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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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