June 17-24, 2004

artpicks

Oblivion

by Maura Johnston

books

Those who wish to talk about David Foster Wallace without discussing his work tend to focus on his more ostentatiously embroidered turns of phrase; analyses of the sheer heft of his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, ate up thousands of column inches where book reviews should have appeared. And it's hard to not be dazzled by his way with nouns, verbs, et al.; since the publication of his first novel, The Broom of the System, Wallace has shown that his dexterity with language is unmatched by pretty much anyone else.

But in Oblivion (Little, Brown) — his first collection of short stories since 1999's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men — it's the punctuation that tells the real story; not the periods and commas, but the nonchalant, plain-as-day way Wallace's narrators mention some of the most personally harrowing details of their everyday. (As a point of comparison: How much of your day-to-day routine goes Vaseline-lens when you make an unpleasant, and possibly life-altering, revelation about yourself while you're, say, washing the dishes?)

What makes the matter-of-fact nature of these realizations more jarring is that much of Oblivion deals with the oft-conflicted coexistence of the inner and outer selves: the doomed army of style-rag researchers in "The Suffering Channel," dutifully identified by the brands they wear in their fashion-forward office every day, view their insecurities as the most disastrous kind of back-of-the-book don't; "Mister Squishy" flips, reverses and then places in a house of mirrors one of the most facade-dependent moneymaking opportunities of the modern era, the focus group.

It's true that Wallace's writing (and, yes, in Oblivion, his prose is once again exhilarating to take in) has always felt as if it's firmly on the side of — if there is a war going on here — the inner selves' camp. His narrators' voices don't come off as one person sitting in front of another and telling a story with a beginning and an ending and maybe an aside or two for color purposes; they're instead all explosion and chaos and more, like the end result of a stereo jack being jammed right into some poor sod's cerebrum's deepest creases, tuned just right into that cranny of the mind where feelings move too quickly to be slowed down and turned into properly diagrammed sentences. Wallace's harnessing of his character's minds (the memories, the insecurities, the mundanities) also reveals an authorial empathy only hinted at in his previous work — which is why, when the proceedings do pause, slow down, or even take a breath and offer up silence, the result can be tears-on-the-subway harrowing.

David Foster Wallace reads, Tue., June 22, 7 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.