Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Contained long glimpses of brilliance. There were a few pieces I simply did not get. Others were scary accurate. Overall, one more experience of the magic that is his writing. I'll have to decide whether to read future DFW on my phone's Kindle app. Hard to maneuver the (essential) footnotes.

While reading a recent review of DFW's latest collection of fiction, I was reminded of a song by Van Morrison, "Professional Jealousy," and the refrain: "Professional jealousy makes others crazy/ They think you've got something that they don't have/ What they don't understand is it's not that easy/ To cover the miles and be where you are." Wallace, like Van Morrison, has improved with age (and was brilliant to begin with), and "Brief Lives" demonstrates his multitudinous gifts better than any single book he's published to date. He rivals Dostoevsky when it comes to dramatic monologues. There isn't a funnier, or more poignant, father/son story than "On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand, the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father Begs a Boon" -- with the exception, perhaps, of Saul Bellow's "Sieze The Day." And no one satirizes better our toxic culture and obsession with mental health (see "The Depressed Person")-- with the exception perhaps of Don Delillo's "White Noise." Wallace writes circles around overhyped wordsmiths, like Pynchon and Tom Wolfe. And he does justice to his teachers by outshining Barth, et al., in his postmodern pieces. There's not a bummer in the collection, regardless of what the critics say. Kudos, Mr. Wallace! Like Van Morrison, you're building a consistently beautiful body of work. What's next?

A story collection of insecurities written in an authentic voice. A fascinating glimpse into the justifications and rationalizations of confused souls. While exploring some of the pitfalls inherent in the logic of mortals, the author guides the reader into discovering unexpected truths about the human condition. Some stories will have you trembling with laughter, others will force you to re-evaluate romantic ideals, all will entertain you.

I read a collection of Wallace's essays called "Consider the Lobster" that I found provocative and insightful. His descriptions of people and places were saturated with wonderful rich details. Together the effect of Wallace's intellect and his writing skill was simply electric. With regard to Hideous Men, his insight and his writing skill has not diminished, but his subject matter is deprived and you guessed it, hideous. I guess I was ill prepared for how low he could go. A couple of the short stories were searing with surprise twists and turns. The rest were an exercise in self indulgent ranting. Remembering his suicide, I couldn't help but wonder if this was a window to the soul of a man truly unhinged.

Before I read this book, I thought that post-modernism and metafiction was for the most part just novelty. But DFW uses post-modern and metafictional tricks to enhance his characters and comment on common human experiences, rather than to hide the story from the reader with gimmickry and flash.
Some may fault DFW for being too personal at times and too abstract at others, but these qualities allow the stories in Brief Interviews to achieve a kind of self-executing immursion that allows the reader to get more out of each one. By lifting the vail of "The Author", he is less self-concious than authors of more traditional fiction, not more so. If the purpose of storytelling is to tell the truth through fiction, then this collection hits the nail on the head. Read this book. Even if it isn't doesn't suit your taste, I guarantee you won't forget it.

Now, let me get this completely clear! I am not the biggest David Foster Wallace fan, but for some reason I was tricked into reading this by an ex-girlfriend of mine who thinks of herself as a propogandist. No, she didn't put a elequent spin on it to convince me that to give in would be ok, no she put another dust jacket on it! So, here I was expecting Buddhist Philosophy, and here I am reading all of these little stories about men. Interviews in fact. And as much as I would like to say that I was charmed by the interesting figures within the book, I kept thinking about how they matched up too easily to the cliches that I see running around, or overhear on the subway. Now, I had to go and read his other stuff, and found after all of those thousands of pages, an odd emptied feeling. I felt as though I had been emptied out, but not in a Buddhist way! More like the feeling that there is a person on the other side of the text with a head and not a heart. My ex-girlfriend made me feel the same way: you have to beware of people who overcompensate in their prose, they turn out to be monsters. Like a local chirpy newscaster who turned out to be a child-abuser. Wallace has seemed to me just like the namesakes of the book, trying tp show off his ability through a fancy prose style, but he ends up ultimately as empty as the people he is portraying. It is a shame that we praise mediocrity now, that we have no literary heros anymore. I would liek to be able to give in to this prattle, but something tells me that my time would be better spent searching.

