"Good People"

The New Yorker has published a new David Foster Wallace short story, available online here. It deserves a response I'm not sure I'm prepared to articulate yet -- which is to say that it's sensitive and compelling and, you know, good.

Mr. Wallace's fiction keeps getting better and better while his nonfiction has kind of stagnated. Don't get me wrong -- Consider The Lobster was worth every penny I eked out for the cloth-bound, but it almost all seemed like things he could have written years ago; in a few cases they actually were things he'd written years ago, kind of like b-sides from his A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again sessions, which I guess makes CTL an Amnesiac to ASFTINDA's Kid A.

Compare that to the title story from Oblivion, which to date remains the most haunting, affecting thing I've ever put in my brain; a story so freaking good I'm a little afraid of the fact that I've read it and it's had such an impact on me; a story that more or less defines the potentials for psychological horror in contemporary American life in a way that only the best fiction writing will ever be able to conjure.

Here's a link to his wikipedia page, and here's another to a fairly comprehensive fansite.