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Nothing Ever Happens: “Mister Squishy” and the Year of the Sentence Diagram | Los Angeles Review of Books

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As a nonprofit publication, we depend on readers like you to keep us free. Through December 31, all donations will be matched up to $100,000. GIVE TO LARB TODAY. FOR THE PAST YEAR, I’ve been diagramming a 900-word sentence from David Foster Wallace’s short story “Mister Squishy,” the opener of his perplexing collection Oblivion (2004). James Wood called this story “fundamentally unreadable,” and on a purely linguistic level, it’s easy to see why—every single phrase is crammed with unnecessarily added words. A few clauses chosen at random: “The only way for an observer to detect anything unusual or out of the ordinary”; “Terry would soon be getting out of their hair and leaving them to perpend and converse in private amongst themselves”; “squeezing the absolute maximum productivity and health and self-actuation out of every last vanishing second.” These extra words feel like impediments to our understanding, but creating momentary linguistic impediments is kind of the entire point. Wall

Nothing Ever Happens: “Mister Squishy” and the Year of the Sentence Diagram Hannah Smart writes about her attempt to diagram a 900-word sentence in David Foster Wallace’s “Mister Squishy,” and what the efforts taught her about human inertia and meaningless language. By Hannah Smart November 15, 2025 Fiction Literary Criticism Oblivion by David Foster Wallace . Little, Brown, and Co , 2004. 336 pages. Buy on Bookshop.org Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspec

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