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Oblivion by David Foster Wallace
(Review: April 2006)
David
Foster Wallace is a man who knows plenty of three syllable words and likes
you to know that he does. He’s also demonstrates great ardor for minutiae, or
so that’s the conclusion one might come away with after
wading through Oblivion, a slow blooming, yet hypnotic
collection of shorts about nothing of much importance, though Wallace would
like to convince you otherwise. The opener, “Mister
Squishy,” details, in (too) excruciating exposition, the
efforts of corporate wonks trying to position their Twinkie-like product in
the market. At 60 plus pages, you’ll feel like you could claim the Twinkie Defense
for having had read it. About
the most straightforward and accessible is “Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature," which revolves around the son of a victim
of plastic surgery malpractice who’s a tad off kilter when it comes to spiders.
Then there’s "The Suffering Channel" where a
journalist for a celebrity mag pursues a story about a guy who makes
sculpture art from shit—enough said. The title story, about a man who
visits a sleep clinic with his wife, bristles with the most promise. It
unfurls in a bar at a country club (The Nineteenth Hole) as the man sits
having cocktails with his father-in-law while it pours outside. The bar
action titillates with revelation and the frayed ends of tawdry relations
gone sour but the sleep clinic/sleep issues back-story, which consumes the
page by the end, adds little and ironically serves as an unintended cure
for insomnia. There’s no doubt Wallace, who made his mark with the
quirky, groundbreaking (and long), Infinite Jest, is a
talented writer. His recent collection of essays, Consider the
Lobster, is Spartan, to the point and accessible. Here though,
Wallace is smug, self-congratulatory and worst of all, just not that
interesting. To naysayers and Wallace fans that disagree, please feel free
to write me off as oblivious.
- TBM
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