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46 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Wallace writes; you decide, October 16, 2004
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.
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114 of 136 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Calm down, people, June 4, 2004
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.
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11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Meat, No Processed Cheese: You Might Actually Have To Chew, February 16, 2005
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.
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