Not only in light of DFW's suicide I don't think, but certainly in light of it, the despair that this collection of stories is shot through with is sobering. There is here a merciless, microlevel, and exacting existential critique both of our outward facing lives in contemporary society, centered in the banalities and inanities of work life, showing through the characters' very commitment to their jobs and roles the utter meaninglessness of them without having to stoop to any even tiny bit of triteness in making the point (instead depending heavily on, ahem, irony), and of our inner lives, or at least of his own inner life, I'm afraid, weighted down heavily with contradictory feelings of grandiosity and insignificance, of feeling like a genius and feeling like the worst fraud imaginable.

I don't know how exactly true to life the hilarious and pathetic workplace procedures and terminology and culture and such of the focus group and market testing company as portrayed in the opener, "Mister Squishy", are, as the characters revolve around a new snack cake confection, but the existential horror of finding oneself spending one's life in such an environment is effectively (and comprehensively... some might say too comprehensively!) portrayed.

"The Soul Is Not A Smithy" continues this theme of the horror of modern adult life in a story from the point of view of a grown man looking back to when he was a grade school student involved in an "incident" when he failed to notice his teacher having a mental breakdown at the blackboard, so occupied was he in his own creative imaginations that his soul could be said to be absent from the classroom his body is sat in. The adult narrator at one point remarks,

For my own part, I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven. I knew, even then, that the dreams involved my father’s life and job and the way he seemed when he returned home from work at the end of the day.

In "Good Old Neon" the narrator turns from the despair over one's outward-facing life to despair over one's core inner self. Essentially, the feeling that human nature is fundamentally bad, in some sense. He expresses this through a focus on how his connection to other people is inauthentic due to an inability to be honest about himself:

There was a basic logical paradox that I called the 'fraudulence paradox' that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a mathematical logic course in school...The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside - you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn't find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were.

I mean. Ouch.

I can imagine a "love it or hate it" reaction to the prose itself in this collection. I listened to it as an audiobook and thought it worked really well. I'm curious how I would have taken the prose if I was reading it in print instead.

Normally I think I wouldn't be a fan of something that comes off overall so, well, nihilistic. But it's not for effect, not to be transgressive, not fraudulent one might say. The voices here are at root sympathetically all too human, even good, it seems to me. They just can't see their way out into something more of the light. ( )

Oblivion reads like a catalog of horrors. Exquisitely wrought horrors. I loved it. The craft in these stories is astonishing, the way they work technically.

Three stories stood out for me: Good Old Neon, Oblivion, and The Suffering Channel. The Suffering Channel is more of a novella, and it's incredibly powerful. On the surface, it's about a 'People'-like magazine doing a story on an 'artist' who poops fully formed sculptures; but that's just on the surface. The story is also Wallace's reaction to September 11th (I know that seems like a big leap, but he pulls it off brilliantly). It functions as a sort of wakeup call to our culture, but not in an obnoxious, manifesto-like way.

In a culture full of beautiful shit, Wallace's writing was a cool clear clean reservoir of potable water. God damn it why did he have to kill himself. ( )

So dense, it feels like an evolution in the history of the short story form, with converging plot-lines that resolve just out of reach of the readers' immediate consciousness.

Oblivion is my favorite book, by the author I most admire in the world.

But that density is its own cost, and so beware, please, the amount of attention required to get everything available out of it.

Still, to reference an ancient SNL sketch: "I laughed. I cried. It was better than Cats. I'm going to [read] it again and again."

( )

Zo. Dit was alvast het meest uitdagende boek van David Foster Wallace dat ik las, misschien wel het meest uitdagende boek dat ik ooit las tout court.

Nu was het een doel van Foster Wallace om zijn lezers uit te dagen en hen "net als in het echte leven" te leren genieten van dingen waarvoor ze moesten werken, omdat hij dat als een meerwaarde beschouwde tegenover de eenvoudige, hapklare populaire tv-cultuur. Die missie is alvast geslaagd, me dunkt.

Vier sterren gaf ik toch met overtuiging (een halve ster ongetwijfeld voor mezelf, omdat ik de uitdaging ben aangegaan en niet opgaf toen ze te zwaar leek te worden) 3,5 voor het boek omdat het een verhalenbundel is, en je niet alle verhalen over dezelfde kam kan scheren.

Van de acht verhalen zijn er enkele waarover ik niets te vertellen heb maar met plezier las (3 sterren) en andere die me nog lang zullen bijblijven (4 sterren).
Sommige verhalen bloeiden open naarmate ik aandachtiger werd of verder vorderde, andere leken hermetisch gesloten te blijven maar boeiden me toch.
Wie Wallace leest omwille van zijn stijl zal nooit ontgoocheld worden en telkens opnieuw geprikkeld worden. Wie Wallace leest omwille van zijn sociaal empatisch vermogen zal ook niet ontgoocheld worden, al is het soms graven door de verschillende stijl-lagen heen om die te vinden.
Maar laat dat nu net zijn kracht zijn: de verhalen die me lagen en waarin ik mijn weg vond, fileerden relevante kanten van ons bestaan op manieren die ik voorheen niet zag. Ik geloof dat Wallace daarin net een meester was: de weg zo plaveien, soms vol obstakels en doornen, dat als de boodschap bereikt wordt, ze glashelder is. En dan ben je als lezer niet alleen verheugd dat je de uitdaging bent aangegaan, maar evenzeer verblind, geraakt of verbluft door de dingen die Wallace voor je klaar heeft gelegd. Straf.
( )

If you are considering reading the ultimate post-modernist work, Wallace's Infinite Jest, but you just can't commit to reading a 1,000-page novel, get a taste of it with these stories. In them, DFW experiments with facets of the techniques that make his writing unique: the narcissistic neurotic who overanalyzes himself; the boring job reported in detail; the absurdities of American corporations; the speech tics that make his characters painfully real; suicide; childhood trauma; unusual physical deformities and abilities. All these themes appear here in exquisitely crafted stories that echo Infinite Jest and prefigure The Pale King. ( )