David Foster Wallace is a very clever wordsmith. Check that: he’s an über-clever wordsmith who is fully aware of his virtuosity with language, his dense imagery (packed with consumerist references), his intensely skewed wit, and his over-the-top intellectualism. As such, reading him is akin to spending time with a super-bright undergraduate who wants to overwhelm you with his literary pyrotechnics.

And, on one level, it’s hard not to be impressed by Foster Wallace’s cerebral high-wire act. As he proved in his hefty, wildly inventive and very maddening novel, Infinite Jest, he is the heir apparent to Thomas Pynchon when it comes to what many critics have called the “maximalist” or “hysterical realism” school of American fiction. It’s a style of writing which could be best described as “What’s wrong with this picture? ”, in which modern life is portrayed as a moronic inferno — and where Wallace wants to play endlessly with the reader’s head.

Playing with your head is one of the abiding features of Foster Wallace’s collection of stories, Oblivion. Just consider Incarnations of Dead Children — a single paragraph account of a child being horrendously burnt in a kitchen accident. I found myself reading this story while gnawing on one of my knuckles, it had me that unnerved. An eerie, quasidispassionate description of a scalding and its horrendous aftermath, its effect is a bit like being grabbed by the head and forced to watch the worst parental nightmare imaginable. And though, afterwards, I couldn’t help admiring its ferocious stylistic compression, another part of me simply wished I hadn’t been put through the entire experience . . . which, I suspect, was the desired effect.

“If you’ve never wept and want to, have a child,” Foster Wallace writes towards the end of this Let-Me-Distress-You tale. It’s a strangely affecting statement from a writer whose other stories largely sidestep any sort of straightforward human emotion. In The Suffering Channel, Foster Wallace shows off his deeply idiosyncratic brand of humour in a tale about, among other things, a hack on a glossy magazine called Style trying to sell a story about an artist who turns his faecal matter into “exquisite pieces of art”.

In Good Old Neon, he takes on contemporary unhappiness and the cult of therapy, while simultaneously playing tricksy narrative games (the story’s suicidal narrator muses on his high-school classmate, a certain David Wallace).

There are interesting takes on focus groups and Life-as-an-Advertisement buried within the opaque prose of Mr Squishy, just as botched plastic surgery is the jumping-off point for a wildly discursive commentary on the way others see us in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Foster Wallace’s stories all grapple, in part, with the information-overload times that we inhabit. And if you can negotiate the hyper-lush vocabulary, the labyrinthian sentences, the need to go off on three different tangents at any given moment, you might see that his big subject is the way we cannot connect with each other, let alone ourselves. But that’s a damn big “if”.

Douglas Kennedy’s new novel, A Special Relationship, is published in paperback by Arrow (£6.99) on August 4

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