David Foster Wallace!

TL;DR

Chad Harbach's review of Oblivion for the first issue of n+1 — remembered less for its verdict on the story collection than for the sentence that opens it, an early and durable act of canonization: Infinite Jest "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." Harbach makes two lineage arguments a reader of IJ will want: that Wallace built the Enfield Tennis Academy out of Don DeLillo's End Zone — the crow's-nest coach, the play-by-play-preferring athlete, the apocalyptic war games all "traveled straight" over — so completely that "the influence seems to flow both ways"; and that Franzen's The Corrections is, functionally, Wallace's "next big novel", IJ's most direct descendant ("replace “drug” with “video” and you have the plot of Infinite Jest"). He also names, as a general Wallace principle, the non-resolving plot — "plot is paradox", a story that "resonates without being resolved" and resonates "even as it deteriorates" — the aesthetic IJ's asymptotic convergence embodies. The bulk of the piece reads Oblivion proper (the shit-sculptor of "The Suffering Channel," the from-beyond-the-grave "Good Old Neon"), but its lasting significance is as a 2004 reception marker: the moment IJ's centrality was being asserted as settled fact, eight years out.

Key claims

• The canonization sentence. Wallace's "1996 opus now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit. More than that: even the writers from whom he borrowed and stole are coming to seem like satellites."
• The DeLillo lineage. The debt runs through End Zone, "whose Logos College Wallace tore down brick by brick and rebuilt as the Enfield Tennis Academy": "The coach who observes practice from a Melvillean crow’s nest; the athlete who would rather do play-by-play than play; the apocalyptic war games; even the unlikely construction, “Everything he knew about x could be inscribed on the rim of a shotglass with a blunt crayon”—all this and more traveled straight from DeLillo’s End Zone (a wonderful and underrated novel) into Infinite Jest", yet Wallace is "so securely his own writer" that "the influence seems to flow both ways, and much of early DeLillo comes to read like a ramping-up toward Wallace."
• The non-resolving plot as principle. "Like Infinite Jest, some of the stories in Oblivion derive their narrative momentum from distinct, asymptotic plot lines that draw nearer and nearer to one another but never quite converge." "For Wallace, plot is paradox—the given information can be parsed in various and often contradictory ways. The successful Wallace plot resonates without being resolved; in fact, it resonates even as it deteriorates, and the desire to know what happened races neck and neck with the growing suspicion that one can never really know what happened."
• The fan-devotion / initiation reading. "Wallace inspires a Trekkie-like allegiance from his admirers, partly because of the insularity of his fictional worlds." His "piling on information before it can be assimilated," his "reflexive use of acronyms, nicknames, and unfamiliar designations (metric measurements, “Year of Glad”)" force a "period of initiation", a "hazing" that produces "fierce devotion" — a hybrid of "high-modernist refusal to assist the reader" and the "fantasy-sci-fi method of semi-allegorical substitution".
• The Franzen descent thesis. "The truth is, Wallace has already written his next big novel—it’s called The Corrections". Franzen called Wallace his "main rival" and said IJ "got me working"; his prose "underwent a profound transformation" between Strong Motion (1992) and The Corrections (2001), and IJ "paved the way for this change". "replace “drug” with “video” and you have the plot of Infinite Jest". Even the Lambert surname (a unit of brightness) "must be read either as conscious or unconscious homage to Wallace’s Incandenzas." "The Corrections, ultimately, cannot be imagined without the example of Infinite Jest".
• On the interim silence and the coming novel. Eight years after IJ, readers wondered if the next book would be "even bigger" or "the leanest, meanest, 500-page novel in recent memory"; Wallace deflected ("There were rumors that the new novel had to do with porn"). Harbach predicts the next Wallace novel will look less like The Corrections than like Thomas Bernhard's Correction — "hundred-page paragraphs," "an endlessly iterative lyricism … of an obsessive mind."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Wallace built the Enfield Tennis Academy directly out of Don DeLillo's End Zone — the borrowing is so thorough that the influence appears to run both ways

