Review Essay

MODERNISM / modernity
VOLUME ELEVEN, NUMBER
FOUR, PP 819–821.
© 2004 THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Review Essay
An Undeniably Controversial and
Perhaps Even Repulsive Talent
By Jay Murray Siskind, Department of Popular
Culture, Blacksmith College
Oblivion: Stories. David Foster Wallace. Boston: Little,
Brown, 2004. Pp. 336. $25.95 (cloth).
Understanding David Foster Wallace. Marshall Boswell.
Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
Pp. 232. $34.95 (cloth).

For some critics of contemporary literature, David Foster Wallace is simply the most gifted writer of his generation. For others, his stature is more troubled: a writer whose obvious talents are being squandered in verbal hijinks and self-regarding mannerisms. The controversy that surrounds Wallace adds to the sense of timeliness that will attend Marshall Boswell’s monograph, Understanding David Foster Wallace. With intelligence and aplomb, Boswell surveys the entire career. After a brief chapter that guides the reader through Wallace’s life and background, Boswell proceeds to a synoptic account of Wallace’s four major works, covering the two novels (The Broom of the System [1987] and Infinite Jest [1997]) and the two collections of short stories (The Girl with Curious Hair [1989] and Brief Interview with Hideous Men (sic) [1999]) which have established his formidable reputation. Boswell elects not to devote a separate chapter to Wallace’s essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), instead interweaving discussions of individual essays into his chapters on the major books. Boswell is a judicious and sympathetic reader, and he offers important insights into Wallace’s thematic and stylistic preoccupations. He is especially good at noticing the difficulties that surround attempts to define Wallace as a postmodern writer, and his work will be welcomed by anyone who has read Wallace with pleasure. It is no fault of Boswell, needless to say, that his book should have appeared just when Wallace was about to publish two more books, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2004), a study of the concept of infinity in mathematics, and Oblivion (2004), a new collection of short stories.

Oblivion displays the stylistic and narrative tics with which readers of the oeuvre are surely by now familiar. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is, we might say, just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. Heroically contorted periodic sentences (round parentheses contain square parentheses [furthering diversions from the main statement] which are then brought back in line [with the help of performative, often unnecessary repetitions of the subject, drawing attention to said diversions, the performative repetitions draw attention to them that is, while reasserting the dominance of the subject]) and persistent double possessives (Wallace’s apostrophes’ regularity creating for this grammatical aberration a kind of coherence and normativity) thrust Wallace’s Oedipal relationship with grammar (his mother wrote Practically Painless English, a remedial writing textbook) into plain view. Not to mention the interjections (providing clues about the stories’ ostensible conflicts’ psychic origins) that occur with insistent regularity. Wallace is far less compulsive in using that antihegemonic footnote for which he is notorious (Infinite Jest contains close to 100 pages of additional narration under “Notes and Errata”; one story in Brief Interviews requires readers to follow two simultaneous narratives [to be like a tree in which there are two blackbirds], arranged in Freudian relation to one another, the hegemony of the “conscious” narration disturbed and distorted by an increasingly assertive “subnarrative”). But there are only a few such narrative diversions in Oblivion, thankfully, and they seem to know their place.

But that’s the thing about Wallace the stylist: postmodern self-awareness and irony notwithstanding, these cavortings should become stale and predictable, or, worse, simply comic. This work, however, like its predecessors, is exhilaratingly serious, funny, and fresh, like an inventive new commercial for an old and familiar product. Perhaps this is because the derivativeness of the style (especially with regard to itself) does not really detract from the breathtaking originality of Wallace’s descriptions (“Amber Moltke directed Atwater through a murine succession of rural roads and even smaller roads off those roads until they were on little more than the ghost of a two track lane that cut through great whipping tracks of Rorschach shrubbery.” [Oblivion, 259]) Wallace has the gift of magnificently pithy description (“Rorschach shrubbery”) combined with an astonishing appetite for ink (Infinite Jest is 1079 pages long). Or perhaps he continues to fascinate because, while recognizably the same stylist he has always been, Wallace regularly makes subtle but significant shifts in terms of his subject matter; where Infinite Jest faced down the entertainment industry, and Brief Interviews plumbed the depths of psychobabble and American masculinity, Oblivion tackles corporate culture. Through this “aperture, or lens, or target, or orifice, or void,” Wallace ponders “the question of how to represent the artist’s conflicted response to his extraordinary but also undeniably controversial and perhaps even repulsive talent” (253).

