David Foster Wallace first entered the literary stage with his first novel, The Broom of the System,  in 1987. He graduated from Amherst college, with degrees in both English and philosophy. since then, he published various novels, essays, and short stories. Such publications include Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Consider the Lobster. Wallace had suffered from depression for most of his adult life, and, after multiple failed treatment attempts, eventually took his own life in 2008.

Good Old Neon is the fifth story in David Foster Wallace’s final anthology, entitled Oblivion. It is a story about an advertising executive. It begins with the sentence, “My whole life I’ve been a fraud,” and leads you down the garden-path of self-doubt and insincerity that plagues this man’s life. He recounts to you tales of being four and convincing his adoptive parents that his adoptive sister broke a fragile piece of china, of becoming a born-again Christian only to find himself trying to prove how devoted he was to the church, of joining a meditation class and being unable to sit still unless other people are likely to be watching and impressed, etc. The closest thing this story has to a ‘present’ would be the descriptions of Neal (the protagonist) going to psychoanalysis, only to be disappointed when he realizes that Dr. Gustafson (the psychoanalyst) is just like everyone else in Neal’s life: willing to only see the part of Neal that he wants them to see. This final disappointment is what drives Neal to finally kill himself. You may think that’s a spoiler, but he reveals that by the second chapter. The whole narrative takes place after Neal has died, and skips back and forth all along his life as he reveals to you, the reader, or you, Neal’s past self, exactly why he felt like such a fraud throughout his life and why he couldn’t have felt any other way.

This story isn’t really about feeling like a fraud, it’s about the inadequacy of human language. Or rather, it’s about how lonely God must feel. Or, it’s about David Wallace’s own insecurities and the amount of regression and self-reference a sufficiently intelligent depressive can undergo. I think it’s about all of these things, in that all of them are about someone who feels he know himself and everyone around him better than anyone knows him. When Neal kills himself, chronologically in the story and in the narrative he’s telling, he reveals the truth of the matter. Everyone feels like a fraud. Everyone feel misunderstood and alone. It’s inherent in life, to live an inner life more complicated than the person other people think you are. Good Old Neon is a story about how impossible it is to not feel alone.

So, should you read this story? If anything in the review has taken your imagination, or if you want to see how a person can incorporate mathematical logic into their depressive spiral, then read it. If you ever feel alone sometimes, read it. But mostly, the best illustration of what you’re in for is this excerpt from the story itself:

That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali—it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

Final rating: the very smallest number that can’t be described in under twenty-two syllables out of ten.