"Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," the story collection that followed it, was a grab bag of experimental vignettes and more-conventional efforts that nosed around the problem of human malice.
"Infinite Jest" seemed a bulgy monster, a gathering of enthusiasms that were always threatening to escape the corral of the novel and go feral. His style remains maximalist, but his focus has narrowed and deepened. Wallace can still be funny, but his humor has been creeping away from the playful, omnivorous sort on display in his first three books ("The Broom of the System," "The Girl With the Curious Hair" and the reputation-making novel "Infinite Jest") and toward a bleaker variety - as if he were making a slow switch in allegiance from Thomas Pynchon to Samuel Beckett. When you find out what they're running from, you can't blame them. 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. The oblivion in this collection's title is what most of his characters are after.
With his new story collection, David Foster Wallace has perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story - so subtle, in fact, that to judge from the book's reviews, few of his readers even realize that's what these stories are.
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