i may very well be his biggest fan, but i did not enjoy this book. it felt sad to me, like he wasn't enjoying himself when he wrote it. what i like about his writing is the "look ma no hands" quality, the way it feels like, when he's at his best, that as i'm reading my hair is blowing back from my grinning face and i'm hanging on for my very life. i love that, and i don't mind one bit if i have to use a dictionary to get through his writing. without dfw, "fantod" would not be a household word aroud here. but i don't get that from this collection. it feels sad to me, like he caved from all the criticism of his style, and simply did not enjoy writing it. one exception, though, that feels right: B.I. #20 12-96. on this one, he hit it. i read it three times in a row. i've thought about it countless times. where the rest of the collection is unsettling, this one disturbs. this one is the joel-peter witkin of short stories. this one has everything. i wouldn't recommend this one as the initiation into the world of dfw, but if you're a fan of his i'd say you should have it. maybe wait for it to show up at a used bookstore, though. and let's hope he can resist the temptation to listen to his critics, people who seem to object to the idea that a reader may have to do a little work in order to enjoy a book.

To this hard-core fan of experimental and modernist fiction, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest was fabulous -- incredible, even. I read it obsessively, down to the notes to the notes to the endnotes, and loved it. I even re-read it! Then I laughed out loud at A Supposedly Fun Thing. And I loved his recent book-length essay on "the usage wars."
So why can't I get through Brief Interviews? I think he just needed an editor. The whole MacArthur grant/critical acclaim/national bestseller thing must have gone to the heads of both Mr. Wallace and his publisher. These "stories" are just boring and annoying. Half should have been junked in the first place, and the other half ripped to shreds before being re-written.

There's no doubt in my mind that DFW is the best fiction writer living in this country. _Brief Interviews_ is astoundingly funny and sad and completely pertinent. Entertainment AND pertinence -- I wish more American writers could fuse the 2 half as masterfully as DFW. _BI_ is structurally amazing, too: nobody else could construct DFW's lengthy sentences and always, consistently, remain crystal clear. So then but only thing I found lacking in this book was about ten more stories.

The pattern here soon becomes familiar. Start with an oddball premise, sometimes shocking, sometimes offbeat, occasionally brilliant. Find a voice, an authentic voice -- perhaps working class, maybe self-obsessed neurotic, occasionally just delightfully kooky. Then, with these admirable ingredients, proceed to beat the reader over the head with this same premise, this same voice, for 30, 40, or 50 pages. While slogging through this, occasionally smiling, sometimes laughing, but mostly drowning, I recalled Jack Kerouac's famous line "you're a genius all the time." Kerouac wasn't and neither was DFW. But what editor had the balls to tell either of them that?

I love this guy. Everything I've read by DFW makes me think: "Man, I wish I wrote that" or "This guy would be great to have dinner with".
But if I did meet him, I'd probably not say anything, knowing that he'd think I was an idiot or something... which is sorta what this book is about. The constant need to project some image of oneself to others for approval, etc. I do it. Everyone does it.
I've never laughed at depression like I have with this book. That deep, dark gonna-blow-my-head-off depression generally isn't a laugh-a-minute subject. But Wallace has it down. Five stars to David. I hope he's writing another really, really long novel to replace INFINITE JEST as my favorite book.

This is my most-lent book.
Nigh-schitzophrenic writing is generously tempered with a gourmet vocabulary, making the deep, jerky ride of his stories extremely readable. DFW presents the writing process as a very deconstructuralized thing with very experimental formats, providing a wholly multifaceted experience.
Perhaps some of the criticisms he's received (An English prof I once knew said, 'He's just a blip on the timeline of literature: a passing phase..') gave rise to the themes of acknowledged pretentiousness in many of the stories.
Hipsters and those fascinated by Americana culture alike will truly enjoy this, if only for the provocative nature of the writing styles, the stories in and of themselves, and themes.
DO read this book. I can't stress it enough.