• Crux: delillo-influence
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [secondary] The itemized transfers from End Zone to IJ: "The coach who observes practice from a Melvillean crow’s nest; the athlete who would rather do play-by-play than play; the apocalyptic war games; even the unlikely construction, “Everything he knew about x could be inscribed on the rim of a shotglass with a blunt crayon”—all this and more traveled straight from DeLillo’s End Zone … into Infinite Jest". [¶1]
  • [inference] The reversal claim: because Wallace is "so securely his own writer," "the influence seems to flow both ways, and much of early DeLillo comes to read like a ramping-up toward Wallace." [¶1]
• Notes: A detailed, admiring lineage claim keyed to the tennis-academy material specifically (Logos College → ETA); the war-games echo also touches the Eschaton apparatus without Harbach naming it. Distinct from the Pynchon-lineage strand of the reception layer — this is the DeLillo thread.

THEORY: The successful Wallace plot is designed not to resolve — it resonates even as it deteriorates, the asymptotic lines converging without ever meeting

• Crux: designed-holes
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [inference] "For Wallace, plot is paradox—the given information can be parsed in various and often contradictory ways." [¶ plot]
  • [inference] "The successful Wallace plot resonates without being resolved; in fact, it resonates even as it deteriorates, and the desire to know what happened races neck and neck with the growing suspicion that one can never really know what happened." [¶ plot]
  • [secondary] The structural link to IJ: "Like Infinite Jest, some of the stories in Oblivion derive their narrative momentum from distinct, asymptotic plot lines that draw nearer and nearer to one another but never quite converge." [¶ plot]
• Notes: Harbach states the non-resolution as an achieved design principle ("The successful Wallace plot"), not a flaw — the affirmative pole of designed-holes that the 1996 pans (Peck, Kakutani) reject. He frames it partly as a reading-in-proofs problem ("daunting to read him in proofs, before the most devoted of his fans have combed through the text for plot-clues"), anticipating the reader-reconstruction culture that later grew up around the novel's ending.

Themes

Reception and canonization (the "central American novel" verdict, the star-and-satellites image, the fan-initiation reading); influence and intertext (DeLillo's End Zone → ETA; the Franzen/Corrections descent; the Bernhard prediction); form and non-closure (the asymptotic, non-resolving plot; "plot is paradox"); the encyclopedic apparatus (acronyms, "Year of Glad", metric measurements as initiation). The Oblivion stories — "Mr. Squishy," "The Suffering Channel," "Good Old Neon" — are read alongside as Wallace's contemporaneous short work.

Cross-references

• Pairs with A. O. Scott's 2008 appreciation on the DFW-vs-cohort ranking and, specifically, the Franzen/Corrections relation: where Scott sets the cohort's big books "in Mr. Wallace’s shadow", Harbach makes The Corrections IJ's literal descendant.
• The DeLillo-lineage argument connects to the archive's DeLillo material (Chambers on the crowd and the individual in DeLillo).
• The Oblivion readings connect to the notes on those stories, chiefly Good Old Neon, whose from-beyond-the-grave suicide narration Harbach calls the collection's "one indisputable masterpiece".
• The non-resolving-plot principle is the affirmative counter-pole to the 1996 pans that read the same non-closure as failure — Peck and Kakutani.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the review (curly quotes, em-dashes, and one italic-boundary space preserved).

• The canonization line: "now looks like the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit" … "even the writers from whom he borrowed and stole are coming to seem like satellites."
• The DeLillo transfer: "traveled straight from DeLillo’s End Zone (a wonderful and underrated novel) into Infinite Jest" … "the influence seems to flow both ways, and much of early DeLillo comes to read like a ramping-up toward Wallace."
• On plot: "For Wallace, plot is paradox—the given information can be parsed in various and often contradictory ways." … "The successful Wallace plot resonates without being resolved; in fact, it resonates even as it deteriorates".
• On the fans: "Wallace inspires a Trekkie-like allegiance from his admirers".
• The Franzen thesis: "The truth is, Wallace has already written his next big novel—it’s called The Corrections". … "replace “drug” with “video” and you have the plot of Infinite Jest". … "The Corrections, ultimately, cannot be imagined without the example of Infinite Jest".
• The Incandenza homage: "must be read either as conscious or unconscious homage to Wallace’s Incandenzas."