Title says it all, really – this is a book of short stories about hideous, repulsive men. God, some of them are bastards. Men who think about, and sometimes do, hideous, repulsive things. Men who seemingly lack any moral fortitude whatsoever. Men who are not nice men. Spineless, cruel, frequently stupid and absurdly strange men. Often, men whose innermost thoughts and fantasies – rendered here in an confessional or, as hinted by the title, interview style by David Foster Wallace – are actually quite funny, if the depraved, maniacal thoughts and fantasies of loner men are what you (like I) consider funny. Men who feel no remorse for their shameful thoughts; men who are overwhelmed by the scale of their shame. Men who, to borrow a phrase from Stieg Larsson, hate women. Men who hate their fathers, or their sons, or their jobs, or themselves. Hideous men.

David Foster Wallace has always been a hard sell. His writing is dense, if rewarding, a style I tried to parody above (I got the density at least: less so the reward). For all that nonsense, this is a good book of short stories, a useful primer if you’ve heard of Infinite Jest but don’t know if you’ve got the time or desire to commit to it. At just under three hundred pages, Brief Interviews is certainly slimmer than its more famous sibling; yet, in some ways it feels more incomplete, though I suppose Wallace set the bar quite high with Jest.

There is certainly something confessional about Brief Interviews, in how accurately Wallace is able to get inside the heads of terrible people and have them tell you what they’re all about. Wallace knew that the devil was in the details, and he’s very good at recording the minutiae of daily life: the ‘thin cruel hint of very dark Pepsi in paper cups’, the ‘blue clean’ smell and feel of pool water – even, in a memorable passage, an exhaustive description of the sounds and smells of a men’s bathroom. These are the kind of things that you’ve never given any thought to but that you recognise instantly. He”s on the ball like that. Although some of Wallace’s characters are outlandish, implausibly cruel, there’s a careful attention to detail in Brief Interviews that makes everything convincing.

The ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men’ themselves appear four times throughout the collection, written as transcripts of conversations between anonymous men and an interviewer. The interviewer’s questions are omitted, shown on the page only with a ‘Q.’, leaving us to guess what was said and to wonder for ourselves what the hell is making the speaker talk about these things. The interviews are sometimes short, sometimes twenty pages or more, usually about sex. One man describes to a friend how he saw a woman in tears at an airport, and, after pretending to comfort her and listen to how she’s been stood up by her boyfriend, did ‘Well you know what’ with the girl. It was all a ploy – something to brag about. In another, a man with a disfigured arm tells the interviewer how he uses his disability to guilt-trip women into dating him – and then using their disgust of his disability and attitude to inspire yet more guilt, shame, and dependency on the man himself. Lots of the stories are about ‘negging’ (where men deliberately make women feel bad about themselves in order to lower their self-esteem and date them) and, as I say, the behaviour of these men is hideous. With all of the #MeToo news and the scorn poured on Hollywood in the last couple of years, Brief Interviews seems painfully realistic, fascinating because it is so disturbing.

Not all of the stories are so grim. ‘Forever Overhead is addressed to ‘you’ on your thirteenth birthday, where you’ve asked to be taken to the public swimming pool and you’re working up the courage to dive off the big board. It’s startlingly well observed; for Chekhov, the real art of the short story was about finding pathos and emotion in the most ordinary, commonplace moments of our lives. Diving into a pool doesn’t seem like a big deal as an adult, but at thirteen it really do be like that.

Not all of the stories are about men, either. One of the most memorable stories in the collection, ‘The Depressed Person’, hones in on the narcissism and self-loathing of a woman who craves affection and validation but feels unable to give it back to anyone else. With its footnotes and run-on, complicated sentences, ‘The Depressed Person’ is classic Wallace, describing in painstaking detail the thought processes and unhelpful negativity depression catches you in. As Zadie Smith points out, even on the level of the sentence does Wallace show the cyclical, negative-feedback loops that the Depressed Person is unable to escape, reinforcing their own misery and preventing them from realising how to be more at peace with themselves. It’s incredible, actually: you end up hating this person, or how they think, for their inability to see the narcissism in calling you friend to complain about your self-loathing while the friend is slowly dying of cancer. Brief Interviews is confessional: it cuts to the core when it cuts.

I’m also intrigued by a running theme in Brief Interviews of the grotesque. Wallace seems to have a fascination with revolting things: the aforementioned bathroom sights and smells, people with severe deformities and rendering such things in long-winded, detailed descriptions of grossness. Please be aware that I’m not saying that disability is grotesque or shameful – but that’s how the narrators of these stories see themselves, and others. As I said above, the disabled man who uses his disability (an arm like ‘a flipper’) to neg women is the one who describes his arm, how he purposefully would smear it with vaseline to make it look shapeless and weak so as to force others to feel disgusted at him. It’s his attitude to deformity that makes him grotesque. The same goes for this father’s description of his infant son’s skin condition:

The suppurating sores of his chronic impetigo, the crust. The ruptured infections. ‘Suppuration’: the term means to ooze. My son oozed, exuded, flaked, suppurated, dribbled from every quadrant. To whom does one speak of this? That he taught me to despise the body, what it is to have a body – to be disgusted, repulsed. The absent thoughtless picking and scratching and probing and toying, bottomless narcissistic fascination with his own body.

Yuck. Of course, this passage says more about the speaker than it does his little boy. It’s worth adding that Brief Interviews is actually really funny – a description like that is so absurdly cruel and over the top disgusting that it can only be parody, too deliberate is its revulsion. The word “hideous” in the title becomes interesting, then, and I feel as though this is all tied in with different types of ugliness – physical, as well as social, emotional, immoral ugliness. The same themes of body horror and over-egged deformity are in Infinite Jest, too. It’s definitely got something to do with morality for Wallace. I’d like to think more about this aspect of his books.

Not all of the stories work in Brief Interviews. There are one or two that just don’t work properly: ‘Tri-Stan: I sold Sissee Nar to Ecko’ is some kind of parody of Tristan and Isolde updated to make a point about celebrity culture but it’s too dense, too wrapped up in its cleverness to get away with it. It reads badly. Similarly, ‘Octet’ – which begins as a series of (presumably eight) interlinked vignettes – soon breaks down under its own ambition, ending with a direct plea from Wallace to convince the reader that he’s not trying to be postmodern and clever and up his own arse, a plea that doesn’t really convince me. The three or four stories like this in Brief Interviews are what make the book feel slightly uneven – you wonder why Wallace bothered with them, when his strengths clearly lie in other directions. But at least it shows that Wallace was willing to take risks and, without them, he wouldn’t get away with his best tricks. As Zadie Smith also said of Brief Interviews, you have to be willing to forgive Wallace his failures in order to get the most out of his successes.

This is a very good collection, you should definitely read it. Because it’s a David Foster Wallace book its language is often complicated, its meanings are many and buried, meaning it can sometimes take a lot of work to get back what you’ve put in to Brief Interviews. There are a few stories that don’t work very well but overall they don’t put too much of a damper on the rest of the book. I’m intrigued but this stuff about the grotesque: I like it, it’s clever in a good way. Wallace is Marmite and this is a good taste-breaker to see if you like him.

Texts:

David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men [1999] (London: Abacus, 2001).

Zadie Smith, ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: The Difficult Gifts of David Foster Wallace’, in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Penguin, 2009).

Picture Credits:

Photo of David Foster Wallace: http://www.dovesandserpents.org/wp/2012/05/29-mcs-wallace-mormonism/

Cover image of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_Interviews_with_Hideous_Men

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