In the Christmas season, one might be forgiven for suspecting a wily piece of comedy on the part of David Foster Wallace's publishers. For, on the face of it, a book of short stories "by the author of Infinite Jest", that least short of recent novels, sounds an unlikely proposition. But Girl with Curious Hair is real enough; first published in America in 1989, it appears here in response to Infinite Jest's popularity - after the fashion of American authors' early works - and proves to offer much insight into the roots of Wallace's satiric concerns. Given the order of the books' British publication, it is hard to avoid seeing the earlier work as a palette from which Wallace drew to create the larger vision of his 1996 novel, although the effects of this are not unequivocally to his benefit.

One of Wallace's talents as a consumer-age humorist is his facility with narrative defamiliarization. Even in this early collection, he is particularly adept at angling his stories from unexpected points of view; after having navigated through the parodic voices Wallace creates, a reader approaches the everyday events and objects of which they speak with a feeling of rediscovery - aptly enough for a writer so concerned with the effects of electronic media on the perceptions. The collection's title-story, for example, offers a convincingly perverse narrator, and emerges as the most accomplished piece in the book. In the seven years since the first appearance of these stories, it has become a tiresome staple of so-called "Generation X" writing to feature narrators fashioned from dis-affection, self-pity and grunge, to the point where even Douglas Coupland reads like a send-up. Wallace's "Girl with Curious Hair" neatly sidesteps such traps by offering its observations on youth culture in the baroque tones of Sick Puppy, a far-right Republican slumming it with a group of punks: The manner in which the little melodies were linked was arranged by Keith Jarrett's sub- conscious, stated Cheese, thus his concerts were linear, Keith Jarrett's piano performance was a line instead of a composed and round circle. The line was like a little life story of the Negro's special experiences and feelings. I informed Cheese that I did not know that Negroes had subconsciousness but enjoyed the sound of the music a great deal, and Cheese frowned.

The only recent work to which the story is comparable is Bret Easton Ellis's overrated slasher comedy, American Psycho, and "Girl with Curious Hair" has the better of the comparison by the simple expedient of being genuinely funny. Wallace's sadistic ingenu, by the very sharpness of his portrayal, manages to point up the dangerous overlap between fashionable nihilism and patrician decadence.

One strength of the comic short story is that it can work like a performed sketch or routine; a set-piece or comic motif can be taken to its natural conclusion, without the larger structural demands of a long novel. Infinite Jest's shortcoming (for want of a better word) is that its often hilarious set pieces don't add up. The early stories are not burdened by this obligation, and can sound all the more sprightly for it. Aside from the title-story, "My Appearance" anticipates many of the monster novel's treatments of characters obsessed with their real and virtual images. A television actress is signed up to appear on the David Letterman chat show, only to find herself - in a sick parody of Erving Goffman - taking direction through a hidden earpiece, in order to sound more "spontaneous": "Let's be honest", I said. The audience was quiet, "I just had a very traumatic birthday, and I've been shedding illusions right and left. You're now looking at a woman with no illusions, David."

Letterman seemed to perk up at this. He cleared his throat. My earplug hissed a direction never to use the word "illusions".

It is when depicting the pathology of self-consciousness that Wallace truly sounds in his element; indeed, it is hard to think of another contemporary American who can sound disturbing on the subject.

There are those who write blithely, even gleefully, of the essentially "fictive" and in-expressible nature of all human communication, whether in novels or in daily life - though it is hard to imagine how such characters might fare on a date. Wallace is not of this order; he is not a strict anti-realist; rather, he dramatizes characters' anxieties about how much reality they have available to them any more. He is rare among tricksy novelists in that he does not banish emotional resonance and pain from his field of vision (although nothing in his work is as genuinely poignant as the end of Pynchon's magisterial Mason & Dixon). Even so, the last story in Girl with Curious Hair, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way", taking up a third of the book's 373 pages, points more ominously to the wilful prolixity of Infinite Jest. Taking its cue explicitly from John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, the story sends up some familiar meta-fictional games, but finishes by colluding with them; for instance, it relies on the technique of serial interruption, which Sterne employs in the "King of Bohemia" episode of Tristram Shandy, and which isn't that funny to begin with. Wallace offers some sharp jokes at the expense of post-modernism, but isn't far enough from his object for it to sound wholly comfortable: . . . she actually went around calling herself a post-modernist. No matter where you are, you Don't Do This. By convention it's seen as pompous and dumb. She made a big deal of flouting convention, but there was little to love about her convention-flouting . . . .

When he hits home, Wallace is simply too talented a writer to need to swim with these stylistic sharks. There is enough in Girl with Curious Hair and the recent work to suggest that he could become a great satirist of the new technologies; however, the finite jests in these stories also lend weight to the argument that, as in so many other areas of life, being short can have its benefits.

David Foster Wallace
GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR
373pp. Abacus. Paperback, £6.99.
0 349 11102 2

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