Mr. Squishy

So I have been reading the short story Mr. Squishy by David Foster Wallace. I actually have an old friend who seems completely enamored with Wallace and have been meaning to read something by him for some time. My friend has mentioned Infinite Jest by Wallace several times, but alas that book is too mammoth for my hectic calendar. Recently I was at an alumni meeting for students of St. John’s College when it was mentioned that they needed a reading for the next meeting. I offered up Wallace as a possible author and everyone seemed to agree. The only problem was, I didn’t know a short story by Wallace from Adam so I went home and G**gled short stories and David Foster Wallace and came up with a title that look pleasing, if not a bit humorous, Mr. Squishy.

When first reading Mr. Squishy I was a bit underwhelmed by the first ten pages. The story read like a litany of minutia. Small unobtrusive facts of everyday life colliding in stereoscopic wonder to the delight of the author. Wallace seemed to take great joy in his ability to create lists of facts and figures that rivaled the book of Numbers.

If I sound a little sarcastic or disapproving it is only because I was so unprepared for Wallace’s signature writing style. In fact soon found myself wondering if there wasn’t some colossal joke being played at the readers expense that I was unawares and decided to change my attitude and allow the waves of detail to wash over me like numbers on an accountants ledger. The meaning of them was lost to me, but the seer fact of their presence was evidence of the writer’s craft.

Let my reader beware. To explain I need to say something of the story itself and for that there are spoilers.

The story of Mr. Squishy is not new, at least not in its subtext. The setting is a corporate focus group in which a facilitator is leading a group of male volunteers though a session on a product that roughly parallels the Ding Dong. As I said the subtext is not new and the story seems to evolve as a kind of criticism on modernity. Where alienation is acerbated by corporate malaise and the whole world has fallen sway to consumerism and the hypnotic allure of fitting in. In fact Wallace’s bludgeoning of detail upon detail seems to mimic the ennui that the cubicle-ridden employee of the modern corporation must experience on a daily basis as they sort through mountains of statistics and redundant studies of studies that were themselves redundant.

Into this world Wallace injects a single personality, Terry Schmidt. Schmidt is the group facilitator, a “cog” in the machines of industry. A pudgy outsider who has used his brains to get ahead and fit into a world that he seems neither to like or respect; a world whose rules he has meticulously learned mastery over so as to become indispensable. As adept is Terry Schmidt at blending into his environment that at first he is nearly indistinguishable from his surroundings.

But the more I ask myself “what is this short story about?” The more I come to believe that this story is about individuality, or the loss of it., or really the illusion of it. For Schmidt the various members of his focus group are mere statistics, even as Schmidt and his peers are mere statistics for his higher ups. Everyone is a statistic to those outsiders that don’t share in our immediate experience. And for those few that our on the same rung of life that we cling to, there is a certain distance. This in made poignant but the unrequited love that Schmidt has for one of his coworkers, a married woman who has faced sexual harassment in the work place and who is basically oblivious to Schmidt’s existence. In Wallace’s world relationships represent another loss of individual identity, and so Schmidt’s love life is one of masturbatory fantasy and illusions of connection. This furthers the idea that Schmidt is an outsider longing of being “one of the gang.” By that I mean living the proscribed lifestyle of society: successful, married, good-looking, everything that Schmidt seems destine to be denied.

Religion too appears in Wallace’s story, the opiate of the masses that offers freedom in the illusion of spiritual awareness and in reality is nothing more than another road leading to conformity. Nothing is what it seems in Wallace’s world, as it is made apparent that even the purpose of the focus group is to create a rational to dissolve the position of moderator as they provide a catalyst of individuality in the group dynamic.

The only avenue of escape in this otherwise inescapable world of conformity seems to be through violence. Schmidt spend his off hours in a homemade chemistry lab growing biological cultures that his dreams of injecting into the same products he seems to be promoting. An renegade urban daredevil makes an appearance scaling the outside walls of the office building creating a crowd of onlookers who are both captivated by his appearance of individuality and terrified at the possibility that he is a terrorist bent on their destruction.

In the end the fate of the myriad of characters is left uncertain. Wallace provide scant details that would allow us insight into the fate of the mountaineer, Schmidt, or his bosses, though I am left with the feeling that even if Schmidt or the Climber were able to “revolt” against the system, their impact would be mere headline news in a cacophony of headlines and would eventually be drown out by the machine.