Oblivion ad nauseum

RP has dug up yet another Oblivion review. This one's got some biiiiig words in it:

Oblivion might be merely clever work, were it not that the stories are animated by a sense of insatiable anxiety. This is manifested partly in the recessions of parentheses and qualifications and digressions that carry sentences beyond mere paragraph length and breathlessly over the page. It all counts: inclusiveness, the exhaustion of surface detail, is a way of gesturing at depths where some people swim like carnivorous eels.

In "Shame", the American poet Richard Wilbur describes "a cramped little state with no foreign policy" - a phrase suggested several times in Oblivion, where scarcely anyone is ultimately interested in anything but themselves. A man spends his last days patronising his dying psychiatrist to demonstrate a superior grasp of his own narcissism. At one point, art itself exists in despairing evasion of the public realm. Oblivion is a partial view, but in presenting a vast political silence masked by voracious and terrified infantile jabbering, it is both recognisable and convincing.

Whew! That's heavy lifting.

I still think most reviewers (including this fellow) are misreading the title story or at least are baffled into silence by the "aha!" ending. RP knows a coupla guys who can set you straight, however.