Oblivion

David Foster Wallace

Schmidt had a quick vision of all of them in the conference room as like icebergs and/or floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknown and -knowable to one another, and he imagined that it was probably only in marriage (and a good marriage, not the decorous dance of loneliness he'd watched his mother and father do for seventeen years but rather true conjugal intimacy) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg's cap's public mask and consented to be truly known, maybe even to the extent of not only letting the partner see the repulsive nest of moles under their left arm or the way after any sort of cold or viral infection the toenails on both feet turned a weird deep yellow for several weeks but even perhaps every once in a while sobbing in each other's arms late at night and pouring out the most ghastly private fears and thoughts of failure and impotence and terrible and thoroughgoing smallness within a grinding professional machine you can't believe you once had the temerity to think you could help change or make a difference or ever be more than a tiny faceless cog in, the shame of being so hungry to make some sort of real impact on an industry that you'd fantasize over and over about finally deciding that making a dark difference with a hypo and eight cc's of castor bean distillate was better, was somehow more true to your own inner centrality and importance, than being nothing but a faceless cog and doing a job that untold thousands of other bright young men and women could do at least as well as you, or rather now even better than you because at least the younger among them still believed deep inside that they were made for something larger and more central and relevant than shepherding preoccupied men through an abstracted sham-caucus.

I can remember certain exciting narrative tableaux based around the competitive, almost primitive connotations of the word breadwinner, which had been Mrs. Claymore's blanket term for our father's occupations. But I do not believe I knew or could even imagine, as a child, that for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year my father sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, fluorescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations and filling out further forms on the results of those calculations, breaking only occasionally to answer his telephone or meet with other actuaries in other bright, quiet rooms. With only a small and sunless north window that looked out on other small office windows in other grey buildings.

I do not know enough about the dynamics of a solid marriage to discern the difference between honesty and mere brutality, and that tact and circumspection play as large a part in an intimate relation as candor and 'soul baring,'

Wallace's collection of short stories feel like a repeated punch in the stomach. Although he has a penchant for absurdity (and most of the action in the stories is absurd) his stories are especially dismal because the characters feel just like we do. I'm hesitant to say that his characters have normal feelings only because the normal definition of normal is wrong, and you probably wouldn't catch my meaning. Wallace's characters feel lonely, they feel frightened, they feel insecure, they feel meaningless, and they feel fake--these are feelings that I'm becoming convinced dominate the lower reaches of everyone's emotional make-up.
This isn't to say that we are doomed. Nor do I believe that Oblivion is an attempt at proving our doom. Its stories simply don't do all the work for you; they require you look a little for the meaning. Like the italic phrases in the collections title piece, or the pensive endings of The Suffering Channel and Mister Squishy, Wallace provides stories that bring you to cliff-edges but leave you to decide whether or not they're worth jumping over. Some cliffs have dreamy pools at the bottom, others have sharp rocks.