By emily

Grade: B+

This is embarrassing to admit, but I used to have a little bit of a crush on David Foster Wallace, in spite of his long, stringy hair and vague Shannon Hooniness. It wasn’t his looks that drew me to him (although, no offense to everyone I’ve ever dated, I do have a thing for ugly guys). No, I had a thing for his sensibility. I liked his obsessive need to tell me every single detail. Sure, the footnotes seemed gimmicky even before everyone else caught on and started using them to ‘postmodernify’ their bad writing workshop story (like, if we’re supposed to read something, put it in the body of the text! If it doesn’t add anything, then why is it there?) But appendices and endnotes aside, I was deeply in like with his prose stylee. An important caveat here is that I was bedridden with a terrible flu and attendant high fever the entire time that I was reading Infinite Jest, so I may have hallucinated entire chapters of it. But I remember genuinely and, insofar as this is possible, unpretentiously liking it. And him. I bet he has a big pack of patchouli-scented MFA ladies chasing him around at this very moment, so I’ll stop talking about my personal tender feelings and get back to talking about his new collection of short stories.

I think it sort of boils down to this: at this point, anyone can write a classic New Yorker short story. The steps are as follows: think of some clever, quippy one-liners and an underlying Theme. Take some (typically middle-aged) protagonists. Maybe they are trapped in an unhappy marriage, or are dealing with the death of a child, or are contemplating unfaithfulness or terminal illness. Throw in a sordidly depicted scene of sex, death, or something else gross. Write the story, making sure not to be overtly cheesy but at the same time not to stray too far from subject matter that’s immediately familiar to the typical NYer reader. Close with an image – something related to the Theme, but not too closely. Focus in detail on describing the image, making sure that no concrete resolution is implied. Some people do this very, very well, and I enjoy their work. But it’s nice once in a while to read a story that has almost nothing to do with these conventions but still manages to be entertaining, which is why I liked Oblivion.

Many of these stories are barely even stories – they’re just sort of piles of facts. Somehow this is appealing, maybe because life often lacks a plotline and is more like just a pile of facts. If oddball structures and page-long sentences make you impatient, I suggest you skip to the end of the book and read The Suffering Channel first. It’s full of all the things we’ve come to expect from fiction, such as characters and dialogue, but still has that wow-this-came-from-the-mind-of-a-deranged-genius quality. It’s about a Midwestern man who, as one of the characters puts it, “poops sculptures out of his butt.” But it is also about the office politics that take place at a fictional People-type magazine as it tries to figure out how to spin the story. The magazine’s offices are housed in 1 World Trade Center, and the story takes places in the summer of 2001. I know it’s hard to believe, but somehow this is all depicted subtly. This story alone revived the ardor that the author photo had dampened. DFW, I bet you are married or gay or a huge player, but I just wanted to say that if you are ever in the neighborhood, maybe we could have coffee or something.