The narrative thrust of "Oblivion" proceeds outward in radial spikes (while its intellectual thrust proceeds ever inward) from a golf course's restaurant, where the narrator attempts to petition his disapproving father-in-law for advice on an increasingly dire martial schism that stems from a disagreement between he and his wife as to whether the narrator has a snoring problem, as his wife maintains, or whether the wife is dreaming that the narrator is snoring, as he maintains. The reserved equivocations of the husband, alternately humorous and heartbreaking, build toward a climactic visit to a sleep clinic where the matter (snoring or dreaming?) is settled, albeit settled in an ambiguous and highly contingent way that alludes to the endlessly reversing currents of blame in the breakdown of marital love.
"Incarnations of Burned Children," in three concise pages, relates the story (unfolding in real time for maximum urgency) of two parents springing into action when their infant son is badly scalded by an overturned pot of boiling water.
"Incarnations of Burned Children," in three concise pages, relates the story (unfolding in real time for maximum urgency) of two parents springing into action when their infant son is badly scalded by an overturned pot of boiling water.
The opacity also clears a bit in the final story, "The Suffering Channel," which details the interoffice politics of Style Magazine (located in the World Trade Center, two months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001) and the converging narrative threads of one of the magazine's editors delving into a story about a Midwestern "artist" whose bowel movements create detailed sculptures of figures from popular and historical culture, and a cable magnate developing the titular Suffering Channel, which is devoted to displaying video of human suffering twenty-four hours a day. But it's "Good Old Neon," in its ambitious and doggedly literal attack on abstract concepts, that stands to me as Oblivion's conceptual centerpiece, and the most fully realized distillation of the theme Wallace at least circles in all his new stories: what consciousness actually is, and how it works.
It's best not to reveal too much about "Good Old Neon" in the interest of preserving its myriad surprises, but basically, it attempts to engage full-on with what actually happens immediately after death (it's narrated by someone who has just committed suicide). As the narrator shares his new understanding of the nature of consciousness and time (while flashing back to the life circumstances and psychiatrist visits that led up to his suicide), it becomes increasingly astounding that Wallace never lapses to pseudo-mystic obfuscation, while dealing with what is perhaps the grandest, most difficult abstraction there is: the nature of the consciousness as divorced from the body. "Good Old Neon" won an O. Henry Prize in 2002, with good reason -- in this story and all the others in Oblivion, Wallace is so far from the moment of crisis / moment of epiphany fare that's rampant in short fiction that one wonders if his work doesn't deserve some entirely separate genre. More than any modern fiction writer that I am aware of, Wallace is directly and skillfully engaged with what much fiction has forgotten it should strive to palpate -- what Saul Bellow called "the mystery of being."
