Publishers Weekly
In his best work, Infinite Jest, Wallace leavened his smartest-boy-in-class style, perfected in his essays and short stories, with a stereoscopic reproduction of other voices. Wallace's trademark, however, is an officious specificity, typical of the Grade A student overreaching: shifting levels of microscopic detail and self-reflection. This collection of eight stories highlights both the power and the weakness of these idiosyncrasies. The best story in the book, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," assembles a typical Wallaceian absurdity: a paroled, autodidactic arachnophile accompanies his mother, the victim of plastic surgery malpractice ("the cosmetic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times"), on a bus ride to a lawyer's office. "The Suffering Channel" moves from the grotesque to the gross-out, as a journalist for Style (a celebrity magazine) pursues a story about a man whose excrement comes out as sculpture. The title story, about a man and wife driven to visit a sleep clinic, is narrated by the husband, who soon reveals himself to be the tedious idiot his father-in-law takes him for. While this collection may please Wallace's most rabid fans, others will be disappointed that a writer of so much talent seems content, this time around, to retreat into a set of his most overused stylistic quirks. Agent, Bonnie Nadell. 5-city author tour. (June 8) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Lots of weird stories from the irrepressible author of Infinite Jest, featuring such characters as a parolee who carefully guards his spider collection. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Media overkill and other forms of contemporary paranoia and mendacity take their lumps in this third collection from the brainy postmodernist author (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, 1999, etc.). The most conventional of its eight impressively varied stories is "The Surfing Channel," the raffish satirical account of trendy Style magazine's research into the personal history of a popular sculptor who works in the medium of human excrement. How he produces his art is about what you'd expect ("Maybe his colon somehow knows things his conscious mind doesn't"), and Wallace's deadpan depiction of his manufactured celebrity is both hilarious and, uh, fundamentally silly. Elsewhere, we encounter an ad agency manipulating public hunger for a cholesterol-laden product ("Mr. Squishy"), a possibly suicidal yuppie devoted to obsessive analysis of his own "fraudulence" ("Good Old Neon"), and the story (told in conversations overheard during a business flight) of an "omniscient child" born in a Third World rain forest and commercially exploited by his fellow villagers ("Another Pioneer"). But Wallace is as versatile as he is facile, capable of such contrasting stunners as a blistering vignette that describes in headlong charged prose the accidental severe burning of a toddler and his parents' panicked efforts to save his life ("Incarnations of Burned Children") and the volume's two standout pieces. In "The Soul is Not a Smithy," a depressed, lonely father sorrowfully recalls a violent episode at his son's elementary school, an episode that the distracted boy survived almost without noticing it: a terrific story, in which the generation gap yawns unbridgeably. Then there's "Oblivion," the narrative ofa 40-ish husband whose wife objects to his nonexistent snoring, leading him to an Orwellian Sleep Clinic, and to question everything he thinks he knows about himself. This ingenious anatomy of incompatibility perfectly illustrates Wallace's genius for combining intellectual high seriousness and tomfoolery with compassionate insight into distinctively contemporary fears and neuroses. One of our best young writers just keeps getting better. Agent: Bonnie Nadell/Frederick Hill Bonnie Nadell Literary Agency
