The oblivion in this collection's title is what most of his characters are after. They have a past they want to forget, a future they'd prefer to avoid, and things about themselves they'd rather not think about at all. When you find out what they're running from, you can't blame them ... Wallace can still be funny, but his humor has been creeping away from the playful, omnivorous sort on display in his first three books...and toward a bleaker variety -- as if he were making a slow switch in allegiance from Thomas Pynchon to Samuel Beckett ... Trauma lurks somewhere, usually offstage, in each of the eight stories ... In Oblivion, Wallace's long arcs of prose and the narrative sidetracks are exposed not as tortuous strivings toward some hard-won truth but as an insulation that people spin between themselves and the sharp edges of their condition.

His new collection, Oblivion, contains eight stories of uncompromising difficulty, with certain superficial similarities ... These novellas are densely packed with sentences that are not infrequently more than a page long. The typical mode of their narration is digressive; the digressions, in keeping with Wallace’s reputation as a humorist of the first rank, are not infrequently very funny. The stories also tend to feature an abundance of neologisms, arcane vocabulary and foreign terms ... Perhaps more than anything, the defining quality of these fictions is the degree to which they leave the reader unsure about very basic narrative issues: who is telling this story? ... The trouble one faces, the trouble I face – having read the eight stories in Oblivion; having found some hard to read and, because they were hard and the hardness made me miss things, reread them; having reread them and seen how they work, how well they work, how tightly they withhold their working...is the concern that these stories, the most interesting and serious and accomplished shorter fiction published in the past decade, exhibit a fundamental rhetorical failure.

Because Wallace's writing often conveys the sense of someone trying to bail out a sinking language by working at higher and higher speeds, with bigger and bigger verbal buckets, it's no surprise that many of his stories take as their subject the limits of words themselves ... When Wallace's superbrain walks into a room, it notices everything ... When he's off on one of these hyperfocused sprees, there's no such thing as an unimportant detail; his intensity spreads out in all directions, throwing every feature of the scene into equally high relief. By the end of the story there's no such thing as an important detail, either ... Wallace's own work is far from flushable -- for one thing it's just too big and broad -- and much of it probably partakes of genius, at least in the chess-grandmaster, Bronx High School of Science sense. He has the vocabulary. He has the energy. He has the big ideas. He has the attitude. Yet too often he sounds like a hyperarticulate Tin Man.

More self-aware than might be healthy, the tangled souls situated in eight new stories by David Foster Wallace tack through a series of actions that read like extrapolations on Edvard Munch's painting The Scream ... Oblivion's predominantly long stories burrow into the whole of consciousness with pitched-up purpose. At the core of the collection is 'that type of embarrassment-before-self that makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once' ... His sentences crackle and swoon, patiently peeling back layers of artifice that cloak the Big Questions ... As the stories stack up, however, the catalog of manic spasms and base behavior turns into a strange sort of love letter to human toil.

Without sacrificing his flair for brainy surreal prose and dead-on social satire, which have on occasion seemed like ends in themselves, Wallace has added a stronger than usual emphasis on narrative drive and ingenious plotting. Consistently impressive is his much-admired talent for bringing a plaintive three-dimensionality to the inner lives of his characters ... A masterpiece of heart-stopping brevity, 'Incarnations of Burned Children' concerns the frantic efforts of a mother and father to console their infant son who has been severely scalded from an overturned pot of boiling water on the stove ... Sometimes Wallace's relentless quest for offbeat material can become tedious and self-indulgent on the page. The collection's opening piece, 'Mister Squishy,' relies rather too heavily on the drone of acronym-laden corporate-speak at a Chicago ad agency ... While alienation and despair remain key themes, his characters are so richly drawn that they behave less like pawns of injustice or fate than tragic purveyors of their own limitations.

The pleasures of Oblivion include huge energy and ingenuity, as well as damning humour, often spun out of the linguistic depravity produced by the unanchored cleverness of his characters ... Most of the stories fight the slow suffocation by complacent knowingness of a world (or of a media-rich slice of America, which to the characters is all that counts) where irony has exhausted itself and become a marker of status rather than a moral faculty ... Oblivion might be merely clever work, were it not that the stories are animated by a sense of insatiable anxiety ... Oblivion is a partial view, but in presenting a vast political silence masked by voracious and terrified infantile jabbering, it is both recognisable and convincing.

Wallace’s prose has never been effortless for the reader. You have to ferret the meal of the story from beneath a silo full of words. There are sentences, like one in 'Good Old Neon,' that literally runs the whole page and requires careful attention in order to find its point. But once you do, the impact is like a boot to the head, but in an enlightening way ... The true stand-outs, however, are 'The Soul is Not a Smithy' and 'The Suffering Channel' ... My only Foster Wallace-ian complaint is how his stories end, which they don’t do so much as simply stop. I’m sure their abruptness is all part of some larger scheme, but, personally, I’d like more closure. That may stem more from a need to feel like these are finished tales, rather than those whose deeper rhythms are still shifting, both in my mind and in my culture’s heart.

The Infinite Jest author has always had a prose style that threads back and forth on the mutually reinforcing line between clinical and clinically depressed, like a weird blend of Pynchon, Kafka, DeLillo, David Byrne and Mr. Spock. In Oblivion, his first story collection since 1999, Wallace channels Stephen King and Holden Caulfield as well ... As in Wallace’s other fiction, depression—with its wearying, bottomless solipsism—combines with consumerist depersonalization as the twin horrors of modern life. But he unites this with sharp satirical vision and—in 'Good Old Neon,' the collection’s most impressive story—a Salinger-esque bittersweetness. In Oblivion—artfully structured, deeply wounded—intelligence governs Wallace’s use of his smarty-pants style as much as the style itself.

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' ... 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 ... Detail is both the delight and downfall of these stories ... 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.

In each of these stories, Wallace establishes himself as the modern- day master of the run-on sentence, able to rival even José Saramago and Thomas Pynchon in his elongated periods. Yet his range of attitudes in presenting these excursions is seemingly endless, moving from the clinical and theoretical to the psychological and confessional. Often two seemingly contradictory tones fight for dominance of the same sentence, a masterful achievement on the part of the author, and one that imparts a vertiginous sense of dislocation to the narrative ... This work not only withstands the scrutiny, but invites and deserves it.

Media overkill and other forms of contemporary paranoia and mendacity take their lumps in this third collection from the brainy postmodernist author ... 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 ... 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.

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 ... 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.