I find it strangely comforting that both Wilco and David Foster Wallace have new work coming out in the same month—I’ve read and enjoyed Wallace more than pretty much any other fiction writer going, and Wilco’s been my soundtrack for the last few years. I’ve grown up a little since either’s last work, so there was less fevered anticipation for either of the two artists’ latest offering—Wilco’s is A Ghost is Born, released on 22 June on Nonesuch records—and, well...

I guess I should quit pussyfooting: I was let down by both artists. Moreso by Wilco, but that’s certainly a different review.

David Foster Wallace doesn’t really need much of an introduction: if you’ve got questions, go to a smoky coffee shop and look for somebody smoking a ton of cigarettes and pounding the Nicaraguan java, heaving mightily through a book that can’t pass through customs because it’s big enough to be a blunt weapon. Ask that guy about Wallace if you need information. The reason there’s a devoted, wild-eyed legion of people who devour Wallace, even his gargantuanly fun and dense and hilarious Infinite Jest, is because he’s a frighteningly great writer, perhaps the frighteningly great writer of his generation, as culturally attuned and hyper self-aware and critical as anyone who’s presently going or has passed into the pale.

What’s more, his books, with rare exception, are completely different animals from each other. He’s created a whole kingdom of beasts with his two novels, book of essays, book on Cantor/infinity, and, now, three books of short stories. I presume everyone falls for Wallace for different reasons, but I fell when I read his first collection, Girl with Curious Hair, and had I not the book itself, bound and labeled, I would’ve doubted that one author had written each piece, as tonally and stylistically divergent as each was from the next.

(This is the part in the review where Lucy’s got the football, Charlie Brown’s got some running room, and she’s swearing she’s not going to swipe the ball away, but we all know she will.)

David Foster Wallace’s new collection, Oblivion, is the quietest of his works yet: there’s little of the stretchy mania and intellectual mayhem that makes his best work so unparalleled. The tone from story to story is for the most part a study in uniformity, and the quickest word to spring to mind, adjectivally, is Dense. There are eight stories, two of them under a solid thirty pages, and paragraph breaks are rare as unicorns throughout.

To be totally clear: you should buy the book, absolutely, and everyone on the planet is in for a world of betterness with just one reading of "Good Old Neon". Also, "Incarnations of Burned Children," which was published like five years ago in Esquire, will stick with you for days and days.

Those things said, it’s a really really hard book to get into, emotionally and literally. The typical lambastes Wallace gets when his books come out are, for the first time, sort of earned: the wordplay doesn’t, in this collection, overwhelmingly save each story. The ’tricks’ he’s fond of—involuted sentences, completely divergent story lines coming from nowhere, the consumerism-skewering that comes with lots of (sometimes maddening) ©’s and ®’s—are as on display as ever, and don’t seem to work quite as well as they once did. For the first time ever, there are David Foster Wallace stories I don’t chest-thumpingly, religiously love.

But! But but but: it’s taken me three weeks of reading and rereading, and there’s something going on in this book that Kakutani totally failed to mention in her scathing review in the Times. Tucked into all this density and wordplay and patience-trying sentences, there’s an examination going on that, aside from the "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" series in the book of the same name, Wallace hasn’t tried before, to my memory. And it’s an amazing examination: essentially, a study of loneliness, self, and the hope/need/fear of connection. Of course the themes are the same as most great works, and territory white guys have capitalized on more than most.

And I don’t know if I’m ready to say that Wallace, overall, pulls everything off—certainly the studying has it’s clunky moments (the stories I don’t like, for the record: "Mr. Squishy" and "The Soul is Not a Smithy"). When he breaks through, though—and he does, at least half the time—it’s the sort of firework display of brains and heart that a reading public is lucky indeed to be alive during, while we can appreciate him and buy his books and listen to his questions and read as he stumbles onward through the dark.

- Weston Cutter