The eight stories are focalized through the point of view of American men grappling with fears and insecurities as deep as the all-defining consumer/corporate culture in which they live will permit. And, fittingly, what gives most of these men night sweats is the thought that they are really as shallow and banal as they suspect they are. “My whole life I’ve been a fraud,” declares one (141); another is described by a colleague as “looking like a ‘70s yearbook photo come to life” (49). The narrator of “Good Old Neon” is so sophisticated he can’t see himself for the stereotype he is. Remembering how he toyed with his analyst, whose intellectual “firepower” was less impressive than his own, Neal remarks to his audience:
However tedious and sketchy all this is, you’re at least getting an idea, I think, of what it was like inside my head. If nothing else, you’re seeing how exhausting and solipsistic it is to be like this. And I had been this way my whole life, at least from age four onward, as far as I could recall. Of course, it’s also a really stupid and egotistical way to be, of course you can see that. This is why the ultimate and most deeply unspoken point of the analyst’s insight—namely, that who and what I believed I was was not what I really was at all— which I thought was false, was in fact true, although not for the reasons that Dr. Gustafson, who was leaning back in his chair and smoothing his big mustache with his thumb and forefinger while I played dumb and let him feel like he was explaining to me a contradiction I couldn’t understand without his help, believed. (155)1 review essay Like the main character in the opening story, “Mr Squishy,” who begins to resemble the corporate logo of the confectionery company he labors for, the men in these stories struggle to convince themselves that they’re more than they appear to be. While covering their crises with thin attempts at bravado and self-promotion, they subconsciously acknowledge the provisionality of their individuality.

It is at this point that I must confess to missing something in Wallace, namely the presence of women nearer the center of the narration (setting aside Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, Jr., the protagonist in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System). I admit that I’ve always been partial to them, i.e. women. I fall apart at the sight of long legs, striding, briskly, as a breeze carries up from the river, on a weekday, in the play of morning light. And what fun it is to talk to an intelligent woman wearing nylon stockings as she crosses her legs. Wallace, I suspect, shares these predilections and could write wonderfully complicated women. Women with personalities as difficult and influential as their hairstyles and wardrobes and makeup routines. Women as complexly shallow as Wallace’s men. And then there are all the countless subspecies and interrelated fields of study, such as mothers. If their latent role in his syntax is obvious, then surely a more overt treatment would be welcome, especially in view of contemporary critical discussion.2

Wallace, it is true, has a wonderful ear for American speech. But in an increasingly globalized world, a reader sometimes wishes for more evidence of the transnational, post-colonial climate of contemporary culture. Or even the more modest but undeniable pleasures associated with those languages that were once spoken by dead white European males, such as French or German, pleasures which have been underscored by recent critical thinking as it increasingly reconsiders the aesthetic dimension of artifacts and things in general.3 And while Wallace has an acute ear for popular speech and culture, it is difficult to avoid the impression that his lavish gifts might be further honed by a bracing encounter with the more recent theoretical developments that have roiled popular culture studies.4 Though he mentions many artifacts of popular culture by name, their energy and aura, their waves and radiation, all elude him.

Still, despite these deficiencies, the book has much to recommend it: Wallace’s sentences have the epiphanic white glow of generic food packaging. This is the last avant-garde. Bold new forms. The power to shock. Slowly but steadily, Wallace is ascending to his rightful place in American letters. No, this book will not be everybody’s cup of tea. But with a little luck and effort, Wallace will soon be able to rival such masters of contemporary prose as Mark Leyner and Louise Erdrich.

Notes
1. Here and elsewhere Wallace displays his impressive familiarity with recent studies that have examined the implications of subverting hegemonic transference in the psychoanalytic relationship. See Hal Incandenza, How I Conquered Analysis: Ten Ways to Dupe Your Therapist (Elsingborg: Yorick Press, 1998).
2. See Jay Murray Siskind and J.A.K. Gladney, eds., Adolf and Elvis: Two Twentieth-Century Men and Their Mothers (Blacksmith: Oedipuskomplex Press, 2002).
3. See, for example, J.A.K. Gladney, Learning German for Fun and Profit (I Did It My Way) (Madison, WI: Wahrscheinlich Press, 2003).
4. See, for example, chapter three (“The Sex Appeal of the Organic”) in Alfonse Stompanato, Crunching Granola: the Semiology of the Cereal Box (Secaucus, NJ: Beadsman University Press, 2003).