The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
Robert L. McLaughlin

David Foster Wallace. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Little, Brown, 1999. 273 pp. $24.00.

In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men David Foster Wallace collects twenty-three pieces of fiction, most written since the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996. Few of these are stories in the conventional sense. Rather, the book makes into fiction many other forms: the title interviews, which provide the structure of the book; monologues; a play; pop quizzes; an outline; and harder-to-define nonnarrative snapshots of various characters and their lives. The results are both familiar, as we recognize techniques and themes from Wallace’s earlier work, and surprising, as we see Wallace taking his post-big-novel work in new directions.
The various pieces here work together to explore three interconnected problems. The first is how to be human in a contemporary society that prefers to see us as things, in which we are encouraged to see others as things and to think of ourselves as things. As one of the hideous men says, “it’s possible to be just a thing but . . . minute by minute if you want you can choose to be more if you want, you can choose to be a human being and have it mean something.” The second problem is where human identity resides, someplace inside, where we know ourselves, or someplace on the outside, where others see us. This ambiguity can be paralyzing, as in the title character of “The Depressed Person,” who becomes obsessed with not appearing to others as she fears she might, or despicable, as in the various hideous men, who self-consciously develop personae in order to manipulate women’s reactions to them. In both cases the result is dehumanizing. The third problem is how to develop a post-postmodern literature so as to write about these problems in a meaningful way. Wallace returns here to concerns he first dealt with explicitly in his novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way: the self-conscious fiction of the high postmodernists has been popularized into a cheap cynicism, a celebration of surface and the denial of depth, and a tendency to label any assertion about anything as hopelessly naive; fiction needs to build on the technical and thematic innovations of postmodern literature and find a way to break through the cynicism and the superficiality of contemporary society so as to say something true about being human. “Octet,” a series of pop quizzes, ends as a powerful challenge to writers and readers to remake fiction and its purposes. A fourth problem is interwoven with these three: language’s ability to express the truth about the self or the world. Like Infinite Jest these pieces suggest contradictory attitudes toward language: on the one hand, a Jamesian desire to describe more and more obsessively, as if creating a lasso of language to ensnare the ineffable; on the other hand, a recognition of the clichéd state of language, so overfamiliar that meaning can be telegraphed (“Foxholes and atheists and so on”). This conflict is illustrated in “Adult World,” where the first half of the story is narrated obsessively and the second half presented as the author’s outline.
The mood of these pieces is generally grim, and the book is less frequently laugh-out-loud funny than Wallace’s others. But in its form, narration, language, and ideas, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a virtuoso display that builds on the achievement of Infinite Jest and points the way to the future of fiction. [Robert L. McLaughlin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace Robert L. McLaughlin David Foster Wallace. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Little, Brown, 1999. 273 pp. $24.00. In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men David Foster Wallace collects twenty-three pieces of fiction, most written since the publication of Infinite Jest in 1996. Few of these are stories in the conventional sense. Rather, the book makes into fiction many other forms: the title interviews, which provide the structure of the book; monologues; a play; pop quizzes; an outline; and harder-to-define nonnarrative snapshots of various characters and their lives. The results are both familiar, as we recognize techniques and themes from Wallace’s earlier work, and surprising, as we see Wallace taking his post-big-novel work in new directions. The various pieces here work together to explore three interconnected problems. The first is how to be human in a contemporary society that prefers to see us as things, in which we are encouraged to see others as things and to think of ourselves as things. As one of the hideous men says, “it’s possible to be just a thing but . . . minute by minute if you want you can choose to be more if you want, you can choose to be a human being and have it mean something.” The second problem is where human identity resides, someplace inside, where we know ourselves, or someplace on the outside, where others see us. This ambiguity can be paralyzing, as in the title character of “The Depressed Person,” who becomes obsessed with not appearing to others as she fears she might, or despicable, as in the various hideous men, who self-consciously develop personae in order to manipulate women’s reactions to them. In both cases the result is dehumanizing. The third problem is how to develop a post-postmodern literature so as to write about these problems in a meaningful way. Wallace returns here to concerns he first dealt with explicitly in his novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way: the self-conscious fiction of the high postmodernists has been popularized into a cheap cynicism, a celebration of surface and the denial of depth, and a tendency to label any assertion about anything as hopelessly naive; fiction needs to build on the technical and thematic innovations of postmodern literature and find a way to break through the cynicism and the superficiality of contemporary society so as to say something true about being human. “Octet,” a series of pop quizzes, ends as a powerful challenge to writers and readers to remake fiction and its purposes. A fourth problem is interwoven with these three: language’s ability to express the truth about the self or the world. Like Infinite Jest these pieces suggest contradictory attitudes toward language: on the one hand, a Jamesian desire to describe more and more obsessively, as if creating a lasso of language to ensnare the ineffable; on the other hand, a recognition of the clichéd state of language, so overfamiliar that meaning can be telegraphed (“Foxholes and atheists and so on”). This conflict is illustrated in “Adult World,” where the first half of the story is narrated obsessively and the second half presented as the author’s outline. The mood of these pieces is generally grim, and the book is less frequently laugh-out-loud funny than Wallace’s others. But in its form, narration, language, and ideas, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a virtuoso display that builds on the achievement of Infinite Jest and points the way to the future of fiction. [Robert L. McLaughlin]

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