Oblivion

In "The Surfing Channel," a popular sculptor works in the medium of human excrement. Elsewhere, we encounter an ad agency manipulating public hunger for a cholesterol-laden product ("Mr. Squishy"), a possibly suicidal yuppie devoted to obsessive analysis of his own "fraudulence" ("Good Old Neon"), and the story (told in conversations overheard during a business flight) of an "omniscient child" born in a Third World rain forest and commercially exploited by his fellow villagers ("Another Pioneer"). In a blistering vignette he describes in charged prose the accidental severe burning of a toddler and his parents' panicked efforts to save his life ("Incarnations of Burned Children") In "The Soul is Not a Smithy," a lonely father sorrowfully recalls a violent episode at his son's elementary school that the distracted boy survived almost without noticing it: "Oblivion" is the narrative of a 40-ish husband whose wife objects to his nonexistent snoring, leading him to an Orwellian Sleep Clinic, and to question everything he thinks he knows about himself.