Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

I think that a lot of people who have written reviews of this book have missed its point. For example, one person said, "The book is full of random stories, some good, some not so good" but these are not random stories at all. Another said, "Wallace fancies himself the ultimate postmodern author" but has obviously completely missed the point of the book.

This book is a parody (or at least an examination) of post-modernism rather than a post-modern book. If you have read DFW's essays, "E Unibus Pluram", or "Greatly Exaggerated" in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, you will know that DFW is at once repulsed and fascinated by the movement, and although he could be described as post-modern, he is also laughing at it, and wondering about its implications for society.

Brief Interviews is about how neurotic our post-modern society has become, with our obsessive self-examination and ironic distancing of ourselves from everything; and how ridiculous we are for knowing we are doing the wrong thing and doing it anyway, as in "The Depressed Person" and the Hideous Men who know that they are hideous but think that by acknowledging their hideousness it will be somehow less wrong. The Depressed Person's constant telephoning of her friends to ask them if they like her is very similar to DFW's musings on writers wondering if readers will like their books in "Octet", where he writes a final piece explaining everything that he was trying to accomplish in the previous pieces, showing how ridiculous the interjections of authors have become, and why its wrong to always be worrying about what people are thinking of you.

The reviewers who are treating this as a collection of independant short stories are, I believe, missing his point. These are all basically the same story with the same point told in different ways. Right from page one where everyone is worrying if the other people like them, through to the depressed person calling her friends to find out if they like her to DFW's musings about whether reader's will like his fiction, you are being exposed to the same ideas over and over. If you want to enjoy and understand this book, you will have ask yourself a lot of questions and compare everything he says to what he has said before. It's a very funny, thought-provoking book and deserves a very careful reading.

A "brief" history of my relationship with David Foster Wallace's oeuvre is necessary, before I discuss the book in question:

I devoured "The Broom of the System", finding its characters, situations, and storytelling unique and enthralling. Although I was upset by it's ending (or lack thereof), I assumed it would be a good warm-up for "Infinite Jest". Wrong! So far, I've made two passes at that behemoth tome. The second time I even made it to page 200 before stopping in frustration. So when approaching "Brief Interviews", I was hoping for more "Broom" than "Jest". Wrong!

In reading "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" one notices the extent that Wallace fancies himself the ultimate postmodern author. If you were to describe to me the style he uses here, I'd have to say: "Wow, what a neat idea! Challenge and frustrate the reader with unreadable prose, paragraphs that go on for pages and pages without a break, and endless footnotes that go on in infinite detail about the same mundane topic discussed in the body of the text! Genius!"

That's all well and good in theory, but it's a bitch to read. In this book Wallace uses his vast vocabulary in such a way that you'd think it would disappear if not exercised constantly. He even goes so far as to make up new words to try out. In one piece here he twice uses the word 'weeest', not because it is a more precise adjective than 'wee' (as in "...hours of the morning") but because its three-consecutive E's make it look exotic. It's style winning out over substance. And those paragraphs! They're endless. Try holding your breath for five minutes, and you'll know what it's like wading through a DFW paragraph. I asphyxiated on more than one occasion. Especially when those marathon paragraphs were made up of but a single sentence. As for the footnotes, sometimes they added substance to the piece, but more often than not they were merely distracting. One piece in particular actually had more text in the footnotes than in the main body. I was flipping back and forth like a madman trying to figure out what I was supposed to read next.

But the biggest peeve I had was his insistence on leaving the reader hanging. There are no payoffs here. The pieces don't end; they just stop. Sometimes I thought they could have gone on interminably, but instead Wallace decided to quit at some random point. After wading through twenty or so pages of philosophical ramblings and long-winded discussions, a punchline would have helped make me look forward to the next piece. As it is, I didn't.

