Nothing Ever Happens: \"Mister Squishy\" and the Year of the Sentence Diagram

TL;DR

The LARB essay that gives Hannah Smart's DFW cluster its name: a first-person close reading of the ~900-word "monster sentence" that opens "Mister Squishy," the first story of Wallace's Oblivion (2004). Smart spends a year literally diagramming the sentence and argues that its grammar — a cascade of clauses within clauses that never resolves — is the point: the story keeps readers "constantly anticipating action in the face of unrelenting letdowns," enacting at the sentence level the stasis of its passive focus-group protagonist, Terry Schmidt. She then widens the reading into a cultural diagnosis: the same language that "can simultaneously herald and forestall progress" runs through the "Nothing Ever Happens" internet meme, Trump's rhetoric, and an information glut that (invoking Wallace's own "Deciderization 2007") makes meaning harder to find, not easier. The essay never mentions Infinite Jest — it is craft and oeuvre context, not an IJ reading — but it is the fullest statement of the sensibility (DFW's prose philosophy weaponized against itself) that the same author brings to her IJ readings elsewhere.

Key claims

• The premise. "For the past year," Smart has been diagramming a single ~900-word sentence from "Mister Squishy," a story James Wood called "fundamentally unreadable." Every phrase is "crammed with unnecessarily added words"; she reproduces sample clauses ("squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second"). The impediments are deliberate: "creating momentary linguistic impediments is kind of the entire point."
• Wallace breaking his own rule. His stated prose philosophy — from "Authority and American Usage" ("clunky redundancies" cost readers "a couple extra nanoseconds of cognitive effort") and "Twenty-Four Word Notes" (good writing should be "clean, clear, [and] maximally considerate") — is exactly what "Mister Squishy" violates with its "parodically inconsiderate and unclean phrases". "The question worth asking is why."
• Almost nothing happens. The story is a focus-group session for a Little Debbie-like snack company, narrated by an unnamed infiltrator on an unspecified mission; we dip repeatedly into coordinator Terry Schmidt, who "muses about his utter inability to take action romantically, professionally, or personally." Schmidt does nothing, the narrator's sabotage is never dramatized, and the ominous figure climbing the building "turns out to be a mere ad campaign, after which the thread is dropped."
• The diagram's revelation. Standard tools ("Let's Diagram") couldn't handle the sentence's size, so she built it in Microsoft Word's shape/text-box features, screenshotting chunks. The finding: "how few words go on the horizontal line representing core components." The whole sentence reduces to "It had occurred" — but reaching what had occurred means parsing clauses that never resolve, so readers stay "suspended on the brink of grammatical satisfaction whose denial Wallace disguises as mere postponement." Stripped down, the sentence is Schmidt fantasizing about poisoning a batch of snack cakes because "a poisoning scandal is preferable to stagnant nothingness" — a fantasy that, "like everything else in the story, never comes to fruition."
• Data-sifting as the trap. Wallace makes us "sift through enough meaningless data" for a gratification that never arrives, so the sifting becomes the whole purpose — readers "become like Terry Schmidt," whose job is to produce "a cascade of random noise" and whose "terrible and thoroughgoing smallness" the reader is forced to feel.
• The personal register. The essay is openly autobiographical: Smart began the diagram feeling "stuck, life trajectory–wise," a would-be writer in grad school blaming "the entire literary industry" for her stalled career, and — "[u]nlike Schmidt" — never contemplating poisoning anyone but sympathizing with "his abstract desire to burn it all down".
• The cultural diagnosis. The stuck feeling "pervades the popular internet meme Nothing Ever Happens" and derives from "deceptively meaningless rhetoric" in media, pop culture, and "the current US president" (she cites Trump's "I have concepts of a plan" and "clean, beautiful coal"). Such rhetoric is "insidious" because "through its promise of change that it can't actualize, it becomes a tool for getting us to accept dissatisfaction." "We are entering a new nihilist era."
• The Wallace through-line. She enlists Wallace's "Deciderization 2007": "whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist" without "a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence". His concerns (Iraq rhetoric, TV-news-as-entertainment, Bush's reelection) "differ from ours," but the core problem — access to "more information than we can ever process", much of it "misleading or fatuous or flat-out wrong" — "has only worsened." She offers no solution; reading the story taught her "to distinguish between data and knowledge" and "to stop conceptualizing my life solely in future terms." "After all, the future is eternal, while the present is momentary." The diagram is unfinished.

Theories & evidence

Both blocks are scoped to the Oblivion story "Mister Squishy," not to Infinite Jest — oeuvre/craft readings. They are the fuller, published statement of readings the same author gives in shorter form in her Reddit AMA.

