes all of the action at the office seem painfully silly and lends a sympathetic note to every conversation.

Another piece, Good Old Neon, follows around a self-described fraud, whose insistence of such leads him to ultimately commit suicide and continue to wonder (because death is never really the end) what other people must have thought of him as a younger person who's internal thoughts must have been really fucked up to lead to such an end (though the eyes of a character named David Wallace). Given the unfortunate end of David Foster Wallace you certainly wonder how much he's suffered through in his forty-something years. ( )