Boring. ( )

When news of David Foster Wallace's death reached me, my first temptation was to reach for his collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Alas, I had long ago loaned this book to someone, and both loaner and loanee have forgotten its proper home.

So instead, I thought: why not read one of his works you have not yet read? This left me with either Oblivion or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men ... and as it turns out, Oblivion fell into my hands first.

What surprised me was HOW LONG it would take me to get through this. Perhaps it was my state of mind, but Oblivion feels like a collection of stories where DFW was trying to figure out where to go next after the epic Infinite Jest -- playing with storytelling and prose styles ... with the predictable success.

For me, the strongest story by far was the final "novella" (the second strongest being the first one) ... and by the time I had reached "The Suffering Channel" I had come to terms that, with this book at least, it's much more about the journey than the result.

Even if you're a big DFW fan, I think to enjoy this book you need to be a writer, and the kind of writer who goes "meta" while reading, becoming aware of what the author is doing and pondering why he might be doing it. I know, I know: this sounds like a HORRIBLE thing to be doing with your time, doesn't it? So even though in the end I can say I enjoyed the book, it WAS quite a bit of work, and I can't say I'd recommend it to others -- or at least not unless I had a conversation with them first about where there "head is at" before they take it on.

I'm also pleased to say that, thanks to Bookmooch, a new copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing ... is winging its way to me right now, and I look forward to immersing myself in the DFW I first fell in love with and really, truly missing him. ( )

"Intricate": this is a favourite word of reviewers that seems often to be applied where it really shouldn't. Stories may be described as "intricate" when in fact they're blunt instruments compared to, well, these ones.

What strikes you first are the sentences, of course; great rambling sentences that may roll on for pages at a time, organized into paragraphs that never seem to end -- yet somehow, all this remains readable, if deafening in its onslaught. Wallace is never one to use one word when a dozen will do. The deafening volume of his sentences threatens to obscure the complexity of the stories themselves, the way in which Wallace pulls together disparate elements, and makes sequiturs of non sequiturs.

But that deafening volume is at the same time indispensable. Reading Wallace is like standing in front of a bank of televisions, each tuned to a different channel and with the volume turned up full. In his strongest stories, such as Mr. Squishy or The Suffering Channel, that sense of overload is essential to his success.

As one would expect from such an aggressively experimental writer, not all the experiments here work fully, but each story is interesting, at the very least. My recent reread convinces me that three are in fact brilliant, perhaps even masterpieces: The Soul is Not a Smithy, The Suffering Channel, and (a flat out classic) Good Old Neon. Formally inventive, funny and sad, and moving, especially Good Old Neon.DFW works very interestingly with narrative time throughout these stories as well, sometimes working almost in real-time, other times zooming in so close on the overwhelming rush of internal life that time seems hardly to move at all.Read Good Old Neon at the very least. ( )

I made myself read the whole thing and it felt like an unwelcome chore. The stories felt labored, so that the humor and interest got buried. ( )