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After reading OBLIVION and pondering it six ways from Sunday, I'm still not sure whether David Foster Wallace is a genius or a new writer who has potential but needs more maturity in his writing. His style is very like listening to a bright energetic young man who is so enthusiastic that he doesn't edit himself, doesn't care if he repeats facts that he wants you to understand, doesn't take a breath for ages and most of all, doesn't care if he bores you. He's enthralled with his own narrative, and if you want to go along and listen to him, that's secondary. The most important thing to him is that he thinks he's telling a hell of a story. Mister Squishy is a story of a focus group that captures the mindset of the test proctor perfectly. But unfortunately, such a man tends to be an unbearable bore whose interest in the minutia of brand testing would bring a non-corporate person to tears, which his pages-long observations does to the reader. While this tedium-fest is going on inside a skyscraper, a human fly is climbing the outside of the building for some unknown reason. In the story Oblivion, a walking yawn of a man, so self-important that he puts almost every other of his words into quote marks indicating that his meaning of mundane phrases is exceptional, discusses his and his wife's need to visit a sleep clinic. In yet another tale Incarnations of Burned Children, a mother spills boiling water on her infant and the father runs in to help, but even as cold water is applied, no one notices that the screaming child's diaper is saturated with the scalding liquid. David Foster Wallace is called a genius, an exceptional talent and a new wondrous literary voice of our time. I'd agree, maybe. I'm normally a good reader, but I wasn't able to trudge my way through the mire of even a single story in this book in one sitting. Though it took more time and patience than it usually takes me to read three books, I still felt the urge to persevere and upon finishing OBLIVION, I'm still wondering if the lack falls in my court or in David Foster Wallace's. I'm leaning toward the view that the author needs to think a little more about his readership and a bit less about his rather immature artistic verve. Not an easy read, sometimes tedious and not for the squeamish, I'd recommend OBLIVION if you're up to a challenge. Beach reading it isn't.
Reviewed by Sharon Katz, July 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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