THEORY: Nothing actually happens in "Mister Squishy" — the anticlimax is the design, and its engine is a grammar that perpetually postpones resolution

• Crux: mister-squishy-nothing-happens
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [text] No poisoning, no dramatized sabotage, the climbing figure "turns out to be a mere ad campaign, after which the thread is dropped"; yet "there's a constant sense that something's about to" happen. [sec. paras 3-4]
  • [text] Schmidt as cause: he "muses about his utter inability to take action romantically, professionally, or personally," and even his poisoning fantasy "never comes to fruition." [sec. paras 3, 6]
  • [inference] The distinctive mechanism (the essay's contribution): the sentence diagram shows "how few words go on the horizontal line", the foundation being only "It had occurred"; the subordination cascade leaves readers "suspended on the brink of grammatical satisfaction whose denial Wallace disguises as mere postponement." Grammar enacts the stasis. [sec. paras 6-7]
  • [text] The reader is implicated: sifting "meaningless data" for an absent payoff makes "the data-sifting … our whole purpose — we become like Terry Schmidt," made to feel his "terrible and thoroughgoing smallness". [sec. para 9]
• Notes: Supports and deepens the same author's AMA answer that "nothing happens" in the story and that Schmidt is too fundamentally passive to act. The AMA states the reading; this essay supplies the argued mechanism (the sentence-level grammar of postponement) and the reader-implication turn. Counterweight in-source: none against the reading itself — the essay's only hedge is that the diagram is "still not done", i.e. the analysis is presented as ongoing, not closed. Non-IJ (Oblivion) story.

THEORY: Wallace's diagnosis of information overload (E Unibus Pluram / "Deciderization 2007") has been realized and worsened — language now heralds progress it cannot deliver, producing a new nihilism

• Crux: eup-connection
• Stance: advances
• Evidence:
  • [author] "Deciderization 2007": "whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by 'informed.'" [sec. para 13]
  • [inference] The core problem "has only worsened": we have "access to more information than we can ever process and … much of that information is misleading or fatuous or flat-out wrong." [sec. para 13]
  • [inference] Contemporary instances read as the same rhetoric of empty heralding: the "Nothing Ever Happens" meme, Trump's "concepts of a plan" / "clean, beautiful coal," and "news" headlines that "purport to provide updates but really only guarantee more of the same" (Musk-on-Mars, a Star Wars release-date item). [sec. paras 11-12]
  • [text] The thesis sentence: "The story has a lot to teach us about the way language can simultaneously herald and forestall progress." [sec. para 11]
• Notes: This matches the AMA's information-overload block, where Smart says the social-media landscape and predominance of short-form content is basically a worse version of what Wallace talked about in E Unibus Pluram. Here she runs the same argument through "Deciderization 2007" rather than EUP by name. Oeuvre / reception-side, not an IJ plot crux. Counterweight in-source: she "won't pretend to offer a solution."

Themes

Communication and solipsism / language (prose as impediment; language that heralds and forestalls; "data" versus "knowledge"); entertainment and the-self (the focus group as an entertainment/consumer apparatus; Schmidt's smallness; the reader made complicit); irony-sincerity and information culture (the EUP/"Deciderization" through-line; the "new nihilist era"); anhedonia / stasis (Schmidt's inability to act; the fantasy that never actualizes). The essay's center of gravity is DFW's oeuvre and prose philosophy, not any single novel.

Cross-references

• general online discussion — same author; the AMA is titled and framed around this essay ("I'm Hannah Smart who wrote the LARB 'Mister Squishy' essay"). The AMA's shorter statements of both readings here — the nothing-happens anticlimax and the information-overload diagnosis — are what this essay argues out at length. In the AMA, commenters (not Smart, and not this essay) drew the further parallel between the story's payoff-that-never-comes and IJ's cyclical-without-climax structure — recorded there, not asserted here.
• ihij-ep23-hannah-smart — same author, 2020; her never-expect-payoffs rule there is the same instinct this essay formalizes for a single story.
• vocal-smart-death-was-not-the-end — same author, 2019; the autobiographical-reading habit (Wallace's fiction as self-portrait; reading one's own life through his stories) recurs here in the first-person diagram-as-life-stuck-ness frame.
• Wallace's own prose-philosophy essays quoted here — "Authority and American Usage," "Twenty-Four Word Notes," "Deciderization 2007" — are the craft scaffolding the reading turns against; the EUP/"Deciderization" line is the same media-diagnosis thread the AMA extends to social media and AI.

Notable passages

Verbatim from the essay (Smart's own prose unless marked as a quotation she carries; where she quotes the story or Wallace's essays, recorded as her quotation, cite-as-written).

• "For the past year, I've been diagramming a 900-word sentence from David Foster Wallace's short story 'Mister Squishy,' the opener of his perplexing collection Oblivion (2004)."
• "James Wood called this story 'fundamentally unreadable.'"
• "creating momentary linguistic impediments is kind of the entire point."
• "While very little actually occurs in 'Mister Squishy,' there's a constant sense that something's about to."
• "Wallace keeps us constantly anticipating action in the face of unrelenting letdowns."
• "we feel constantly suspended on the brink of grammatical satisfaction whose denial Wallace disguises as mere postponement."
• "The sentence's foundation is a simple phrase: 'It had occurred.'"
• "The story has a lot to teach us about the way language can simultaneously herald and forestall progress."
• "We are entering a new nihilist era."
• "After all, the future is eternal, while the present is momentary."
• (Smart quoting "Deciderization 2007":) "whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by 'informed.'"