Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

"Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" is the sort of collection that comes out only after an author has already achieved a reasonable amount of fame and success. It is a book where an author who has received critical praise for previous works can sell a book primarily on the value of his name, not necessarily on the quality of its contents. This isn't meant to imply this book is of no value or is even a bad book. In this reader's opinion, a good 70% of the stories in this work are worthy of publication. It is the other 30% or so that I question whether or not would be deemed deserving of publication if they didn't have David Foster Wallace's name attributed to them as the author.

The stories dealing with the self-absorption and egocentrism of our current therapy & self-help-filled age are both hilarious and frightening. In "The Depressed Person" a woman gets so wrapped up in her own depression that she actually looks at a friend's bout with cancer as a benefit, assuming that her friend, now free from the burdens of having to work, has little better to do with the last months of her life than listen to the sob stories of the title character. Another story concerns a woman so worried about her own sexual ability that she actually is relieved to find out her husband is a porn addict, thinking it means her own fears of sexual inadequacy are unfounded. Sometimes, though, the jokes die out long before the story ends. Towards the end of the book there is a story about a father filled with resentment towards his son, due to the fact that having the son around caused the father to have to share the attention and affection of his wife. What starts off as a funny tale of selfishness and jealousy soon begins to resemble one of those bad "Saturday Night Live" sketches where the same "funny the first time you heard it" joke gets repeated over and over again ad nauseam. . The title pieces, the "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men", which are interspersed throughout the book, are the collections strongest. They provide an insightful look at misogyny and the distorted logic used by many men to justify their poor treatment and attitude towards women. Two men in these interviews, while acknowledging the rape is always undeserving, still try to argue that is can build character in the victim. One man rationalizes his bizarre and deviant sexual behavior by arguing that he never heavily pressures any woman to participate. One man brags to another how he was able to use a woman's fragile emotional state as a tool in his sexual conquest of her. I have to tip my hat to Wallace, he had me absolutely in stitches with the "Brief Interview" about a young man who goes insane after contemplating the drastic universal implications of his sexual fantasy (a fantasy involving the temporary stoppage of time, a la Samantha from "Bewitched").

As a reader, I can deal with, and even enjoy some of Wallace's eccentricities (his constant, but almost always entertaining footnotes, his concluding one story with a plot outline for the remainder of the story instead of the ending itself). At times, though, you almost want Wallace's IQ to drop a few points, because he can occasionally get too clever for his own good. For the life of me, I couldn't tell you what the stories "Church Not Made with Hands" or "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" are supposed to be about. I am willing to accept the possibility these stories were simply over my head, however, Wallace would be wise to realize that the quality of a story does not increase in direct proportion to how few people understand it. There is more than enough good stuff in this book to make it worth recommending, but I wouldn't worry too much about reading it all the way through. The few stories that don't seem promising at the outset don't get any better as they go on.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a collection of modernist writings that never gets to the point of telling an interesting story or making a meaningful literary allusion. There is not a real character or incident anywhere in this flash fiction exercise masquerading as a novel. David Foster Wallace even dickers with the pagination style, putting the odd-numbered pages on the left and starting the book with page 0 on the right. Perhaps he merely did it to give the publisher's production staff agita, or perhaps he wanted to get the reader to think, "Oh my, what clever thing will the author do next?" It might have worked if the author had been genuinely clever rather than trying hard to be.

Beyond the mild convolution of pagination, irritating tone and repetitious subject matter, the biggest problem with the book is the constant changing of narrative style. There are times when changing the narrative style dramatically in the same book is quite effective. Take Ulysses, a book Wallace appears to be mimicking self-consciously in places [183]. James Joyce's Ulysses includes all kinds of narrative pyrotechnics, from fairly standard, though image-laden, third person, to a play, to an internal monologue lasting dozens of pages. In the case of James Joyce, he constructed a Dublin and a cast of unforgettable characters to parallel the Greek story through the mazes of narrative style change. In the case of David Foster Wallace, his narrative changes obscure the characters and the situations they find themselves in. The narration jumps from third person, to second person, to first person answers to unstated interview questions, to a more standard first person, and back to third person. Since Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a collection of short stories, the shifting of narrative styles only serves to reinforce how unconnected the pieces of fiction are.

