Oblivion
by David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown (2004), 329 pp.
Consider the Lobster
Little, Brown (2005), 343 pp.
The Discomfort Zone
by Jonathan Franzen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2006), 195 pp.
The Diviners
by Rick Moody
Little, Brown (2005), 567 pp.
The Disappointment Artist
by Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday (2005), 160 pp.
Felonies!® are dark, chocolate cakes made by the Mister Squishy Company. A new product, the cake is still in the testing phase. Everything from the name, meant to “connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis-à-vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack,” to the packaging, featuring the Mister Squishy icon behind bars with his “eyes and mouth rounded in cartoon alarm,” is open to discussion and improvement. Gathered in a conference room on the nineteenth floor of an office tower is a focus group made up of members of the target market for Felonies!—males between eighteen and thirty-nine, the “single most prized and fictile demographic in high-end marketing.” A pyramid of cakes adorns the table, and a facilitator stands ready with a whiteboard and several dry-erase markers.
“Mister Squishy” opens David Foster Wallace’s story collection Oblivion. At some 20,000 words, the majority of them arranged in the looping sentences for which Foster Wallace is renowned, this critique of the “great grinding US marketing machine” is a purposeful slog. On page after page, many without paragraph breaks, the mechanics of that machine, from the pseudo-scientific language to the banal aspirations and practices, are detailed with malicious precision. Riffs on matters ranging from the “high-lecithin frosting” (which must be injected into the cake’s hollow by using a high- pressure confectionery needle) to models for market testing (the “anovas” or “ANalysis Of VAriance model, a hypergeometric multiple regression technique”) lend the sprawling story a feeling of claustrophobia and, eventually, diminishment. In a world where desires and vices exist to be manipulated and humans are encouraged to think of themselves in strictly economic terms, there is much sustenance but little nourishment.
Terry Schmidt, the thirty-four-year-old focus-group facilitator, is certainly starved. Clinging to the belief that he has “a vivid and complex inner life,” Schmidt aspires to extricate himself from these consumer self-conceptions. He is stymied by two doubts. The first is his sense that he has “very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men.” The second follows whenever he looks in the mirror. “So that when he thought of himself now it was as something he called ‘Mister Squishy,’ and his own face and the plump and wholly innocuous icon’s face tended to bleed in his mind into one face, crude and line-drawn and clever in a small way.” The dissolving complete, Terry’s individuality is doomed. To fill that hole now, he would almost have to eat himself—and that still might not be nutrition enough.
From Melville’s benchmark exegesis on whaling to John Dos Passos’s urban throngs to Cormac McCarthy’s epic delineations of physical violence, the intricate detailing of experience has long been the business of major American fiction. What critic Mark Kingwell calls the “American gigantic” produces its equally outsized literary simulacra, and in the structures of the greatest novels and the headlong momentum of the best prose, the nation is perpetually depicted as an unwieldy, messianic, and decidedly material project. In 1961, Philip Roth admitted that the grandeur and lunacy of the project was “a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.” Embarrassed or not, Roth, Saul Bellow, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon, among others, have all published books that match that sprawling reality, if only in terms of ambition and aspiration.
Post-World War II materialism carried with it promises of pleasure and freedom, along with a new kind of self-reliance and even self-invention—two further hallmarks of American literary thought. Choosing and buying things made you who you were. But several decades on, an infinitely greater variety of products and pop-cultural distractions are staking claims on that self, using ever more sophisticated information-age marketing, and the noise is deafening. Commodities no longer add up to anything meaningful or helpful to better living; they are now just a disorienting 24-7 barrage of sales pitches and heaps of largely useless stuff. Individuals, especially those who sought to ground their own identities in things, might well be feeling abandoned or simply lost.
Foster Wallace sets his tale of consumerist oblivion in 1995, during the decade that saw the emergence of a group of novelists, including Rick Moody, Jonathan Franzen, and Jonathan Lethem, who were openly ambitious about reinvigorating the kind of social novel championed by Philip Roth. And yet, almost in advance of carrying this national literary project into the twenty-first century, this younger crowd was suffering pre-emptive insecurities. In a 1996 essay in Harper’s, Franzen worried that America had become a “tyranny of the literal.” Any efforts at satirizing it might end up “bloated with issues” and lacking the space to deal with complexities of character. “Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?” Franzen asked.
The same year, Foster Wallace admitted to similar qualms. While maintaining that “the texture of the world I live in” is pure pop, with its hyperkinetic pacing and countless distractions, Foster Wallace, then the recent author of Infinite Jest, wondered about all the “arch, meta, ironic, pomo” manias of his generation. “I get the feeling that a lot of us privileged Americans, as we enter our early thirties, have to find a way to put away childish things and confront stuff about spirituality and values,” he said in an interview. He spoke as well of an “American type of sadness” borne, in effect, from having too much.
Now, a full ten years further along, with these writers into their forties and their nation altered by the shock of 9/11 and the ongoing ravaging of national self-conception from the disaster in Iraq, what has become of such impulses? With one exception, the spiritual, values-driven “stuff” that Foster Wallace alluded to remains unexamined. Meanwhile, pure pop textures rooted in artificial commodities continue to overwhelm books, as though their authors can no longer see any way beyond the dense forest of things.
The exception is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, published in 2001, a novel that is a clarion call to put away, or at least put in perspective, manias induced by consumerism. The novel is so alert to the pressures of the dark moment, and so acute in its diagnosis of that shading, that it shines genuine light upon the condition. This may not be immediately evident. At over 500 pages, the book has the requisite bulk, the weight of materialism packed between its covers. But The Corrections displays a thematic concision the rival of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Here, too, the title is the message: various urgent “corrections” are required. Literally, it is the habits of the Lambert family—the secrets and hurts, the addictions and dysfunctions—that require corrective measures, and, as is evident in nearly every paragraph, it is American excess that must be addressed.
“The Correction, when it finally came,” Franzen writes, “was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value.” Though he is talking about the dot-com market crash, he is really describing the newly liberated Enid Lambert. “She was seventy-five,” the novel ends, “and she was going to make some changes in her life.”
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