“Good Old Neon” is the most uncomfortable of the stories in an uncomfortable volume, a narrative about an advertising executive who deliberately kills himself by crashing his car into a concrete bridge abutment. Neal is a familiar type in the Wallace world, a young man whose personality is built on the need to impress others. And the more he succeeds in impressing them, the more of a fraud he feels. Like Wallace, he feels frozen by the need to control how others see him, “condemned to a whole life of being nothing but a sort of custodian to the statue.” Suicide appears to him the only escape from this recursive nightmare. “Self-loathing isn’t the same thing as being into pain or a lingering death. If I was going to do it, I wanted it instant,” he assures us. Strangely, his is a death testified to by David Wallace, a year behind him at the same Aurora, Illinois, high school, leafing through their yearbook. It is a story where a ghost tells his remembered self about David Wallace’s imagining why the ghost’s remembered self killed himself. 7
“Good Old Neon” is the only story in Oblivion explicitly about a suicide, but many in the collection have a tamped-down sense of doom, of thoughts distorted by words and words constrained by personality and personality deformed by culture.
“The Suffering Channel” is about that culture and the cluster of editors and writers in New York who help create it. Much of the story takes place at Style, a lightweight celebrity magazine whose cheery denizens plan the next issue’s pabulum in offices on the sixteenth floor of 1 World Trade Center. “The Suffering Channel” can be read as a prequel to “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”; it re-creates the heyday of irony less than three months before the fatal attacks. But it is also a story about personal shame and the confused sources of an artist’s art. In the tale, the celebrated defecator, whom we first think so gifted he can just shit a classic, turns out to be beset by self-hatred. To go to the bathroom is to remember the childhood abuse and humiliation that led to his creativity. He is asked to give a performance on the Suffering Channel, a new station devoted entirely to “real life still and moving images of most intense available moments of human anguish.” Yet at story’s end it turns out to be impossible to broadcast his agony; his shame and his art both are to remain private:
There’s also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground level camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is known in the industry as feedback glare — the artist in this case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light.
Oblivion, published in June 2004, met with what was by now a familiar duality. Wallace had a public that awaited his books — he filled bookstores, and an event at the Public Theatre in Manhattan where he was interviewed by George Saunders sold out. The book sold well — in all eighteen thousand hardcover copies in its first year — and was on several bestseller lists. Wallace found the author tour painless, he preferred having company onstage. The collection got the customary respectful reviews accorded an important writer in the daily press, but there was also an undercurrent of irritation, even anger, on the part of critics — Wallace was denying them the full enjoyment of his great talents. Why, for instance, did all the protagonists sound the same? Where had the Dickensian scope of Infinite Jest gone? What had happened to its comic genius? Reviewers remembered that Wallace had promised readers something different: a single-entendre writing that felt redemptive. That hardly seemed the achievement, let alone the aim, of Oblivion. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times again brought up this gap, criticizing the collection for offering “only the tiniest tasting of [Wallace’s] smorgasbord of talents. Instead, he all too often settles for…[the] cheap brand of irony and ridicule that he once denounced.”
More sympathetic critics acknowledged that there was something interesting about using deadened language to convey deadened states, that the ironization of irony had merits, but they too wondered whether what Wallace was writing was of more than academic interest. “Another Pioneer,” contained the words “evection,” “canescent,” “protasis,” “epitatic,” “hemean,” “nigrescently,” “ptotic,” “intaglial,” “catastasis,” and “extrorse,” not to mention “thanatophilic” and “omphalic.” It had a single paragraph twenty-three pages long. The same thing might be said about the stories as is said in Infinite Jest about Jim Incandenza’s disdained experimental cartridges, that there was “no sort of engaging plot, no movement that sucked you in and drew you along.” Or maybe that they were less stories than forms for stories, much as one character in “The Suffering Channel” is described as “not a body that occupied space but rather just a bodyshaped area of space itself.”
The eagerly awaited next novel was on reviewers’ minds as well. Where was it? The Houston Chronicle hypothesized, generously, that it was already written, imagining a “forest-killing manuscript à la the thousand-page Infinite Jest” that was at that very moment “devouring the time and energy and quite possibly the soul of a senior New York editor.” Wyatt Mason in the London Review of Books, after a skillful elucidation of the title story, wrote:
Wallace has the right to write a great book that no one can read except people like him. I flatter myself to think that I am one of them, but I haven’t any idea how to convince you that you should be, too; nor, clearly, does Wallace. And it might not be the worst thing in the world, next time out, when big novel number three thumps into the world, were he to dig deeper, search longer, and find a more generous way to make his feelings known.
Chiding notices were harder for Wallace than the pans, which he expected by now — he could ignore critics calling for more salt in the soup — because for him, too, all roads led back to his “more generous” Long Thing, The Pale King. He had hoped at times while he was writing them that the stories in Oblivion would show a way out of the dead end Infinite Jest seemed to have left him in. He boasted to Costello that in writing it he had “looked straight into the camera.” He meant that he had finally surmounted the need to have readers love him. The mania was gone; only a studied and mature sadness remained. But to his disappointment he didn’t find that the story work suggested how to write a novel of similar honesty. The problem may have been that Wallace’s approach to Oblivion—the trick-free prose, the Pynchon-free plots, the insistence that the reader work for his or her satisfaction — was simply too pitiless to carry a reader through a novel. And while Oblivion was descriptive, The Pale King was supposed to be prescriptive. It had to convince the reader that there was a way out of the bind. It had to have a commitment to a solution that Oblivion lacked.8 Wallace had settled on his thesis long before. As he wrote in a notebook: