Name: Nature's Nightmare
ISBN: 9780988930513

Greg Carlisle

Analyzing David Foster Wallace's Oblivion

Nature's Nightmare

Daryl Houston

Carlisle's comparable book on Infinite Jest is indispensable if you're doing more than cursory reading of that novel. This book too provides lots of insights into the stories in the collection it considers. You have to approach a story collection a bit differently than you do a novel, I think, and Carlisle does a nice job of pulling threads from all the stories together to show how the stories are working with similar material in spite of their apparent diversity of subject matter.

I suspect that work was well under way on this book before The Pale King was released, and yet a book analyzing TPK will be a huge undertaking. So I can understand what I presume was an impulse to relate the story collection to the more recently published novel (and there are clear thematic ties and in some cases even common source material between the two), but it did feel at times a little tacked on.

In any case, it's a great read for those baffled by the stories in Wallace's story collection or for the Wallace curious or completists, and I'll be among the first in line for the similar reference that I hope Carlisle puts together for TPK.

Nature's Nightmare Analyzing David Foster Wallace's Oblivion

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