Oblivion is the final collection of original fiction written and arranged by David Foster Wallace to be published in the author's lifetime. The book was published in 2004 by Little, Brown and Company which is a subsidiary of Time Warner.
There are eight stories in this book. They are: Mister Squishy, The Soul Is Not A Smithy, Incarnations of Burned Children, Another Pioneer, Good Old Neon, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oblivion, and The Suffering Channel.
This is an unusual book.
If this book happens to be your first exposure to Wallace's fictions or you are considering reading it after an abortive previous attempt with a different or longer book, take heart. The stories in this book well-represent the intricacies of plot and narration which Wallace uses to explore his themes of alienation, boredom, chicanery, despair, entertainment, finagling, grandiosity, hubris, imagism, and je ne sais pas.
This is Wallace at the height of his maturity as an author and for that reason is a preferable entry point into his oeuvre. You will need a good dictionary but no matter how good your dictionary is, you will need a secondary reference. Coffee or some other stimulant might also help during some of the slow-building parts of the first two stories. For other stories such as "Incarnations..." or "Good Old Neon" the prose may overstimulate you.
All of the stories in this collection are meticulously arranged in a thematic progression which becomes more clear upon completion of the cycle.
As is typical of his writing, Wallace exercises both constraint and restraint as well as flouting any notion of such matters wholeheartedly. Many of the stories involve multiple jump-cuts and asides and parallel actions and subplots and reveries. There are rather few footnotes. Themes of medicalisation, psychological horror, corporatism, hyperbole, innocence, (religious) fanatacism, and tragedy are all included.
The first two stories, Mister Squishy and The Soul is Not a Smithy, in particular almost seem as if Wallace were adapting a Chris Ware comic into prose. As alike as they are in form, these first two stories could not be more different in topic: the former concerns corporate machinations in a focus group for snack cakes while the latter is concerns a young boy in a tense schoolroom hostage situation who daydreams about his father taking a break from work. "The Soul is Not a Smithy" (which takes its title as a refutation of the vow to art which Stephen Dedaelus takes at the end of Joyce's first novel) is a prolonged meditation on boredom, a topic Wallace was pursuing at the same time in his unfinished novel The Pale King. It is likely that this story grew to stand alone as a discard from that posthumous work.)
The shortest piece in the collection, "Incarnations" seems to be indefinitely available online at Esquire. It's a doozy. You may read it here.
In "Another Pioneer" Wallace employs some tricks of nested narration to explore how myths are made.
The story "Good Old Neon" speeds across the page, right from the opening line of "My whole life I've been a fraud". From there the author and narrator do the sort of high wire act which can only end one way. This is the sort of story that grips you by the throat and forces you to take stock in what really matters to you in life while simultaneously reconsidering the very nature of time.
"Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature" is a more subdued tale of a socially awkward boy on a bus with a spider. There's shades of horror film tropes and echoes of the work by a certain pragmatist philosopher which shares the name of this story.
The title story, "Oblivion" is nothing less than Lynchian. Lots of involutions here. Don't expect it to make sense until the end.
The final story, "The Suffering Channel" reexamines the nature of entertainment, a topic explored in greater detail by Wallace in his novel Infinite Jest and his seminal essay on television in the 1980's (the latter may be found in his collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"). "The Suffering Channel" takes its name from a fictional cable channel that specializes in schadenfreude. The story is stylistically interesting in its use of arrows to convey chronological movement towards a certain event that more or less set the tone for American life in the new millennium.
So. Read this book if you think you like to think.
Read it when you are going to be on an airplane for a while or in a car or otherwise find your mind restless. If you try to read this book while tired, your progress may at best be halting and you will more than likely grow frustrated. Or maybe you just won't get any sleep until you finish each story.
329 pages total
ISBN: 0-965-91478-x