[In the following review of Girl with Curious Hair, novelist Bell places Wallace in the context of "metafictionists" like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon in order to discuss how Wallace seeks to differentiate himself from that label.]

The appearance of his immensely long first novel, The Broom of the System, caused David Foster Wallace to be lumped in with "metafictionists" such as Barth, Coover, Pynchon & Co. Evidently Wallace is not altogether pleased with this categorization, and in his new and also sizeable first collection of stories he takes some pains to correct it. The volume ends with what by virtue of its length might be called a novella, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," which is simultaneously a parody of, homage to, and rebellion against John Barth's story, "Lost in the Funhouse." The Barth story, which constantly interrupts its progress to comment explicitly on its own techniques, is regarded by Wallace as a sort of metafictional manifesto, and here he uses somewhat similar devices to write a rather different manifesto of his own.

"Westward" is crammed with a lot of rather superfluous plot material—superfluous since the plot doesn't actually lead anywhere much and isn't supposed to. Appropriately enough, the story begins inside "The East Chesapeake Tradeschool Writing Program," directed by a Professor Ambrose (Barth himself in thin disguise). Here D. L. Eberhardt, a self-declared "postmodernist" who writes, for instance, a 20-page-long poem consisting of nothing but punctuation and whose "pheromones are attractive only to bacteria," has through the stratagem of a false pregnancy contrived to get married to Mark Nechtr ("one of those late-adolescent chosen who radiate the kind of careless health so complete it's sickening"), another grad-student fiction writer of a more realist persuasion, who is, however, completely blocked. This mismatch provides occasion for a certain amount of sniping about fictional technique, but the elaboration does not stop there.

One of the great many peculiarities of D. L.'s background is that she is a former child actor in McDonald's commercials produced by adman and franchise potentate J. D. Steelritter. Steelritter is now on the point of launching, in partnership with Ambrose, a new chain of homogenized discotheques to be called "Funhouses," after the ur-Funhouse of the Barth story (here supposed to have been written by Ambrose). Steelritter is opening the first Funhouse in his "hometown," a crossroads amid the cornfields called Collision, Illinois, and to add to the fanfare he is bringing all the former child actors back there for a humongous reunion. Thus Mark and D. L. find themselves (very eventually) passengers en route from the airport to Collision along with Steelritter and two other McDonald's "alumni," Tom Sternberg and Magda Ambrose-Gatz, in a homemade car built and driven by Steelritter's son DeHaven, who is decked out in the full regalia of his official role as Ronald McDonald.

At this point, with all the ingredients for a typical metafictional circus in place, the plot thickens to a sort of jelly, and begins to be constantly broken up by "Blatant and Intrusive Interruptions," labeled as such. Like the interruptions in the original "Lost in the Funhouse," though much longer, wilder and hairier, these are commentaries on fictional technique. Their content is thematically interlaced with the story's action, which has now been reduced to conversation amongst the people stuck in the car, which with increasing obstinance refuses to reach its destination. The story has much to say about various relationships between art, life, and advertising, but what it finally says about metafiction (through the head of Mark Nechtr) is that "itself is its only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love …" Nechtr, however, "desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you to the heart … The stuff would probably use metafiction as a bright smiling disguise …"

If Wallace has assumed the mission of seizing the methods of metafiction while rejecting its self-reflexive ends, the question becomes, can he do it? And the answer is, not always. "Westward" itself does not quite manage to escape the toils of its own cleverness, but there are nine more stories in the book. In several of them ("John Billy," "Here and There," "Say Never," "Everything Is Green"), Wallace overindulges in the merely ingenious. In several others, however, he meets his own standards in a quite impressive way.

Of the successes the simplest is "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR," a close-up account of one man attempting to manage another's heart attack in the depths of an empty parking garage. The most moving may be "Little Expressionless Animals," a sort of psychodrama mostly set on the stage of "Jeopardy." The most frightening is the title story, which depicts the perverse mesalliance between a gang of unusually violent punk rockers and a psychotic Young Republican. The most improbable is an affectionate portrait of Lyndon Johnson, seen through the eyes of a fictional aide.

Promiscuous mingling of real-life celebrities with fictional characters, fantastically absurd situations, puns and other self-referential gestures—the standard metafictional maneuvers are present everywhere. Even when he's just fooling around, Wallace is a good deal funnier than the average metafictionist, so some of the stories are worth reading for laughs alone. But the best of them do what he promises for them: they go beyond talking about only themselves to say something serious and sincere about the world that the rest of us have to live in.