Wallace follows his debut novel (The Broom of the System, 1986)
with this collection of nine stories and a John Barthian novella.
The best of the pieces, often drawn from the media or topical
events, are inventive, entertaining, and inspired, while others -
including the novella - can be all too glib and mannered. "Little
Expressionless Animals" (which received the 1988 John Train Humor
Prize from the Paris Review) is a zany, fast-paced romp through
la-la land: Julie, a bleached-blonde lesbian with an idiot-savant
brother, lives through a three-year winning streak on Jeopardy.
Wallace - along with the reader - has a great deal of fun with
backstage politics and a media-inspired hysteria that wrecks
people. Meanwhile, the title story turns Less Than Zero into
parody: a young Republican hangs out with a group of L.A. punks
(Gimlet, Big, and Mr. Wonderful) at a Keith Jarrett concert - the
tale is tantalizing in its facility with its milieu (here,
Wallace's feverish prose finds a fitting subject) and even the
expected stylized violence at the end outflanks cliche In "My
Appearance," an anxious actress narrates the antics surrounding her
appearance on The David Letterman Show. While there is a little too
much media analysis (Wallace is fatally fixated at times on
superficial forms of glamour), there is also some good satire.
After those three stories, however, the pickings grow thin:
"Lyndon" is a predictable, too facile mock-memoir about LBJ written
by an aide and shot through with quotes about the former President,
while "Here and There" and "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its
Way" (the novella) are jargon-ridden, archly metafictional, and too
clever for their own good: the novella, especially, is surprisingly
jejune. In all, the work of a prodigious but still developing
talent too much impressed with his own gifts and with some current
critical theory. (Kirkus Reviews)
In these stories, the author renders the bizarre normal and the
absurd hilarious, from the eerily real , almost holographic
evocations of historical figures, to overtelevised game-show hosts
and late-night comedians. In the title story, punk nihilism meets
Young Republicanism.
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