Oblivion David Foster Wallace Abacus, 336pp, £7.99 ISBN 0349118108

At the heart of this collection of stories are two or three lengthy accounts of what Orwell complained of in his essay "Politics and the English Language": the cost of jargon. Or, more broadly, of jargon culture. Wallace has the skill to make a virtue of writing badly - a trick that lends his least sentence an air of conscious ironic detachment. The first two rules of good fictional prose are practically contradictory: conceal your personal investment; suggest larger and pervasive intentions. Wallace, taking his cue, perhaps, from Joyce, knows that wilfully bad writing resolves this paradox - a fact he exploited brilliantly in Infinite Jest (1996). Oblivion is littered with artful and obvious mistakes: carefully careless repetitions; bunched-up possessive pronouns; tireless run-ons; double negatives; unnecessary Latinate expressions - in short, those obfuscations which, as Orwell warned, permit the lies of those in power, and obscure from a culture its natural and clear relations to things of importance.

The first, and perhaps the most remarkable story, "Mister Squishy", describes the deliberations of a focus group set up to evaluate Felonies!, an upmarket chocolate "snack cake". Terry Schmidt, the focus group's moderator, is both consumed by his job and aware of its limited nature - a terrifying combination. A man in a devil suit (carrying what looks like a weapon) mounts the high-rise office block where the focus group meets, while a small crowd gathers below. He may or may not be the unhappy victim of an office coup bent on revenge, or the perpetrator of a publicity stunt based on that premise. (Wallace doesn't so much write plots as puzzles - the plot is rather the tension the reader builds up in trying to fit the pieces together.) Schmidt himself, it seems, has undertaken to poison the chocolate cakes set out before the target consumers. These details suggest a lighter comedy than Wallace delivers. The numbing weight of the astonishingly bureaucratic prose, and the effect of its cultural context on Schmidt's sense of himself, are the real story:

[A] certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy . . . had enabled him to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful . . .

The rest of the collection develops these themes. In "The Soul Is Not a Smithy", a grown man recalls a traumatic event from his schooldays. A history supply teacher, writing constitutional amendments on the blackboard, begins to intersperse the words "KILL", "THEM" and "ALL" among the phrases. Children panic; four are taken hostage; the teacher is eventually gunned down. The narrator is among the hostages, but the story is really about his growing sympathy for his father, whose working life was so monotonous. He reflects: "I do not believe I knew or could even imagine, as a child, that for almost 30 years of 51 weeks a year my father sat all day at a metal desk in a silent, fluorescent-lit room, reading forms . . ." In this context, the supply teacher's rage takes on a kind of sensible heroism: something has to be done about the situation.

Wallace has always been interested in high school. He writes well about America's fetishisation of "the gifted child": high-school creatures, calibrated by the unrelenting meaninglessness of special tests. These not only mark out their "precocity", but direct their energies towards mastering other meaningless tests, until the point of failure is reached and ushered in by disproportionate despair: the sort of wincingly amusing American tragedy captured by the recent documentary Spellbound. The corollary of Wallace's interest in high school is his fascination with the odd jobs that people do: this is what becomes of all that terribly ordinary high-school promise. His prose is lit- tered with professions (such as "market research focus group moderator") that prove wrong people's fantasies of being "in certain crucial ways superior".

Such tragedies are worth describing, and Wallace does them well, though he sometimes gets the proportions wrong himself. "Good Old Neon" accounts for the suicide of a successful and personable yuppie. The narrator kills himself because he is tired of being a fraud who acts only in order to present a certain image of himself - surely a rather over-intellectualised premise for self-destruction. Wallace's conclusion suggests he knows that his motive has failed him. He enters the story (still in his narrator's thoughts) to say that David Wallace couldn't imagine when he heard about it why this successful high-school kid, "with the seemingly almost neon aura around him all the time of scholastic and athletic excellence and popularity and success with the ladies", would kill himself. Clearly, this is a question central to the collection as a whole; but I am not sure Wallace has successfully imagined why, and his hyper-clever rendering of an answer looks poor next to, say, Calvin Trillin's wonderful book on the same topic, Remembering Denny.

In the final story, Skip Atwater works at Style, a glossy magazine housed on the 82nd floor of the World Trade Center. In the summer before the September attacks, Skip chases up a story about a man in Indiana who defecates extraordinarily precise reproductions of artistic images. Wallace again manages to avoid making this as silly as it all sounds; and his characterisation of the interns at Style - their little fashion statements; their small, important insecurities; their sparse private lives - is both sharp and on the whole gentle. Except that the great ungentle event hangs over them all, rarely referred to, obliquely suggested - a tragedy whose shadow is deeper and more real than the prosperous, petty questions with which they vex their lives.

Towards the end, the Indiana artist and his celebrity-hungry wife prompt Skip to reflect on the conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives and our awareness of its objective insignificance:

Atwater knew . . . that this was the single great informing conflict of the modern psyche. The management of insignificance. The accommodation of a whole new kind of fear, of death by demography - the fact that terror of being average was itself completely average. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture.

This is also the great syncretic bond between these stories; I am just not sure how true it is, or how important. It depends, in part, on how wide the definitions are - of modernity, among other things. Thoreau's "mass of men" with their "lives of quiet desperation" refers no doubt to the same condition - but then, perhaps, the 1850s also count as modern. However, that most of us find that our lot is "average" is often, in practice, a source of consolation rather than despair. Nor does it seem so significant in the throes of the specific. But these are private grumbles about another brilliant book: the sort of disagreements provoked by the virtues - rather than the failings - of literature.

Benjamin Markovits's novel The Syme Papers is published by Faber & Faber

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