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Tested to destruction
A Review by Stephen Burn

One of the strange narratives that emerged from the ruins of the World Trade Center was the idea that the destruction of the building marked the end of a certain kind of quintessentially American novel. In an article in the Guardian in October 2001, James Wood announced that henceforth there would be no more of the massive encyclopedic novels that had made the names of writers like David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo. Such intellectually confident works had no future, Wood claimed, for who would dare to be knowledgeable about politics and society now? There have been no long novels yet, but the writers he named seem not to have heeded Wood's warning. In December 2001, DeLillo had already begun to envisage a literary response to the attack. The writer, he noted, "begins in the towers trying to imagine the moment, desperately.... The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon?".

DeLillo's younger contemporary David Foster Wallace first wrote about the attack on the World Trade Center for Rolling Stone magazine in October 2001. This may indeed have been too soon -- he conceded that he was still in shock. Three years later, he has approached the topic again. And although his new volume of stories, Oblivion, cannot be considered solely as a response to 9/11 (most of the stories had been published earlier), much of it will be read with the fall of the twin towers in mind, because the last story in the book, "The Suffering Channel", depicts the staff of a magazine whose editorial headquarters are in the World Trade Center. The story is set in July 2001, and the editors discuss their September 10 issue; the date is luminous to post-9/11 eyes.

More subtly, the arrangement of stories, itself, evokes the terrorist attack. While the last story is set in the World Trade Center, the first begins in the nineteenth-floor conference rooms of another skyscraper, also facing imminent attack. A skyscraper under threat thus stands at the beginning and end of the collection, as if Wallace had placed his stories between his own twin towers. In between, Wallace treads some familiar thematic ground. Intergenerational conflict is a frequent subtext, and parodies of America's therapy culture (nearly all the longer stories feature characters who have been to therapists) carry over from his earlier fiction. But the most notable continuation from Wallace's previous work is the extension of his obsession with self-consciousness and recursion.

Wallace has been preoccupied since the late 1980s with scrutinizing the element of self-consciousness that has characterized most American fiction since the 1960s. He set out his critique in 1993 in an essay about television and fiction which can be summarized (in simplified form -- it is a sixty-page essay) as an exploration of how the self-conscious irony used by writers such as William Gaddis, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon and DeLillo to expose social and political hypocrisy has been co-opted by television. Wallace believes that television's adoption of the devices pioneered by post- modern fiction robs irony of its force, making it just another tool of commercial manipulation.

This argument informs Oblivion's opening story, "Mister Squishy", which focuses on the soulless existence of thirty-four-year-old Terry Schmidt, employed by a market-research firm called Dg. Wallace shows how commerce has assimilated the lessons of postmodernism, describing the way advertising campaigns use self-conscious irony to flatter the consumer's sense "that in this age of metastatic spin and trend and the complete commercialization of every last thing in their world they were unprecedentedly ad-savvy and well nigh impossible to manipulate". At the same time, "Mister Squishy" shows that Dg has itself become a recursive structure, forever bending back on itself, never embracing anything outside. The research it carries out is not dictated by the response of focus groups, but is shaped by what the researchers think the client wants to hear. But if this market research has no impact on the product being tested, it is destined to affect the researchers. Leading figures in the firm have designed the research Schmidt is using so that it proves that the researcher adversely influences the data; this means researchers like Schmidt should be eliminated.

This may sound convoluted, and it is reminiscent of the thought spirals that Wallace treated in Everything and More (2003), where he outlines the formula: "desk, pen, David, head, aspirin". But recursion is important elsewhere here, especially in the story "Good Old Neon", written from the perspective of Neal, who is already dead. Neal reveals the sense of fraudulence and inner emptiness that led to his suicide, then he enters the mind of David Wallace, who is contemplating an old picture of him. In a characteristic manoeuvre, Wallace bends the story back to himself in an attempt to escape the cynicism of the ironist, and establish a form of empathy:

David Wallace trying, if only in the second his lids are down, to somehow reconcile what this luminous guy had seemed like from the outside with whatever on the interior must have driven him to kill himself in such a dramatic and doubtlessly painful way -- with David Wallace also fully aware that the cliche that you can't ever truly know what's going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere.

