  Category: Fiction Laura Miller's urlLink review of Oblivion for Salon today is by far the best review I've read of Wallace's new collection. Placed as the lead story for Salon's page, the review turned a rare book review trick: it made me want to read the book again.
Miller pulls off the impressive feat of thematically unifying a collection of stories which seem at first glance only loosely connected--she believes Wallace is writing a "particularly subtle form of horror story -- so subtle, in fact, that to judge from the book's reviews, few of his readers even realize that's what these stories are. " "Judging" other reviews is a big part of Miller's article, but it's warranted because so many of the reviews of Oblivion have been so silly, if not willfully ignorant. Miller understands, for instance, that Wallace doesn't use footnotes to be annoying, or "as mere postmodern smart-alecking. " He uses them, and other grammatical devices, because "he wants to show how a great web of inchoate feelings and trains of thought and immanent understandings of multiple situations is operating in any person at any point in time. The breadth of human consciousness can never be squeezed through the narrow aperture offered by one word at a time without distortion or oversimplification or, basically, the expenditure of lots and lots of 'English. '" This part of Miller's review is extrapolated from the collection's best story, Good Old Neon , but could be about almost anything in Wallace's fiction.
It's nice to see a reviewer actually consider what Wallace "wants to show," rather than merely using Wallace as an instrument in what they want to show--you know, about urlLink culture, postmodernism , their own urlLink genius as reviewers . I think this is the difference between actually reviewing a book and just showing off that one can review a book. 
