Book Review

Set to Stun

Anita Sethi

David Foster Wallace's latest collection foregrounds the most marginal parts of the mind. In the surreal landscapes of these eight stories, the quotidian is lit by the glare of nightmare, and characterised by narrators sinking into oblivion or pushed to the peripheries by insomnia, stress, manic depression, or attention deficit disorder.

Foster Wallace suggests that language inadequately expresses such elusive existence, yet 'is all we have to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else'. The suicidal narrator of 'Good Old Neon' alleviates the weight of his loneliness by talking himself into death. Hypnosis, religion, and finally psychoanalysis all fail to contain his confusion, but his greatest disappointment is with 'organised English'. Rejecting 'one-word-after-another word English', Foster Wallace's idiosyncratic prose captures the 'internal head-speed' of those rapidly losing the plot, mimicking the loopy narratives of their self-defeating involutions. In just three pages, 'Incarnations of Burned Children' articulates the breathless panic of two helpless parents as they struggle to save their burnt toddler.

The first-person stories are the most compelling. In the novella-length 'The Suffering Channel' an artist's own excrement is his subject matter. 'Shit happens' and so eager is the artist's wife to distinguish herself that she sells theirs to Style magazine. The journalist identifies in her impulse the 'conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its insignificance'. Wallace portrays a self-obsessed generation desperate to escape its mediocrity and solipsism, but impeded by the 'artful bullshit' polluting language. Reading Foster Wallace is exhausting, but his dazed, somnambulant narrators offer something morally important in their struggles to escape from or embrace the oblivion rolling towards them. These stories are stunning - in both senses of the word.