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'Stunning......Wallace is an astonishing storyteller whose fiction reminds us why we learned how to read in the first place.' -San Francisco Chronicle OBLIVION is an arresting, hilarious new creation from a writer universally regarded as one of the most prodigious and original talents in contemporary letters. In the stories that make up this exuberantly praised collection, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness-a combinat... (show more)
Reviews (40)
My first David Foster Wallace book and probably the most complicated reads I've ever experienced. As interesting as it was, I just had a hard time following it. DFW is an amazing writer, but he may be to verbose for me. The story "Good Old Neon" was the best part of the book in my opinion.
Four stars for "The Suffering Channel", two stars for everything else. I like Wallace a lot, but let's face it, he's often not a very satisfying fiction writer. His characters are all satirical archetypes. He's bad with plot. His pursuit of quirky grammatical and structural tics starts off as quaint but becomes irritating (mercifully, there are no footnotes in this book). I prefer Wallace's nonfiction because it requires him to anchor his acrobatic mind to a concrete topic and saves him from the excessive wankery that typifies his fiction and that, while technically impressive, can be fatiguing to read. Short stories require an author to get to the point quickly. Not Wallace's strong suit. "The Suffering Channel" works because he allows his sense of humor to come through --- his talent for finding the comedy in the collision between lowbrow and highbrow.