The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes
…
And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.
Oblivion: Stories is an intimidating collection to review. The stories are dense, complicated and resist complete understanding. But if that’s all they were I wouldn’t be writing this review.
David Foster Wallace as an author does not have the cleanest reputation in the literary world. He is often the butt of any number of tired jokes centering around pretentious authors narcissistically obsessed with their own work and making it avant-garde just so that it could be called intellectual. Whatever one’s own personal stake in that particular debate (I personally don’t give it much weight), I think it’s a shame that it has so utterly overshadowed other aspects of Wallace’s writing. Wallace has the ability to write achingly relatable characters whose emotions and struggles seem so real it is strange that they are a man’s creation.
These sincere emotions are not always immediately apparent, doubly so in a collection like Oblivion. The stories were written alongside the unfinished novel The Pale King, and that shows in the density of prose and the strange off-putting nature of some of the stories. A reader already of the opinion that Wallace is smugly self-indulgent and only interested in pushing the boundaries of writing to flaunt his own intelligence might well read a few pages of the first story ‘Mister Squishy’ and feel vindicated.
Yet if you’re willing to work with the story, willing to trust that Wallace has written something deserving of focused reading, the human depths of the story reveal themselves. ‘Mister Squishy’ is not just about the pointless absurdism of large corporations, it’s a glimpse into the life of a man besieged by doubts and harboring a sincere crush on a colleague that he is too scared to attempt to initiate. The story ‘ The Soul Is Not a Smithy’ is not just about the recollection of one teacher’s terrifying mental breakdown and the unintentional hostage situation that ensued, it’s about a child’s terror at glimpsing the adult word ahead of him and how it has so ruthlessly overworked his father.
The story ‘Good Old Neon’ warrants special mention. To my mind, it is not only the best short story in the collection but the best short story Wallace wrote altogether. It put into words a feeling about myself that I had barely comprehended the existence of, and at the same time reassured me with the knowledge that at least one person had felt those feelings, that at least one person had understood. That is, to me, a hallmark of great literature. A relevant passage from ‘Good Old Neon’ is quoted above.
Reading Wallace for me invokes a particular feeling of being seen, of being understood. David Foster Wallace didn’t ever know me of course, and I don’t claim to have ever known him either, but that objective fact doesn’t feel true in the moment of reading. There are passages in reading Wallace that feel like he’s clawed me open from beyond the grave and grasped hold of the essence of my being. That reads dramatically of course, but I’m trying to sincerely convey how much his work means to me. Because that’s what Wallace was interested about above everything else in his writing: being sincere.
I don’t know if reading David Foster Wallace will be for you. I especially don't know if a starting point as difficult as Oblivion will be for you. What I will say is that you should try and read Wallace, no matter the starting point. Whether it be reading his essays on cruise ships or the ethics of eating lobsters, or jumping straight into Infinite Jest - read something written by David Foster Wallace
