#58 Mister Squishy- David Foster Wallace
Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy!
I’ve been waiting for this since I started this project. David Foster Wallace is such a pleasure to
read. Since his death in 2008, I’ve been
reading or re-reading his catalogue of work.
This collection of short fiction, Oblivion, is one of the only things he
published I have not yet read. So, with
absolute joy and without trying to temper my impossibly high expectations, I
plan on reading one of these a month until the book is complete.
DFW is truly a singular figure in literature. There is
absolutely nobody who understands, or can craft the english language as fully as he does.
He once wrote an in-depth book review of a new Dictionary edition…and it was truly entertaining in a completely non-ironic way.
Mister Squishy isn’t really a short story (perhaps short for
a man who wrote an 1,100 page novel) This short fiction is a 6o-page, small
font, wide-margined, novelette-sized satirical running dialogue on the buffoonery
that occurs during a product test focus-group to choose the next great sugary
snack cake, and of course, all the adjacent tomfoolery and hi-jinx attached to
such an endeavor. The new snack cake in question is called:
“Felonies—a risky and multi-valant trade name meant both to
connote and to parody the modern health conscious consumer’s sense of
vice/indulgence/transgression/sin…”
It’s the brilliance of DFW that such a long descriptive work
can be so engaging, but it is beyond that.
Nothing escapes the eye of the narrator, nothing goes past the lens without
comment and clarity. If this whole view looks like a image distorted through a
fun-house mirror, its only because that’s what we’ve become in a
all-consumer-all-the-time world.
The piece reads as a longer and smarter George Carlin Skit. It’s
Satire at its finest. I wish I could
print the whole thing, but here is just a random sampling of DFW’s brilliant
description of modern commercialism:
“…the familiar Mister Squishy brand icon, which was a plump
and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its eyes squeezed
partly shut in an expression that somehow connotated delight, satiation, and
rapacious desire all at the same time. The icon communicated the sort of
innocuous facial affect that was almost impossible not to smile back at or feel
positive about in some way, and it had been commissioned and introduced by one
of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt’s senior creative people over a decade ago, when the
regional Mister Squishy Company had come under national corporate ownership and
rapidly expanded and diversified from extra-soft sandwich breads and buns into
sweet rolls and flavored doughnuts and snack cakes and soft confections of nearly
every conceivable kind; and without any particular message of associations
anyone in Demographics could ever produce data to quantify or get a handle on,
the crude line-drawn face had become one of the most popular, recognizable, and
demonstrably successful brand icons in American Advertising.”
In case you were wondering, that last sentence is 126 words,
which for DFW is miniscule. The reader
of pieces like this must keep focus. If you lose the thread all could be lost,
however, follow along and the entertainment is endless.
*It is unfair and impossible to rate these pieces. The
quality, scope, craft, and impact of Wallace’s writing is unlike anything else.
If I had to rate it, clearly it would be 10’s across the board. But since i don't want to ruin the curve for everyone else, lets just set these aside as something different.
No comments:
Post a Comment