Oblivion's treatment of self-consciousness is more subtle than that in Wallace's previous short fictions (early stories, like "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" and "Octet", are awkward attempts to address recursion), but it still takes the cerebral route to emotion -- something readers of Wallace's earlier work might expect. But this collection also shows the flexibility of his writing. Since his second novel, Infinite Jest (1996), a 1,079-page masterpiece, Wallace has been associated with complex, expansive writing. But while his extravagant, tentacular prose is on display here, Wallace shows that he can write brief, emotionally direct stories. "Incarnations of Burned Children", for example, is a moving three-page story about the soul of a scalded child leaving its body.

The interest level varies, but Wallace is always a technically interesting writer. As the narrator of "Another Pioneer" observes, the word "read" can be used as a wider "term for interpreting, contextualising, and/or anticipating the ramified implications", and Wallace requires the reader to treat reading as a process of interpretation and assembly. He breaks up his fictions to include stories nested within stories, or resists traditional narrative development. In "The Soul Is Not a Smithy", he alternates between upper-and lower-case paragraphs, and collapses an imagined story into a parallel "real" narrative. Like an edited testimony, "Oblivion" is disrupted by square brackets and italicized fragments, marking disturbing intrusions into the narrator's consciousness, which become more frequent as the story moves towards its ontologically unsettlingly conclusion. And in "Mister Squishy", the account of Schmidt's monotonous day is broken up by six narrative inserts following a figure crawling up the outside of his building to wait ominously outside the floor below Schmidt. This figure seems to be scheduled to meet a member of the group Schmidt is lecturing to, and twice Wallace jolts the reader, by abruptly switching to the intruder's viewpoint.

This is a collection that relies heavily on first-person narrators. Five of the eight stories (62.5 per cent of them, Wallace would say) are first-person accounts, and since they are often wrestling with the problem of solipsism, the collection can have a claustrophobic feel. The confining atmosphere is increased by Wallace's liking for characters who work with data -- actuaries, statisticians and systems supervisors whose stories bombard the reader with data. Wallace has an acute sense of the way modern life is shaped and limited by information, and he does not let the reader forget it.

This love of data is not a failure of a more traditional, literary, imagination. Asked to define imagination, Jorge Luis Borges replied that imagination was "made of memory and oblivion". Wallace, who used an epigraph from Borges for one of these stories when it was first published, has long considered memory to be a source for his literary imagination. In Girl with Curious Hair (1989), a character memorizes an obscure encyclopedia; Infinite Jest introduces Hal, who has learnt by heart the Oxford English Dictionary. In this collection, too, characters are obsessed by memory, and have a precise recall of statistics, recipes, scenes from films, or facts about spiders. Some boast that they have an "outstanding retention", others find their consciousness broken by the intrusion of "mnemonic tableaux". But the second term in Borges's equation is harder to pin down. The etymology of "oblivion" suggests forgetting, and while Wallace's characters with their powerful recall may rarely forget facts, they do forget what it means to have a sense of self. The struggle to locate identity is characteristic of Wallace's writing. In Infinite Jest Hal's epiphany is based on the realization that, despite his formidable memory, what passes for his self is really a kind of empty shell:

"Hal... finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull as a human being...inside Hal there's pretty much nothing at all."

Recognition of a kind of inward oblivion affects many in this collection, too. They fear that they are shallow, or are sickeningly aware of "the inner emptiness". But the title story, which describes visits to a sleep clinic, suggests that one meaning of oblivion the reader should keep in mind is the oblivion of sleep. Five of the eight stories are about characters who are troubled by dreams, and often these dreams are stimulated by crises of their working adult life.

Prior to Oblivion, Wallace's longest fiction was concerned with young lives. At the centre of The Broom of the System (1987) is a twenty-five-year-old telephone operator. Infinite Jest's twinned narratives concentrate on a seventeen-year-old and a twenty-eight-year-old. Oblivion's characters are getting older and watching the promise of their youth dissipate. These are powerful stories about the quiet desperation of adult life, and the full horror of monotonous work. The book, Wallace's first work of fiction for five years, marks an extension of his earlier obsessions and begins to map out new territory. But we must hope that he can be persuaded that the vast encyclopedic novel is still viable. His short fiction provides moments of dazzling talent, but there are few writers who can match David Foster Wallace when it comes to invigorating the novel with emotional force and intellectual curiosity.

Stephen Burn's book on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was published in 2003. He teaches at Durham University.