I can only echo jonvoellestad's excellent review below. This is truly a book for our times, and Wallace is the one contemporary writer who seems to hit the mark with everything he does. He is able to track and elucidate moments in life which we all have but which we've never seen in fiction before.
There are many great stories and vignettes here but the highlight is the outstanding penultimate story (simply called Brief Interviews #20) in which a man narrates his experience of a girl telling the story of how she was raped by a psychotic sex killer. The trick is that Wallace manages to write highly self-consciously, humorously and movingly all at the same time, no easy feat. He takes the best parts of the realist, modernist and postmodernist traditions and combines them into something new and hilariously funny.
In doing so he transcends genre to produce something new and very exciting. The future of fiction is here.

This collection is about two short stories shy of a perfect "10". That said, for anyone that wants to cut their teeth on some DFW before taking the Infinite Jest plunge, I would gladly recommend this compilation. There are numerous gems in here that tease you in every which way. Here are the great (short) examples of DFW's work: format bending, expectation jerking, emotion shredding -- all of it.

I don't generally read fiction. I prefer biographies, autobiographies, and occasionally I'll wade into philosophies...but I discovered Mr. Wallace when he wrote an hilarious article about the Illinois State Fair in Harper's Magazine..several years ago... This writer simply put is a genius...a modern day Marcel Proust...do not expect to travel traditional avenues while reading his work..but certainly be ready to question basic precepts that may be holding you up. Hideous is another great work..the nine words after the third date is my favorite..simply because I enjoy laughter..but the entire book is excellent...wish I would have had him when I went to Illinois State U. 30 years ago..instead of becoming a school teacher I may have become a carney.

The author has an uncanny ability to reach down into the nether regions of your mind and pull out those gloriously wicked thoughts that ferment there, submerged by the everyday flood of routines and cultural fluff. He does so in a way that can be both hilarious and unsettling. I don't read much 'post-modern' literature, and in spite, or perhaps because, of that I did not find the style overly showy or unappealing (a few stories did drag towards the end). Any excesses of Wallace's maniacal genius are more than compensated for by the the book's overall brilliance. To this reviewer, a great read.

In this collection of short stories, David Foster Wallace displays a deep understanding of the dark side of the male psyche. He also has fun with words and structure and tries out some unusual story ideas, but at the core of the book are the "interviews with hideous men" that provide the title.
My personal favourites were Adult World (I) and (II), a two part exploration of a relationship, and The Devil is a Busy Man. Foster Wallace is *so* good at getting into the (lack of) communication prevalent in all forms of relationships and at exploring what is not being said or even acknowledged.
The collection is patchy - although tastes will differ, for my money The Depressed Person is just plain boring and some other stories drag and/or don't quite work. But when you're exploring this far over the edge sometimes the risks aren't gonna pay off.
This book should be compulsory reading for all women and for all men who wish to better understand themselves and their gender.

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.

One ingredient I would add to the mix amid all of these mixed reviews is Darkness. Not the dystopian darkness of Infinite Jest but a more personal, involutional and really quite terrifying darkness (even despite the humor, which in fact grows so delirious as to become terrifying in itself at times). The characters inhabiting Infinite Jest, however narcissistic and self-destructive, are woven into a fabric; the sickness of Infinite Jest is societal. Here it is personal, agonizing, solipsistic. If you were to take away his brilliant language Wallace's vision in Brief Interviews would be unendurable. But then, only by that brilliant tool could the vision have been so vividly shown.

David Foster Wallace certainly conducts an interesting experiment with this collection of shorts. He has a knack for writing in the present, or capturing a moment that, in many ways, is unprecedented. He portrays the absurdity of contemporary culture in a way that makes the the reader feel close to the oddities and peculiarities. However, Wallace often fails to create characters that are compelling and interesting. When he manages to do so, and he begins gaining momentum, he is often slowed by a less compelling, or tedious short. The stories themselves are often redundant, and what seemed to be a cohesive series of shorts soon becomes a tedious compilation of repetitive stories.

