A literary overachiever mellows slightly in an extraordinary new collection of stories
There is someone like David Foster Wallace in every field of creative human endeavour. In the world of architecture, there is Antonio Gaudi, whose complex, iconoclastic creations boggle the mind and inspire the soul. In music, one could venture that the dense, layered melodies of Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninoff fit the bill.
These are the visionaries, the creative “overachievers” who are alternately loved and hated by the public for their enormous talent and their ability to take the ordinary and turn it into something unrecognizable. Like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which virtually requires a magnifying glass to inspect the facade’s detail, and like Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos, whose rapid-fire concertos defy the untrained ear’s ability to unravel the melody, David Foster Wallace’s writing is unique, challenging and sometimes frustrating.
Know this about Wallace: If you plan to read him, come armed with patience and an unabridged dictionary. Wallace’s penchant for obscure words is legendary, and his utter disregard for the traditional structure of storytelling can be downright infuriating for a reader who expects, let’s say, that the story she is reading has a climax and a conclusion.
For years Wallace has built his narratives to a fever pitch, only to cut the story short just before the climax. His latest collection, Oblivion, is no exception. Yet with this book he is beginning to show the earliest symptoms of middle-age mellowing. He has cut back on the excessive postmodernist gimmickry, such as footnotes within footnotes, that were the hallmarks of his previous short story collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, as well as his breakthrough 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which for a while made him the literary world’s fair-haired boy.
But Oblivion is still trademark Wallace. His fiction often feels like a surgical performance into deepest recesses of the human psyche, an analytical journey into the corners of consciousness few of us ever dare to publicly confront. In the story “Mr. Squishy,” the main character, looking back on an embarrassing moment from his past, “experiences a kind of full-frame internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once.”
We have all experienced that emotion at one time or another, but it takes a writer of Wallace’s calibre to describe it in such minute detail.
One of the overriding themes that permeates almost every story in Oblivion is what Wallace at one point describes as “the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance,” and “the fact that terror of being average was itself completely average.”
Fear of being ordinary is a continuing concern throughout Wallace’s work. In “The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” the central character recalls having nightmares as early as age seven about being an adult. His dreams were essentially his own image of what his father, an insurance adjuster, experienced during business hours. The fear of mundanity, Wallace tells us in another story, is the source of everything from impatience in long lines to cheating on taxes to the desire to become a famous musician.
Wallace makes much of the paradoxical need of people in western society to see themselves as individuals with free will, while at the same time seeking acceptance and validation by following the herd.
In “Mr. Squishy,” that theme manifests itself in the form of fictional snack cakes called Felonies!, which, Wallace tells us, are named thus to appeal to people’s innate desire to rebel from the overbearing health-consciousness of our era, while in reality the consumer is simply doing what millions of others are doing — eating a mass-produced chocolate snack.
Another recurrent theme in his work is what Wallace believes is an innate inability of two separate human beings to truly communicate. One would think that Wallace, as a writer, would be seized with paralysis if he believed this entirely, but instead he has tackled the issue head-on many times.
(He perhaps did it best in Infinite Jest, which revolves partly around a talented but troubled filmmaker who simply cannot create an emotional link with his audience, prompting him finally to create a film that is terminally seductive for the viewer, the “Infinite Jest” of the novel’s title.)
In “Good Old Neon,” the central character frets that the story he is telling to you, the reader, has an “overarching paradox, which is that this whole thing where I’m saying words can’t really do it…”
Perhaps Wallace is simply complaining about his own inability to express everything he wants to express. If his goal is deeper communication, then it is probably a good thing that in his latest work he has cut back on the clever but distractive gimmickry that marked his earlier works, and decided to focus rather on a straighter — if somewhat stream-of-consciousness — narrative.
But Wallace is by no means through with mentally whipping his readers. Long known for his complicated yet grammatically correct sentences, he takes it up a notch in Oblivion, presenting the reader on numerous occasions with page-long sentences that contain brackets within brackets within brackets, all of it further divided by the occasional dash.
So are all these tricks necessary? Well, no, they’re not, but neither are Rachmaninoff’s rapid-fire melodies or the Sagrada Familia’s excessively ornate spires. These aren’t questions of necessity. Wallace has a way of making language come alive in a way that few other writers can, and it’s hard to begrudge him his frustrating writing style when it can be so amusing to watch him build his manic sentences word after word until they become so ridiculous that they are funny. Much of the humour in Wallace’s writing, it’s worthwhile to note, comes from the way he presents his stories to the reader.
If there is one saving grace Wallace has to make up for the frustration he intentionally inflicts upon his readers, it’s the fact that reading him can, at the best of times, instill the sort of feeling one sometimes gets when confronted a brilliant work of art: A brief, epiphanic moment of realization that one is confronted with a talent and vision with which few are endowed.
The Ottawa Citizen
Sunday, July 25, 2004
