Oblivion [Hardcover]

David Foster Wallace (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 8, 2004

'A visionary, a craftsman, a comedian and as serious as it is possible to be without accidentally writing a religious text. He can do anything with a piece of prose, and it is a humbling experience to see him go to work on what has passed up till now as 'modern fiction'. He's so modern he's in a different time-space continuum from the rest of us. Goddamn him' ZADIE SMITH A recognised master of form and a brilliant recorder of human behaviour, David Foster Wallace has been hailed as 'the most significant writer of his generation' (TLS). Each new book confirms and extends his genius, and this new short story collection is no exception. He is quite possibly the most exciting literary talent in America today, and certainly one of the most influential. 'Wallace's talent is such that you can't help wondering: how good can he get?' TIME OUT

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his best work, Infinite Jest, Wallace leavened his smartest-boy-in-class style, perfected in his essays and short stories, with a stereoscopic reproduction of other voices. Wallace's trademark, however, is an officious specificity, typical of the Grade A student overreaching: shifting levels of microscopic detail and self-reflection. This collection of eight stories highlights both the power and the weakness of these idiosyncrasies. The best story in the book, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," assembles a typical Wallaceian absurdity: a paroled, autodidactic arachnophile accompanies his mother, the victim of plastic surgery malpractice ("the cosmetic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times"), on a bus ride to a lawyer's office. "The Suffering Channel" moves from the grotesque to the gross-out, as a journalist for Style (a celebrity magazine) pursues a story about a man whose excrement comes out as sculpture. The title story, about a man and wife driven to visit a sleep clinic, is narrated by the husband, who soon reveals himself to be the tedious idiot his father-in-law takes him for. While this collection may please Wallace's most rabid fans, others will be disappointed that a writer of so much talent seems content, this time around, to retreat into a set of his most overused stylistic quirks.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Some critics scream self-indulgence, while others lash back with claims of genius. No one denies the verbal wizardry of the MacArthur Grant-winning author of Infinite Jest. And yet Wallace’s prose style lies at the epicenter of the debate. Does his wordiness obscure a lack of substance, or is the key to his intent found in that same verbosity? Reactions to his stories elicited similar controversy. More than one of his boosters notes a welcome turn towards naked emotion, most notably in “Good Old Neon.” Others question his maturity and moral sense, and criticize the unfinished quality of some of the stories. These polarized opinions, however, seem to ensure that Wallace will not fade into oblivion.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Abacus (July 8, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0349118108
• ISBN-13: 978-0349118109
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,347,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Foster Wallace wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl With Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and the full-length work Everything and More.  He died in 2008.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wallace writes; you decide, October 16, 2004

By 

Wheelchair Assassin (The Great Concavity) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Oblivion: Stories (Hardcover)

It's pretty tough for a writer to balkanize popular opinion the way David Foster Wallace has. It seems that for everyone who views Wallace as a literary genius, there's someone else who thinks he's a self-indulgent bore who appeals only to the pretentious. In truth, Wallace is neither; he's just a writer who takes chances with his work and is apparently willing to accept the occasional failure along with his successes. More a journey than a destination, Wallace's fiction relies heavily on such devices as unconventional narrative structures, punishingly dense and convoluted prose, dazzling verbal trickery, and clinical attention to detail. All that aside, though, Wallace isn't just a showoff, as there's an unmistakable human element to his fiction. Buried among the endless detail of these stories are some moments of profound insight and sympathy for the characters he's created to go with Wallace's innovative style and encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything.

A prime example of all things Wallace is this collection's opening story, "Mr. Squishy," which is about 65 pages long but reads like at least 100. In one respect, this story is an insider's view of the ad industry, complete with descriptions of various market research strategies and examinations of the minutest details of a focus group assembled to test out a new snack cake. On another level, though, the story examines the professional and personal frustrations of its protagonist, a focus-group coordinator who could be a symbol for any number of inconsequential white-collar workers the world over. And of course, there's some trademark Wallace weirdness in the form of a costumed wall-climber with some bad intentions and a highly ambiguous ending that resolves exactly nothing. In other words, it's kind of like a miniature version of "Infinite Jest."

The next story, "The Soul is Not a Smithy," continues in this vein, starting with an elementary school student's daydreams while a substitute teacher descends into madness in front of his class before connecting them to the disappointments of his father's middle-class existence. The brilliant "Another Pioneer" is an examination of the nature of knowledge and belief revolving around the story of a long-ago young genius whose intellectual development eventually became too much for his fellow villagers to handle. The title story takes the arguments between a middle-aged guy and his wife over her accusations of his snoring and turns it into a penetrating look at the complexities that result from the confluence of marriage, parenthood, and aging.

Wallace apparently decided to save the best for last, though, as the 90-page closer "The Suffering Channel" easily ranks among his most fascinating work. At turns poignant, hilarious, bizarre, and profound, the story takes a look at office politics, small-town dreams, and the modern literary world, all centered around a handyman who can create sculptures in a literally incredible manner. It's everything Wallace can be when he's on, and why readers should be willing to tolerate his occasional overreaching. Those who don't like what Wallace does can say what they will, but his successes are more brilliant than most precisely because he aims so high that he doesn't always reach his mark. You can't have Wallace's brilliance without his shortcomings. To be perfectly, honest, you have to just read the man's work and come to your own conclusions.

