"Mister Squishy," by David Foster Wallace, at first under the name Elizabeth Klemm (!) and then under his usual name
First appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly, Issue No. 5, Very Late Summer, 2000; collected in Oblivion: Stories (Little, Brown and Company, 2004)
63 pages, perhaps 14,000 words?---I really have no idea, I'm just going off intuition, it feels wordy
I like this one, though it's not a favorite of mine. Like Infinite Jest, it sets up elaborate, tantalizing, catastrophic possibilities that are never realized onscreen. I'm on record as never having quite grokked Infinite Jest, but this story works better for me, possibly just because I read it as a maturer and more skilled reader.
Like a lot of male Wallace characters, Schmidt has painful and debilitating issues with women, and his elaborate murder scheme is only slightly more unusual, though here it holds up a sort of pathetic mirror to the scheming of the higher-ups; it seems quite possible he'll be too weak-willed to go through with his little felonies, or will fail spectacularly. Whatever the monstrosity in his soul, he's a victim of the system. (I hesitate even to tag this "villain protagonists"---ha.) (One is certainly reminded of Wallace contemplating buying a gun to use on his ex, only to be talked out of it by a friend.)
This 2012 blog post gives a very thoughtful interpretation that begins: "The story is about the deception, manipulation, and unwavering self-interest that underlies the operation of modern corporations, particularly those whose success is highly dependent on the public's perception of the company and its products." It ends: "[T]he marketers put on a carefully designed show and the consumers are drawn to it inexorably, their awareness of their situation never reaching more than superficial levels, though many take satisfaction in their delusions of knowledge."
I would quote Blake Butler's HTMLGiant post too but I didn't understand it. Sorry, Butler! Maybe my brains are inadequate.
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