I am a huge fan of DFW's non fiction. His essays are amongst the choicest examples of the modern form. But his fiction I'm not so sure. I keep gearing up for a shot at his mammoth Infinite Jest, but reading these trickles from his stream of consciousness mind puts me off. I can see the talent there, but these come across as flicked off the wrist exercises in craft. Neither particularly stylish nor funny. I think I'll stick to the non fiction.

I really can't explain why, but several different sources agree. On paper this is a pompous and annoying book. The Audiobook, on the other hand (which is read by the author) is engaging, funny, and cool. If you are drawn to David Foster Wallace and have never really gotten into this book, try it on tape. It may well be a whole different experience.

Great book - I highly recommend. Some 'interviews' are hilarious but most are about provoking deeper understanding of things. Some are hard to listen to only because you're turned off at the surface of things but if you let yourself think at a deeper and perhaps more reflexive level then it all becomes worthwhile.

Much of this collection is in the form of soliloquies, one side of supposedly overheard conversations, meticulously observed and in excruciating detail. Many pieces go nowhere. Several are totally unintelligible. One such is Datum Centurio, which is 4.5 pages of babble in the form of mock dictionary entries, with copious meaningless footnotes. I would hate to have been one of his students asked to 'Discuss' this piece! Another is Church Not Made With Hands. I can only describe this as a stream-of-consciousness record of unrelated words and phrases, poetic imagery, bits of business involving unexplored characters, small events and so on which passed through his brain during REM sleep (or a pharmaceutically induced haze?). Pretty in parts, but tedious in the extreme to labour through, especially when unrelieved by less self indulgent offerings elsewhere in the collection.
After reading the whole book it came as no surprise to learn that DFW hung himself in September last year; his insights into narcissism, depression and ... um ... hideous men, are far too sharply observed to be imagined.
I can't shake the feeling that some of the claims he was genius come from the same mindset that makes similar claims about one's work colleagues, but when you ask, 'What makes you say that?' they say, 'He's so smart I can't understand a word he says.' Unintelligibility isn't proof of genius.
My conclusion was that the guy had an uncanny gift for picking up nuance and subtext in speech and behaviour around him, but despite the fact that he appears to have been a polymath, his illness came between him and genius as a writer.
No doubt his idolaters will say I speak as a banal pragmatist, but there it is. Give me Nam Le's collection in The Boat any day.

I'm not a literary genius as clearly some of the author's fans are but, I'm bright enough to know this was really self indulgent and asked a whole lot of the reader without giving much back. I did enjoy some of the interviews that revealed the "hideous men" (and a few women as well). And, I found some of what seemed to be total stream of consciousness to be interesting for a bit. But, the gibberish went on forever, the pages and pages of footnotes were annoying, not funny, and the fact that DW felt absolutely no obligation to gift the readers with any kind of resolve to any of it, ever, is a statement in and of itself. If you put 100 avid readers in a room with this book you would have 18 people smiling with their face buried in the pages, 10 people sound asleep, and 72 others intermittently looking around to see if anyone else was as bewildered and bored as they are. Abstract and uppity isn't necessarily genius.

Supposed to be great. Critics loved it. So original. I thought it was boring and annoying. A collection of short stories about unlikable people, a lot of gibberish that was intentionally unintelligible. Which is fine for a while, but an entire book is too much. I really disliked it. I applaud any attempt to do something completely different, so I give it two stars instead of one, but jabbing knitting needles into my eye sockets would be different too, and I wouldn't like that much either.

Wonderful writing, wonderful stories. It is infuriating, hilarious and authentic. Wallace creates characters whose voices are both believable and unique as well as anecdotes that are creative, diverse and incredibly insightful.

