Book
Review
Set
to Stun
Anita
Sethi
David
Foster Wallace's latest collection foregrounds the most marginal
parts of the mind. In the surreal landscapes of these eight
stories, the quotidian is lit by the glare of nightmare, and
characterised by narrators sinking into oblivion or pushed
to the peripheries by insomnia, stress, manic depression,
or attention deficit disorder.
Foster
Wallace suggests that language inadequately expresses such
elusive existence, yet 'is all we have to form anything larger
or more meaningful and true with anybody else'. The suicidal
narrator of 'Good Old Neon' alleviates the weight of his loneliness
by talking himself into death. Hypnosis, religion, and finally
psychoanalysis all fail to contain his confusion, but his
greatest disappointment is with 'organised English'. Rejecting
'one-word-after-another word English', Foster Wallace's idiosyncratic
prose captures the 'internal head-speed' of those rapidly
losing the plot, mimicking the loopy narratives of their self-defeating
involutions. In just three pages, 'Incarnations of Burned
Children' articulates the breathless panic of two helpless
parents as they struggle to save their burnt toddler.
Oblivion:
Stories
David Foster Wallace
Abacus £12, pp330
It
is death-in-life that haunts Oblivion's opening story, 'Mister
Squishy', in which a focus group tests a Mr Squishy-brand
snack cake. The group's depressed facilitator feels trapped
in the 'great grinding US marketing machine', which squeezes
out his humanity. In the mirror, his face and the face of
Mr Squishy merge spookily. Against the identity-sapping
fuzziness of corporate life, Wallace pits a painstaking
particularity - but detail is both the delight and downfall
of these stories. The third-person 'Another Pioneer' is
the collection's weakest, so cluttered by the arcane terminology
Wallace satirises that the narrative collapses.
The first-person
stories are the most compelling. In the novella-length 'The
Suffering Channel' an artist's own excrement is his subject
matter. 'Shit happens' and so eager is the artist's wife to
distinguish herself that she sells theirs to Style magazine.
The journalist identifies in her impulse the 'conflict between
the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness
of its insignificance'. Wallace portrays a self-obsessed generation
desperate to escape its mediocrity and solipsism, but impeded
by the 'artful bullshit' polluting language. Reading Foster
Wallace is exhausting, but his dazed, somnambulant narrators
offer something morally important in their struggles to escape
from or embrace the oblivion rolling towards them. These stories
are stunning - in both senses of the word.
Copyright
(R) thedailystar.net 2004
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