_Oblivion_ by David Foster Wallace

I bought _Oblivion_ because I was trying to pick up the clerk at a bookstore. (No, actually. It almost worked too.) It sat on the shelf for two and a half years. I read it over the last couple of weeks. Some thoughts:

Primarily it reminded me of _How We Are Hungry_ by Dave Eggers except more successful. Both feel like books of short fiction written as much to show the banalities of modern life as to show writers new ways to portray said banalities; more of Eggers's experiments, in my opinion, fall flat, while Wallace bolsters his run-on sentences with something that fills me with eager expectation. His use of acronyms and seemingly meaningless jargon echoes all sorts of actual legitimate technical writing I've read but manages to tell a story at the same time; five points for that.

A couple of the individual stories are particularly good. "Oblivion" especially cuts deep into people's relationships and how they trust themselves and what happens when that trust breaks down; granted it does this through a very silly lens, but if you step back and think about it, maybe it's not so silly after all. Except it is. But what's silly is life, not the story.

My personal favorites are "The Suffering Channel," which I think does an excellent job of making the entire world look utterly and deservedly ridiculous, and "Mister Squishy," which despite being completely unrealistic is completely and utterly realistic. You may find that they fall flat if you expect resolution, but, well, it's Wallace. I encourage you all to check it out if you are into long short stories that don't tie up their loose ends but will give you ideas for your own writing. I have a copy you can borrow.

_I Do But I Don't: Why The Way We Marry Matters_ by Kamy Wicoff

This book is marketed as amateur anthropology but I think it's much more a personal narrative with a lot of generalizing thrown in. I don't think that's a bad thing; indeed I think it's the narrative that really ties it together. I just don't get what any of the people writing reviews of the book were reading, since it wasn't anything like what I read. :)

Basically, Wicoff tells the story of her marriage from working-up-to-engagement to exchanging vows, and periodically laments that gender roles screw her over. (They do.) She talks about being sandwiched between feminist ideals (sexual liberation, moneymaking, &c.) and older, confining gender roles (the man proposes, the woman is proposed to; the man has the money, the woman raises the kids) in a way I find personally resonant. By interviewing her friends and citing a good number of sources aimed at "hip" women (magazine articles, websites, books like her own) she does an excellent job of convincing me that there are problems with the way gender roles work in society today (not surprising) and that weddings are one of the man focal points of this (not that surprising either, I guess, but not something I had considered before).

She makes a lot of suggestions for how to plan an engagement, wedding, and marriage that will be less constrained by "traditional" oppressive gender roles, though she admits that, since marriage involves your family and friends and society, taking some of her suggestions may cause trouble. She's definitely right about that, and she might be right about some of her suggestions. The idea that both partners should propose to each other in roughly parallel ways at around the same time? A good one, I think, in many (though not all) relationships, though maybe difficult to actually achieve. I'm less impressed by her suggestions surrounding the actual wedding, which seem less considered. She's had more time to think about the engagement, I guess :)

While she tries to cover queer issues, she's not incredibly successful; the book is so much about gender roles (and primarily about women's roles, though she tries hard to look into men's heads, too) that gay marriages are kind of out of scope. Some of the lessons are still useful: Yes, people are going to stare at your ring. Yes, wearing white has some associations you really want to think about. The subtext behind these things, though, she alleges to be all about gender roles, and so the aspiring Massachusetts (or Iowa if you were really lucky, or Canada or Spain or...) couple may be left scratching their same-gendered heads, saying "So what does this mean for _us_?"

It does give me some idea why gay marriage screws with people's heads, though. If people's ideas about marriage and what it means are that fundamentally gendered, for better or for worse (for worse), breaking down that barrier must be quite the mind expansion. Or, I suppose, excuse to close your mind off to the idea. I hadn't considered before just how much it turned traditional expectations on their heads, though, and for that alone I have to thank the book. Plus she's a good writer, so even if you're not able to get that much advice from it, it's an engaging read about _her_ story and what she went through.

I can't loan it out since I borrowed it from someone else --- a married lesbian, in fact, who said she got something out of it, so who knows. If you're considering the strange practice of straight marriage, especially but not only if you're a woman (she really tries to speak to men! She does! But it's a very personal story so I don't know how well that actually works), I'd recommend at least flipping through this book and seeing if it has something to say to you.