  David Foster Wallace has a new collection of stories out and urlLink Laura Miller reviews it at Salon. She makes a claim early on that Wallace is seeming less like Pynchon and more like Beckett. This filled me with a sense of hope that perhaps Wallace, who displays a monumental talent and energy, might finally be narrowing his focus enough to write something that isn't heavy-handed, ugly, masturbatory and charmless. The rest of the review leaves me with less hope. She stakes out the plots of the stories in a way that reveals that Wallace's style remains burdensome, labored and awkward.
I might pick this one up anyway, just on the offchance that it's worthwhile. Miller manages to find some examples of clean, delightful and powerful prose, though she presents this almost as a weakness ("conventionally beautiful prose"). Conventional or not, it's beautiful, if not perfect: .
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.having learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo. 
