RobPalindrome’s Reviews > A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies > Status Update

[1]

'Wallace indicates his admiration for Ballard's work as early as 1991, and specifically in terms of a work that had much in common with The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard's 1990 collection of stories called War Fever included two stories that were also included in the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition: "Notes Towards a Nervous Breakdown" and "The Secret History of World War 3."

[2]

In his review of this collection for the Washington Post on April 28, 1991, Wallace asserts his affinity for Ballard's book, and for these specific pieces shared by The Atrocity Exhibition, for their "formal fun," "Borgesian... involution," and first-person perspective. He also registers his dislike of their "poverty of affect" and tendency not to "give their readers a chance to exercise discernment or insight"

'[T]he structure of Brief Interviews can seem more akin to that of Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition, which resists readerly attempts to connect and order its pieces both in its original 1970 text and in Ballard's marginalia added 20 years later, than to the short story collection from which Brief Interviews most overtly takes its influence: Barth's Lost in the Funhouse.'