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! ;)

I have to preface this review by saying that I normally do not have a visceral reaction to novels and stories I do not like. As a matter of fact, I have wasted a good chunk of my life reading things that were no good and or not worth reading. That being said, I actually threw this book across the room. I have never read such a self-congratulatory piece in all my life. The smug conceit of the author actually oozes out of every page. The book made me go and reread some Dostoevsky, just so I could feel better about the world and literature.

So I find myself in an unemployment hearing with a judge who finds for me, saying that "7 days out of 7 months isn't enough to fire someone" -- and she's smacking back at Westlaw itself.

(Yeah, three of them were sick days, and yeah, I wasn't explaining my insomnia well and four vacation days aren't really but an awkward thing to put your superior in the position of having to humor your burning since the sick days are up ... but ... creepy guys who are dime-a-dozen copy editors needn't be vouched for!)

I got $3200 for the amount I had claimed (over the phone) until the claim expired, and a "HTH!" from the judge, including having to build a WHOLE CASE around that one finding, to restore if not my job than the hole in my resume with no money coming in which is a lotta lotta fun.

Some of us work!

It's not just a fantasy.

Sad to say, there's no story here; the material, such as it is, never boils over into characters, voiced and tied to narrative arcs. It's a lot of essayistic, Amherst student-gone-ambitious wallowing, which could never engage the hook for a pleasant read a Book Club a team of co-workers could enjoy.

I could've brought in Calvino, but it didn't seem of the moment; I'd read "Girl w/Curious Hair" in the "Voices of the Xiled" anthology from '94, so I knew enough to avoid THAT one; so this was the only one left -- aside from the big one, the medium-sized one, or the book of nonfiction that was available at the time -- so I figured this "acclaimed author" was readable.

Wrong.

I still remember the look in that Copy Editor's eyes when I walked by her cubicle that one time, after she dutifully, good-married-Christian and astute hard-worker that she was, finished it cover-to-cover before anybody had ... this after my Team Coordinator (in a manner polite for people who need to be treated "politlely," lucky me!) explained "We might be reading another book ... "

Yuck.

(I'd read not a page of it; take the name off, and look at the title, because that's what the effect was, the OPPOSITE of what *my* procedure was, bringing the go****n thing into the office to begin with ... )

I don't doubt the Attorney Editor who replaced it with Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998) knew who he WAS (whether she'd read DFW or not) but, sad to say, I didn't disagree with them that it was a sprawling, sloppy, go-nowhere mess that has no intention of other than archly stringing these points-of-view along to awe the reader. Whoop dee doo.

Meantime, I might as well've brought in something from the avant-garde -- thought I'd expect they'd know who Burroughs or Ballard WERE, and, what, am I going to just plop down Harold Jaffe's Straight Razor (Black Ice Books) (1995) as though I was clueless about how it'd go over for a chummy office Book Club? I think not.

Before you think "office politics," think: "that guy in that cubicle."

Before you think: "he got me fired" -- how possible could that be? -- think "I don't need this!" when it came time to it, other circumstances being in place, which they weren't.

And it came to that.

And I didn't blame them for the reception it got.

REMEMBER: The worst isn't bad taste, or something that's guilty of ambition or overreach -- it's when you're dealing with someone whose sense of boundaries is so blurred, you can't even tell what he can't tell.

That was me.

Because of this piece of s*** book.

MORAL: Don't road-test this book with your a**! Nobody has.

It turns out ... nobody HAS!

More blarney from the king of blarney. How does this crap get published? Wait, don't answer. The editors in NY are more puerile than the child who penned this egotistical, mastabatory gibberish. The writing here reminds me of precious artsy undergradute literary magazine twaddle.

It is stunning how many critics, academics, and readers who want to think well of themselves have fallen for this trashy fraud. The man COULD NOT WRITE! His prose is the sort of stuff produced by clever but not very literate undergraduates. The stories are adolescent in design, the ideas are silly, and the whole effect is one of profound boredom.

Wallace's works are intelligance tests: if you can be conned into thinking you should think these are good books, you aren't nearly as bright as you'd like to believe you are. Come on, admit it: you hate this stuff.