I must say, though, that I wish I had Wallace's talent. That's not to say that I would use it the same way he does but it would be nice to have it there when I needed it. He seems to be constantly involved in a game of showing it off. His style is self indulgent to the nth degree. "Let's see how cool I can be," he seems to be saying. "Let's see how far post-modernism can stretch." The odd thing is that Wallace is willing to admit to this fault in an interesting way. Witness the first line in the last sub-chapter of the piece titled 'Octet': "You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer." He puts this (ironic) hindrance on the reader's shoulder. But as the piece moves along, it becomes apparent that he's constructing a meta-fictional rebuke of the sub-chapters that appeared before this one. He rips their intentions and their techniques to shreds. Ad infinitum. It's a great bit of self-referential (dare I say) theatre; the post-modern writer attacking his own post-modernism, in a hyper-post-modern way. It's enough to make the reader's head spin. Mine did.

There are a couple of other pieces here that really hooked me. "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" is Wallace at his most fun. Using contemporary cultural objects as a new language, punning mercilessly (e.g. a line describing University of Southern California cheerleaders as "attendants at the Saturday temple of the padded gods Ra & Sisboomba" had me chuckling but good), and coining modern day epigrams such as "The Medium would handle the Message's PR", he tells a convoluted tale about modern narcissism. Although the joke runs out of steam halfway through, it's still quite a strong piece. The opening piece, "A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life" clearly shows Wallace can be a genius when he focuses his gifts. And the title pieces, a quartet interspersed throughout the book, embodies all the problems I've detailed above. But they are still quite powerful in their depiction of modern man's ugliness (or rather 'hideousness').

I admit that there were some pieces here that I couldn't finish, either out of frustration or ignorance. That's probably more my fault than Dave's. Still, he could have helped me out a bit. But he never did. So even though I admired his talents, I didn't like his book.

I loved much of Infinite Jest and his essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing, but he always had tics which threatened to ruin his work and here they are given free rein. It's all here: the trivializing long-windedness, the meaning-denying vocabulary, the distracting footnotes, the reflexive experimentation, the fetishization of the grotesque, the general sense of droning and contempt for the reader.

Lets just say that the first time I attempted to read one of David Foster-Wallace's books I was 16, and it turned out that "Infinite Jest" was not the best one for me to start with. I got through about 20 pages when I finally admitted to myself that I was in over my head and could not understand a thing. Well, about 7 years later in an airport I was rummaging through a book store and stumbled upon "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men". Which in turn led to a second try at "Infinite Jest" (still havent finished it yet). Now to the point, this guy can write like no other. His writing style is sort of a stream-of-consciousness meets the mind of a Gen X intellectual. He is witty, serious, descriptive, emotional, over-emotional and bizarre. It makes for such an interesting read. However, it is obvious that his books are not for everyone. One must have a very open mind and a definite appreciation for the creative. I would not recommend this book to a non-artistic type.

Writing a review for a short story collection is always difficult. No matter what, the work is going to be uneven, if all of the writing fit a uniform standard, it would be boring. Postmodernist du jour David Foster Wallace's second short-story collection, "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" displays his broad intelligence and skill, at times leaving the reader behind. Sometimes I think I like Wallace because I know he's smarter than I am, and sometimes this quality infuriates me but either way, this book contains some real golden moments. The central theme of the stories is anxious obsession. From the very first story, in which every character is doing something so that someone else will like them, to the end when a twin focuses on his reflection while getting his hair cut, almost every single story is about an almost obsessive-compulsive attention to one's own actions. In this context, then, certain stories seem misplaced within this collection, for example the hilarious Datem Centurio. This obsessivenes usually works to hilarious and profound effect, although sometimes obsessive attention to detail grown tiresome, like in "The Depressed Person". Anyone reading this collection will also be bowled over by the many ways in which Wallace plays with (and border line destroys) form. These stories allow him to push his vehicles of story telling even further than Broom of the System or Infinite Jest. One minute you're in dialogue form, the next you're reading an outline for the second half of a story, or soaring in rhapsodicly poetic prose about swimming or taking a pop quiz on postmodern identity. Of the pieces contained within, the strongest are probbly "Octet", "On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand" (it may seem tiresome, but the twist at the end is well worth it), "Forever Overhead" and the four "Brief Interviews". If you have half a mind for postmodernity, and are willing to seriously invest yorself in plowing through some amazingliterary gymnastics, check this one out.