Oblivion: Stories - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

The book was met with a “familiar duality” in the reviews, receiving a mixture of both extremely positive and negative reviews. But according to the review aggregator Metacritic, it received generally positive reviews from critics. Metacritic reported that the book had an average score of 68 out of 100, based on 22 reviews. Joel Stein, for Time wrote that the “breathtakingly smart” stories are “epic modernism,” with “big plots, absurd Beckettian humor and science-fiction-height ideas portrayed vis-a-vis slow, realistic stream of consciousness.” Jan Wildt for The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote that Oblivion argues convincingly that the short story is the 42-year-old author's true fictional metier.” He additionally stated that Oblivion "puts stylistic idiosyncrasy to better use than any of its predecessors." Laura Miller, for Salon, wrote that Wallace had "perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story," and that his "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." Scott M. Morris for the Los Angeles Times wrote that with Oblivion, Wallace “has earned a place as one of America's most daring and talented young writers.“ Morris claimed that although some of the stories left the reader "more impressed with intelligence than with the stories," with "'The Suffering Channel,' 'Mister Squishy' and 'The Soul Is Not a Smithy,' Wallace transcends mere dazzling displays and explores human emotions with sensitivity.” Morris wrote additionally that in this collection “the high stakes of life have supplanted postmodern playfulness,“ and that “Wallace has laid down a marker that will be coveted by readers.“

Despite these positive reviews, there was also an "undercurrent of irritation, even anger" in other assessments of the collection; many critics were less impressed and gave the collection either mixed or negative reviews. For n+1, Chad Harbach wrote that "apart from 'The Suffering Channel' and 'Good Old Neon', Oblivion has a casual feel.“ Harbach argued that “compared to the premeditated formal performances of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, his previous collection, much of Oblivion has a loose, tossed-off feel. “For the London Review of Books, Wyatt Mason wrote that although the stories were “a bright array of sad and moving and funny and fascinating human objects of undeniable, unusual value,” they still might exhibit a “fundamental rhetorical failure” due to their difficulty. Nonetheless, Mason claimed Wallace’s collection to be “the most interesting and serious and accomplished shorter fiction published in the past decade.” For The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani suggested that the collection was dominated by “tiresome, whiny passages.” She wrote that even though Wallace is a “prose magician,” in Oblivion he “gives us only the tiniest tasting of his smorgasbord of talents. Instead, he all too often settles for the sort of self-indulgent prattling that bogged down his 1999 collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and the cheap brand of irony and ridicule that he once denounced in an essay as 'agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture.'" James Wood also disliked the collection in his review for the The New Republic. He claimed that the story "Mister Squishy" was "fundamentally unreadable" because Wallace too often "bloats his sentences with mimesis." "Above all," wrote Wood, "his immersionist's willingness to saturate his fictions in the germs that he is documenting makes them sick themselves." The collection as a whole, according to Wood, was "talented, frustrating, and finally intolerable;" each of the stories failed to “move the reader“ because they “strangely reproduce the extreme coldness that they abhor."