If Foster Wallace was depicting the zeitgeist in his writing then there is no hope in hell for us, and we might as well follow his lead and exit this world, quickly. To restore my faith in mankind I had to remind myself that this writer suffered for many years from depression and finally succumbed to it; this world was his, not mine.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is an extremely robust book in terms of the styles and formats of the stories contained within: interviews, monologues, dialogues, pop quizzes, medieval tragedy, author notes, footnotes, confessions, dictionary and still life. The characters are indeed hideous people: the sexually repressed, sexual molesters, neurotics, mother haters, father haters, child haters, suicides, rapists. There are also the lost ones like the lavatory attendant and the boy on top of the diving board. After a while, they all blend into a soup of human misery. And all throughout is the author’s pretentious prose that adds to character homogeneity. These are not “shown” stories, they are very “told.”
What kept me reading was the irony and the unusual situations: a dying father hurls curses at his successful son while on his deathbed, another father wags his penis at his young son scarring him for life, a woman feels a karmic connection with her attacker and comforts him while he goes about raping her on the side of a road, a guy proposes voluntary bondage on every third date with a new partner, another guy involuntarily yells “Victory for the Democratic Forces of Freedom” every time he has a sexual climax leaving his partners running for the hills.
No doubt, Foster Wallace was a brilliant writer who stretched the form of the novel and the story to new heights. Somewhere in there however, he seems to have lost interest in his reader, or he doesn’t appear to care. Sentences go on for pages at times and the circulatory and repetitive nature of the propositions within get quite boring. Foster Wallace alludes to this with his reference, “the artist doesn’t need the reader’s permission for what he writes nor does he need to be liked by the reader.” I agree, but if you don’t make it interesting for us, Mr. F Wallace, why should we care either?
For those attempting to read this book, prepare to work at it, it is not easy reading. In the end you will learn some new words, become somewhat dispirited with humanity and come to understand how it must have felt to be a (mad?) prophet crying in the wilderness.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace - A Review
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