Oblivion: Stories [Hardcover]

These are sentences that defy easy categorization - sensational amalgams of disparate thoughts and hidden meaning. These are sentences that push the boundaries of both style and length, wherein the format itself is as important as the content.

When they work, the result is breathtaking in its audacity and verve. With sentences as perfect as "the angle of his shoulders as he leaned into the door had the same quality of his eyes," Wallace truly earns the accolades he had accumulated.

Be forewarned: reading Wallace can be exhausting. He makes you work. And in Oblivion, his uneven collection of short stories, the rampaging prose overwhelms everything else in its path.

Wallace is in the higher ranks of modern writers, often mentioned in the same breath with postmodernist icons Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. His award-winning prose, most vibrantly on display in his mountainous bestseller Infinite Jest, takes modernist techniques to their most extreme, threading themes and motifs in an artificially self-conscious style that is now Wallace's trademark.

With Oblivion, Wallace presents a bewildering display of bizarre narratives, each notable for never once treading familiar roads. A boy daydreams his father's existence while a teacher slowly goes insane. A man recounts his suicide. A husband goes to great lengths to prove he does not snore.

In the very funny "The Suffering Channel", Wallace tackles "the paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity." While a magazine editor anguishes over how to correctly market an artist of magical faecal manifestations, a television executive takes reality television to its logical next step, wondering, "How far along the final arc would Slo Mo High Def Full Sound Celebrity Defecation be?"

Wallace's overall style, when it works, captures those moments and thoughts "that flash through your head so fast that [italics] flash isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by and they have so little relation to the sort of non-linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second's flash of thoughts and connections, etc."

Yet unlike the brilliant stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which manage to combine his manic vigour with subtle restraint, Oblivion ultimately never satisfies. Many of the tales trail off to nothing, their ultimate arguments lost in the raging sea of Wallace's text. Oblivion displays all of the worst tendencies of an author lost to his talent, refusing to reign himself in, running roughshod over the page.

In the end, Oblivion functions best as a Wallace primer. If his convoluted expressions exhilarate the reader, Wallace's better works beckon. If, however, the reader is confounded more than engaged, tackling his Infinite Jest may seem like just that.

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.