The "Adult World" stories [161] deal with a young woman's sexual obsessions and fears, and how they force her to seek out a former lover. When Wallace uses a female narrator in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, he writes the story either in the third person, in a "phony third" person ("The Depressed Person" [37]), or uses a man to tell what is supposed to be a woman's story (the last "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" piece [287], which reads more like a guy's rape fantasy). The second "Adult World" story is presented as if it was a set of author notes on writing the second "Adult World" story, instead of actually telling the story itself. Wallace's consistent use of a "removed narrator" when dealing with a female narrator reinforces the writer's distance from women; it is as if he cannot let a woman narrator use the pronoun "I."

Parts of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men satirize psychobabble, most notably in "The Depressed Person" [37]. While the piece is written in the third person as therapist's notes, the actual narrator appears to be the depressed young woman herself. The kind of detail included in the piece, particularly in the footnotes, is hardly type a therapist would note:

...And yet the depressed person confessed to the therapist that she nevertheless still felt...that her chronic emotional pain and isolation and inability to reach out forced her to spend $1,080 a month to purchase what was in many respects a kind of fantasy-friend who could fulfill her childishly narcissistic fantasies of getting her own emotional needs met by another without having to reciprocally meet to empathize with or even consider the other's own emotional needs...

While this was an "almost-clever" narrative device, this became very tiresome after more than a few pages because it was extremely repetitious and self-pitying.

In most novels or collections of stories, the narrative choices the author makes enhance the characterizations and mood. This should be as true of a collection of short stories as of a single novel. But the narrative style shifting did not serve to tell any of the stories well in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Most of these vignettes were just preciously hilarious - piercing but entertaining views of the human condition.

I found a few of them a little tedious: they were like Dennis Miller meets Faulkner. But maybe I'm just not patient enough.

Also, if you're a man-hater, this is a must have for your collection! ;)

Writers can be divided into two major types: poets and scientists. If poet-writers are your thing -guys like Henry Miller, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or J.D. Salinger- stay away from this book. Wallace is a mad scientist, a manipulator of storytelling's double helix. Instead of going for the heart he opts for the brain. Some authors paint picures; this guy makes Rubik's cubes. He out-Pynchons Pynchon.

In this collection of short stories Wallace attempts to expand definitions with his characteristic ultra-weirdness, and I think to an extent he succeeds. Although some of them fizzle, the length is never such that you feel let down, and the successes encountered along the way -most particularly his "Hideous Men" and "The Depressed Person"- are well worth the less than fruitful moments. The brevity of the work may attract readers away from his mind-boggling "Infinte Jest," but I'd be lying if I told you that this book was better. I'd recommend "Infinite Jest" over this one any day, but if you haven't the time to wade through such a vast landscape this will give you at least a hint of the strange and funny mind at work.

I think any reader with smarts and a good sense of humor will find this book problematic and enjoyable BECAUSE it's problematic. If you like to laugh and enjoy a little masochism in your reading experience, pick it up.

il punto è : ci fidiamo della capacità di scrittura di fronte ad ogni sgradevolezza che vogliamo scrivere? a volta la seconda prevale sulla prima, e a volte con esiti piuttosto banali (vedi il racconto dell'uomo che usa il proprio moncherino - la sua "dote" - per conquistare le donne, un po' troppo citato, anche nella prefazione italiana...). Ma dove la scrittura diventa respiro affannoso e incredula limitatezza nel comprendere (vedi il dittico "Mondo adulto")allora gli esiti sembrano davvero irresistibili. Dalle parole della donna il cui marito esce ogni notte per "seguire l'andamento dello yen" entriamo direttamente nel suo stomaco, nei suoi occhi semiaddormentati, nella gravosa convivenza con una educazione buona solo ad imbolsire. In questo racconto, e nelle altre storie brevi che non puntano al pugno allo stomaco, Wallace fa un uso straordinario della scrittura, suono odore e colore al tempo stesso. per questo si, vale la pena di intervistare questi poveri schifosi...