Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

La noia.

شاید بشه گفت داستان‌های این کتاب، برای ذهن ما، هم خیلی ملموسه و هم خیلی دوره و عجیب. بعضی از نوشته‌های این مجموعه رو شاید به هیچوجه نشه تفسیر کرد و فقط باید حسشون کرد و بعضیای دیگه‌شون رو، با تمام وجود درک خواهید کرد و از اینکه والاس چطور اینارو میدونه و روشون دست گذاشته تعجب خواهید کرد. انگار والاس جای همه‌ی ما، انسان‌های دنیای معاصر، زندگی کرده و از بالا روایتمون میکنه. شایدم از پایین و شایدم از زاویه‌ای خاص و جدید، نمیدونم...

David Foster Wallace once said "Good fiction’s job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
I can say that many stories in this collection have done this to me.

This is a hard book for me to rate and review.

I could listen to David Foster Wallace talk all day but his writing is just hard. It requires work, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Although short and relatively simple I adored the first short story ‘A radically condensed history of postindustrial life’ and struggled with the more complex titles such as ‘Tri-stan: I Sold Sisee Nar To Ecko’

– уявіть, що ви прийшли на вечірку, де мало кого знаєте, а потім, повертаючись додому, раптом усвідомлюєте, що всю вечірку так хвилювалися, подобаєтеся ви чи не подобаєтеся гостям, що просто гадки не маєте, чи сподобалися вам вони.
Звичайно ж, майже завжди з'ясовується, що насправді ви не сподобалися гостям на вечірці з тієї простої причини, що здавались таким зацикленим на собі та стурбованим собою, що у них виникло неприємне підсвідоме відчуття, ніби ви навряд їх помітили, і що, швидше за все, пішли без поняття, сподобалися вони вам чи ні, від чого їм прикро і ви перестаєте їм подобатися (вони, зрештою, лише люди і теж хочуть подобатися)

–

The story 'Forver Overhead' made me realize the one thing that I appreciate most about DFW. Much of his writing is executed with such exquisite, painstaking detail that it not only causes me to visualize the scenario more clearly, but often at the same time a particular scene will make me recall memories that were long ago misplaced. This story is about a thirteen-year-old boy who works up the courage to tackle that youthful right of passage of going off of the high dive for the first time. The memory that this evoked for me was the vague fear that I always had in my pre-teen years of a wet foot sliding off of a wet, metal rung resulting in a banged up knee and potential fall to the concrete below. Another thing that impressed me about this story is that it was written in the second person. I know of very few stories that are well-executed from this point of view (Carlos Fuentes 'Aura' being the only one that comes to mind at the moment). This may have been the reason that I became so immersed in this particular story.

My other favorite in this collection was 'Church Not Made With Hands.' The prose in this story is beautiful and there is a suggestion of magic realism afoot, in my opinion.

The last section of 'Octet' made me laugh, as that nervously bumbling yet still brilliant writer persona that DFW does so well in his nonfiction makes an appearance.

There is one thing that I am still pondering about the title story, 'Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.' This story, which is divided into sections and spread throughout the book, can be sloppily summarized as the text of interviews with men who would be considered creeps in regard to how they deal with and relate to women. One section, however, outlines the life of an older black man who has spent a majority of his work life as the attendant in a swanky restroom. I'm still struggling with how this section fits in with the rest.

This is billed as "experimental fiction" but I think that it is a mixed bag that contains something for everyone.

Brief Interviews is certainly one of Wallace's better works, though the postmodern meta-stuff is already a bit dated . . . similar to reading William Gass's novellas (from the 1970s), there's a certain sepia-toned "classic postmodernism" about it.

Anyway, I've searched in vain for someone to point out what seems to be DFW's obvious point with the "Brief Interviews" sections of this book. The usual reading is that he's undertaking a funny and vicious critique of hideous men, and that we're supposed to sympathize with the (female) grad student interviewer throughout (see here, for example). It seems clear to me that DFW meant something else entirely.

The key is the earliest interview listed in the book ("B.I. #2, October 1994," on page 91). Crucially, this isn't a part of the interviewer's study, but rather an episode from her life; she moves across the country with her long-term boyfriend, who had been putting off a breakup, only going through with it once she had uprooted her life for him. The point is that this is the first "hideous man"; her anger at her ex-boyfriend launches the interview project and colors the rest of the material in later interviews.

This is made most clear in the climax of the book (and of the "Brief Interviews" themselves), in what is generally seen as one of DFW's greatest bits of writing: "B.I. #20, December 1996." The interviewee relates how he fell in love with a woman who he had initially just been trying to seduce for a one-night stand, sincerely explaining how it transformed him into a better person.

The message that most reviewers appear to take from this story is that somehow the man is still "hideous" here, but the whole point is that the interviewer is hideous. When confronted with genuine love and compassion, she remains hateful and antagonistic, refusing to accept that this very sincere man she is interviewing truly loved this woman, and that this love helped him to see that "connection and nobility and compassion [are] more fundamental and primary components of the soul than psychosis or evil." This is basically DFW's personal motto, and we're supposed to believe that he disagrees with this character? Even when this exact point has already been emphasized by the story of the rape victim in "B.I. #6"?

Anyway the point is that seeing "psychosis and evil" as "fundamental" is exactly the trap that the interviewer has fallen into. She is obviously bitter and antagonistic (as evidenced by the implied contents of each of her "Q." questions). She isn't really listening to her interlocutor, as he is right to point out: "I know I'm not telling you anything you haven't already decided you know. With your slim chilly smile."

In other words, by B.I. #20, the interviewer has spent years descending into a negative spiral of resentment and hatred due to her compulsive, open-ended project of seeking out hideous men -- this is an unconscious attempt to psychologically reinforce her initial hatred of her ex-boyfriend (in B.I. #2), which is now projected onto all men. The fact that the longest and most important interview is placed at the end of the book is meant as a refutation of the interviewer's entire stance, her nihilism and callousness; the ultimate point of the "Brief Interviews" stories is that you're supposed to pity this hideous woman who compulsively interviews men for a decade, including after her experience with the clearly-not-hideous man in B.I. #20 (whose point obviously never got through to her).

This hyper self-conscious metafictional stuff is not my thing, though I did sort of enjoy the "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" chapter (several chapters have this title) that begins on p. 69 (the one that discusses Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning in the context of violent, degrading rape), minus the part about the narrator's father's bathroom attendant job. The "BIWHM" chapters, with their invisible female questioners and hideous male responders, sport a twisted misogyny that is kind of fun.