An Approximation of a Shadow of a Book Review

Oblivion

David Foster Wallace

DFW was my first introduction to contemporary literary fiction, so I owe him. His nigh-omniscient lexicon and quirky--dare I say, postmodern?--manipulation of literary styles and tropes endeared him to my wide-eyed late teen mind, and his themes on the isolation and emptiness of American life appealed to my loner tendencies. Having finished up his latest collection, I find that his stories which avoid resolution are the most disappointing, while those which aspire to halfway complete the narrative are far more appealing.

My favorites in this collection:

The Soul is Not a Smithy, a man reflects on a childhood incident when a substitute teacher suffers a mental breakdown in front of an elementary school class, intermingled with the narrator's description of the daydream which completely distracted him from the teacher's panicked mind.

Incarnations of Burned Children, a tragic, very short story that pierces straight to the heart.

Another Pioneer, a second-hand discussion of a story involving a preternaturally gifted child in a primitive village whose omniscience eventually destroys his home once he hits puberty.

Good Old Neon, an incredibly successful man, aghast at his own fraudulence yet also the (putative) cliches we repeat to ourselves to get through the day, describes his manipulative actions towards his fellow men which lead up to his suicide.

Here's a particularly striking stream-of-thought passage from his less successful story "Mister Squishy" about a focus-group facilitator who is trying to live with his awareness of his utter ordinariness:

Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium's picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his satellite TV's channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly on another of the cable provider's 220 regular and premium channels and that he was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone that wholly unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley's home number on Speed dial...