Of all the things I've meant to do for this resolution week, completing Oblivion by the late David Foster Wallace has been the most difficult. That's not to say that the stories are not astute and satisfying, but the rewards of these sometimes maddening short stories can be hard earned. The writing often follows obsessive and painful threads of thought with no rational linear pattern or relief. In short, it reads – as sadly it was –?ike the last musings of a man broken down by the perceived absurdity of life.
By far the best stories in the collection are the dense “Mr. Squishy”, a tale of the absurdity of advertising focusing on a focus groups called in to test a new snack cake called Felonies! – the name was inspired when an idea man ordered Death by Chocolate in a restaurant. It's an extremely detailed, extremely strange short story that seemed to last forever as I waded through page after page of endless lists of snack cake adjectives and the increasingly bizarre neurosis of the protagonist, the almost classic frustrated working man flailing in unimportant work and lost dreams.
The book ends with the equally strong, and slightly less difficult to get through, “The Suffering Channel”, which is a roundabout 9/11 story about a magazine writer sent to learn about a man who creates art with his excrement. It's absurd and memorable while still delivering stoking the perpetual state of dread and slight disgust at the futility of the world that permeates the book (the entire time you're reading about these people obsessed with writing small lifestyle articles, you're reminded that they will all die within a few days), but it's the most airy, inventive and… fun (for lack of a better word) of the bunch.
Other not so fun stories include the painful, heartbreaking “Incarnations of Burned Children”, which is about the bleak and terrible tragedy of a burning baby, and a tale about a man whose just committed suicide after accepting that he will always be a fraud called “Good Old Neon”. That particular story earned him the O. Henry prize, for good reason, but it's far from uplifting and I struggled to get through it.
I had to put the book down several times and finish the stories between other books, but it was worth the effort to get inside the last ideas of this greatly missed creative talent.
But what do you think?