david foster wallace's oblivion

"...The narrator of "Good Old Neon" [one of the stories in the collection] (another ad man) is smothering in self-awareness. "My whole life I've been a fraud," he announces, relating a history of triumphs, each one curdled by his consciousness that "all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people." Admitting as much to a psychoanalyst only leads him to further spasms of self-loathing: "My confession of being a fraud and of having wasted time sparring with him over the previous weeks in order to manipulate him into seeing me as exceptional and insightful had itself been kind of manipulative.

"This dilemma, in which every layer of self-knowledge is nested inside yet another layer that scrutinizes it mercilessly for inauthenticity, is a Wallace trademark."

check out laura miller's review in salon.com of david foster wallace's new collection.