david foster wallace's oblivion
because i liked infinite jest so much, robert suggested i check out this book of dfw's short stories. unfortunately i thought the last two were the weakest (the second-to-last-one made me wince with every one of its deliberately overused quotation marks, like someone was doing those air/finger quotes every three seconds), but i'm trying not to let the ones freshest in my mind color this commentary too much. :) what i found really interesting was that dfw seems to do equally well with lengthy tomes (IJ) and with a short story that's less than two pages long ("incarnations of burned children" was probably the most powerful of the bunch, although i liked "the soul is not a smithy" and "good old neon" best). one of the things that often annoys me about short stories is that i don't feel fulfilled after reading them, like there's so much more that could be said, but dfw really does a good job with the form. i think that i probably will add brief interviews with hideous men to my to-read pile and consider myself a dfw convert.
4 comments:
I'm working on Oblivion now too. Robert should get a commision from Back Bay Books. I finished "Mr. Squishy" and am reading "Good Old Neon."
i wonder if robert is secretly on dfw's street team or something.
If you haven't had the pleasure, both his collection of essays are really worthwhile as well. If you want to pick just one, I'd suggest his earlier collection, A Supposedly fun thing I'll never do again.
i've seen some good reviews of his new essay collection, but maybe i'll read the other first based on your recommendation. :)
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