Customer Reviews

Oblivion

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

... do others see an unfortunate emerging stagger in David Foster Wallace's experiments in free-wheeling prose?

I may be totally wrong in my theoretical problem with Oblivion; given the extreme level of reader interest and cooperation that DFW's stories and novels require, I can't be certain that I'm not just one of the other dufuses who just plain DONT GET HIM. I have tried, however, and am proud to place Infinite Jest in my top ten favorite novels list (I actually read that monster twice! Woof!)

So here goes: my theory is that the most fundamental "Jest" in Infinite Jest is the lack of resolution of the story and the myriad plotlines. If you manage to plow through the dense but enjoyable prose, you are actually pretty engaged in the plights of the dozen or so demi-protagonists, and actively speculating to yourself what the resolution will be. DFW actively encourages this, to the extent that ultimate denoument for Hal, Don and the Veiled lady is denied; in other words, you have to actively put the non-chronological pieces of the puzzle together in your mind, because it ain't spelled out for you in the manner that most of us (quite reasonably) expect from thier fiction. The joke, in other words, is on the reader, because the reader has to actively participate in the conclusion of the story in order to "get it;" and in the end, there is no difinitve answer to the question "What the hell actually happend to...?" so the jest is effectively infinite.

Ugh, I know, that's a chewy mouthful of an opening paragraph, but I'll wrap this up quickly. Oblivion uses this device so frequently in the short stories that it inspires frustration, rather than awe at the author's story-telling acumen. DFW repeatedly sets up mesmerising plots with his trademark narrative quirks (footnotes, three-page long sentences, metafictional third-wall breaking etc.) but denies the reader a tidy ending. Despite the fact that the intent reader can see the ending coming, DFW habitually denies the reader of this convenient pleasure.

I continue to be amazed by DFW's intellect, style, and breadth of subject matter, but I'm really getting frustrated with the meta-fictional crap. David, write a novel for God's sake. Or stick with the non-fiction that you do so so very well (Everything and More, his "compact history" of infinity is the genre-bending tour de force that you expect it to be -- check it out.) Or, if you insist on focusing on short stories, think up some new tricks. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Shame, shame on me.

First, let me say I absolutely LOVE reading David Foster Wallace. This collection showcases one of his strengths: the attention to detail - or, more accurately - the minutiae - of everyday thoughts; how, for example, three minutes of a day can only be captured by pages & pages & pages of prose, because the human brain simultaneously functions on so many levels (best illustrated when you find yourself listening to someone attempting to explain 'the dream I had last night' but use so many qualifiers that a dream that lasts for probably no more than one minute absorbs the conversation of an entire lunch - or as least smoke break).

Ultimately, though, I found myself wishing a strong editorial voice would have confronted Wallace on several counts prior to the publishing of 'Oblivion.' This is especially true with the first story, 'Mister Squishy,' which seems to build up to a crescendo that is never reached. Wallace weaves together several different narratives into what the reader expects to come together at some point, but instead the story just...ends.

'The Suffering Channel' is a lost opportunity of amazing proportions. In this story, a highly engaging tale begins - and the reader falls into it helplessly, increasingly curious as to what it all means and where it's all going. Yet, instead of reaching a conclusion, or really any sort of resting point, the story abruptly ends. I wondered if the printer had left out pages & pages of the book, and I fought against the urge to hurl it across the room.

I absolutely love Wallace's amazing & rare gifts. But what 'Oblivion' shows is a 'writer's writer.' These stories are partial projects, not stories. They are, at best, extremely well fleshed-out beginnings.

It's a joy to read the words of someone with such innate talent, with such incredible gifts with the written word, but to me what we're left with is just one-half of a whole. Most of these stories end so abruptly, one can scarcely even call them a 'slice of life' because they consistently refer to past or future events that are never quite clear or explained. It's not that I'm left frustrated because 'I want to know what happened.' I'm frustrated because what could have been three or four great full-length novels were robbed.

I will always read Wallace because it is an incredibly intense & enjoyable experience. But I probably would not recommend this book to anyone I know because it is so unfulfilling and ultimately disappointing.

I guess 'Oblivion' can be classified as 'experimental' fiction or non-narrative storytelling, but Wallace is capable of so much more than that, as we have seen in the past, as we will hopefully see in the future, & as even 'Oblivion' attests.

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.

I haven't picked up a DFW book in a while, probably since "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men." I've always enjoyed his work, although I usually turn to pulp after reading it to cleanse the palate.

This is a good collection of stories, written in his usual manner -- although fewer footnotes than previous works. The only gripe I have is that some stories seem to end just before they hit their stride. Many just stop. You feel that he's about to go somewhere, and then the story just ends, like he got sick of writing it and just said, "aw, to hell with it."

If you think Mr. Squishy is "tedious and goes nowhere," you are just not going to enjoy this book. It's a bit like what Karl Rove said about those prospective American voters who were disgusted by Abu Ghraib and vowed to vote W out, "Well, we never had those people on our side anyway." But, if you're able to put up with Wallace's style and do a little hard work, there is a very rewarding and entertaining intellectual adventure in store for you here. Wallace is a diagnostician of American malaise. Very dark, bizarre, and -- for me at least -- extremely moving when taken as a sum total instead of as eight distinct pieces about loneliness.

As for comparing Wallace to Candace Bushnell, whoever said that should have their library card revoked, "stat."

What's so difficult to understand? Well, a lot, I guess, since the jacket notes on the book are so off the mark that the Atlanta Journal ought to be slack jawed with shame. Yes, the author is interested in minutiae. But even with all the time in the world, he could't write a shorter story. We watch freakin' television with 5 different layers of information, but let a writer tangle the reader up in a little french theory via structure and syntax, rather than hitting you over the flipping head with it, and people scream. Shut up and read, and read, and read...