Tim Peters looks deeply at Good Old Neon (from Oblivion) for the Los Angeles Review of Books suggesting allusions to Hawthorne, Hemingway, Salinger and Tolstoy as well as a reading re: the state of prose fiction today in his essay, Good Old Wallace:
[...]
Is “Good Old Neon” then a sort of vivid, pessimistic prophecy? A vision of a psyche that for some troublingly deep, fundamental, almost a priori reason is both unable and unwilling to grow up and to evolve and to participate in the world as a responsible adult? Could it be that this anxiety is also what’s hiding behind prose fiction’s societal malaise, and behind the troubles Wallace was having while he worked on The Pale King? That plain old unadorned narrative prose has just become more or less culturally impotent and exhausted and unable to extricate itself from the spiral of inauthenticity?[...]
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