114 of 136 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Calm down, people, June 4, 2004

By 

Gulley Jimson (Bethesda, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oblivion: Stories (Hardcover)

There are some writers who it becomes fashionable to read and then, when they become too popular or widely praised, fashionable to put down. We are in the midst of the recoil that began after Infinite Jest became popular. I think the recoil is probably going to continue (and appears to be continuing in these reviews) because Wallace is a writer whose flaws are so easy to spot, and it's simple to quote sections of his writing and hold them up as everything that's wrong with today's literary writing. His style is frequently bloated and self-indulgent, and if you're not paying attention it's easy to get lost and call all of it nonsense. Sometimes he tries as hard as he can to make you stop paying attention, when he throws in what appear to be irrelevancies or whatever oddity he can come up with to be more original - because god forbid that any of his writing have the taint of old-fashioned conservative storytelling.

This is, unfortunately, only half the truth, because there really are magical moments in Wallace's writing, and just when you're about to get absolutely fed up with him he pulls out something beautiful, or shocking, that for whatever reason stays with you. Even in a two page story like "Incarnations of Burned Children" I went through all of the probable reactions to the stories in this volume: initial interest, confusion with the prose style, impatience, boredom, and then suddenly a moment where the story seems to open up and become incredibly moving.

The story is about a mother accidentally scalding her toddler, and is told in the long clause-filled breathless sentences that Wallace uses - with occasional good taste. At first, the prose is frustrating, because it seems to be getting in the way of actually enjoying the story, but eventually it falls into a certain rhythm, and as the parents are frantically trying to cool down their child it starts to imitate their panic, until both the parents and reader realize with horror that the hot water inside the diaper is still burning the child, and despite knowing nothing about this family, in just this little story we can start to understand what it's like to feel terrified for a child that is ours.

When a writer enjoys goofing around, and seems to be scared of clarity, it's occasionally hard to judge his genuine value. Reading an early novel of Beckett's, with its incessant clowning around and self-conscious erudition, I wasn't really sure what the big deal was about him - he just seemed like an aggravatingly precocious little kid. But there were glimmers of a profound talent there. And I think there are here too. Instead of complaining about the obvious surface clutter - which, who knows, might be inextricably linked to the virtues, although I hope not - I'm pleased enough with what he can give us.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Complete Awe, July 12, 2005

By 

Jimmy Chen (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oblivion: Stories (Hardcover)

D.F. Wallace epitomizes a recent thread of hyper self-awareness in fiction. His writing addresses the way in which langauge is read. The syntax and grammar is all very very dense, with spralling run-on sentences that cover as much ground as most paragraphs. A common critique is that this is mere gimmick. However, DFW is rooted in surrealism, his pieces more in common with Borges and Kafka than Barth and Barthelme (the two latter which the former critique unfortunately holds true). A likely comtemporary is Dave Eggers. Both are stunning, but DFW's writing is less driven on the personality of the author, which is the case with Eggers.

Oblivion is his best collection of `short' fiction, though some span as long as novella's take the same amount of time and attention as whole novels. The formula is genius: Take a simple, almost absurd, motif (literal sh*t as art and vice versa, a repressed gloss mag writer getting crushed in a rental car while copulating with a 7 ft. tall woman, the fallout of a marriage due to a philosophical argument over snoring, a man seeing through his son's mind looking through a window, etc.) and spiral inward, folding a myriad of concsiousnesses into one another, imposing fractal-like qualities on the form itself, in which one read's the same thing in the same context, yet at the same time totally elsewhere, as if one were blind to the 'system' unless objectively above, which contradicts subjective encounters with reading.

A root concept is imposition. DFW imposes, by restricting (usually with rhetorical tone or form/style, appropriating unconventional, somewhat conservative ones, i.e. legal briefs, corporate memos, academic essays with footnotes, etc.) his own `voice', which ironically is why his voice shines and soars. His sentences read like a car in the wrong gear, jutting to and fro, bumping along. One cannot simply read the sentences casually--readers need to be agile, judgeless, ready for any turn. Like the late poems of e.e. cummings, the form imposes the way content is perceived. For example, in `Good Old Neon', readers follow a footnote which ends with the ending of the story, only to begin again as readers continue reading the main text, which invariably has it's own ending. Thus, the story has two endings (in which the latter `real' one's narrator turns out to be the DFW's college roommate reporting the suicide of the former, an example of his absurd play with `truth' in `fiction'). DFW's writing, while ebullient and voluptuous, is at root very dry. He rarely talks about feelings any humanist characteristics; nor does he describe events. He simply juxtaposes people's consciousnesses and actions in ways that implicate the former list of narrative imperatives.

The stories all formally brilliant, absolutely awe inducing in how completely original each piece is. DFW's humor is almost sick, cruel. His view of nature/humanity is sobering, even cynical. His stories are inside jokes for people who share his disposition. Yet, at heart, he is interested most in loss and loneliness. Each character is pleading for something, awakened to an untold world that is painfully yet joyfully entered. Lost in the sentences, these characters are little seeds of lit up lives and we love them for being there. In his strategic mess of words, David Foster Wallace, challenges you to leap inside, and when you do, the blinking light is dizzying and awesome.