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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
David Foster Wallace delves into the heart of human darkness in his chilling new story collection.
Jun 30, 2004 | With his new story collection, David Foster Wallace has perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story -- so subtle, in fact, that to judge from the book's reviews, few of his readers even realize that's what these stories are. The oblivion in this collection's title is what most of his characters are after. They have a past they want to forget, a future they'd prefer to avoid, and things about themselves they'd rather not think about at all. When you find out what they're running from, you can't blame them.
Wallace can still be funny, but his humor has been creeping away from the playful, omnivorous sort on display in his first three books ("The Broom of the System," "The Girl With the Curious Hair" and the reputation-making novel "Infinite Jest") and toward a bleaker variety -- as if he were making a slow switch in allegiance from Thomas Pynchon to Samuel Beckett. His style remains maximalist, but his focus has narrowed and deepened. "Infinite Jest" seemed a bulgy monster, a gathering of enthusiasms that were always threatening to escape the corral of the novel and go feral. "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," the story collection that followed it, was a grab bag of experimental vignettes and more-conventional efforts that nosed around the problem of human malice. "Oblivion," by contrast, is of a piece, relentlessly trained on the things people do and say to bear the unbearable.
Trauma lurks somewhere, usually offstage, in each of the eight stories collected in "Oblivion." In some, it hasn't happened yet; in others the narrator never quite gets around to describing it. Possibly, this is Wallace's response to Sept. 11, although the terrorist attacks directly shadow only the final story, which is partly set in a World Trade Center office in July 2001. Nevertheless, the possibility of brutal and often meaningless catastrophe hangs over all the characters here. Something awful, for example, is likely to happen to the market research focus group described in "Mr. Squishy," the first story, though exactly what remains unsettled. Be that as it may, Timothy Schmidt, the character at the story's center, a "thunderingly unexceptional" focus group facilitator nursing a hopeless love for a married co-worker, already finds his life pretty dreadful.
Wallace revels in professional jargon and takes a transparent, boyish delight in knowing how things work, which is why "Mr. Squishy" isn't just another flabby diatribe about the stupidity of advertising. Instead it's a half-awestruck speculation on the fiendish brilliance of advertising that probably gives the field too much credit.
The company for which Schmidt works seethes with more intrigues and counter-intrigues than John le Carré's Circus: Schmidt knows that his focus group doesn't know that it's the subject of a study of how behind-the-scenes knowledge of a marketing campaign affects a consumer's experience of the marketed product. But what Schmidt's supervisor knows (and Schmidt doesn't) is that the group itself will become the subject of an advertising campaign about the difficulty of selling a "labor-intensive ultra-gourmet snack cake" called "Felonies!" And what Schmidt's supervisor doesn't know is that his supervisor has set the whole thing up (including a staged disaster) in order to study the focus group facilitators themselves as part of a plan to eliminate them from the realm of market research, along with "all the infinite ephemeral unnoticeable infinite ways human beings always kept impacting each other and muddying the waters." But what none of these puppet masters knows is that the disillusioned Schmidt has plans of his own.
