David Foster Wallace's Oblivion

This month's literary excursion is polymath DF Wallace's brilliant collection of short stories, Oblivion. His genius is a semi-autistic ability to make startlingly unusual connections between ideas, but without autism's attendant social confusion. In his essay on maths and tennis, which isn't in the book, he describes being one of the few to contemplate cycling in his hometown of Philo, Illinois, a mind-bogglingly windy place: He conquered the wind by riding with a large heavy book that he could use as a sail.

Wallace, in his essay on TV and irony, which also isn't in the book, has articulated what it is about Stuff White People Like that unsettles me:

And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervavsive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All US irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I'm saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think today's irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric and a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

That is why our teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic.

His fiction is every bit as incisive and clever and fascinating to read as his journalism. So, thumbs up from me.

See here for a description of DF Wallace's sad life: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?yrail

You can download the TV essay, 'E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction', quoted above, here: http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf

Oblivion is available at both the Moreland and Yarra libraries and at bookshops.