Recommended for: DFW fans, ppl who want to expand their vocabulary & their mind.
Shelf: Postmodernism,metafiction,American writer,short stories.

I have many DFW works on my shelf but i picked this particular book up as the cover really grabbed my attention: the male face; covered in burlap sack,reminded me of the Phantom from 'The Phantom of the Opera', but unlike the tortured,homicidal,musical genius whose passion,angelic voice & sad past,made him a tragic character, hence,easy to feel compassion for- the same can't be said of this gallery of "hideous men"(save case no 46 & 42): pathological characters of varying degrees & hues: self absorbed,neurotic,cunning,cruel & what's worse aware of their cruelty,these meta, post-structuralist men who speak in quotation marks; throw their readings of Foucault & Lacan at you! 
Sample this from a grad student:
"This,of course,is because today's postfeminist era is also today's postmodern era,in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what's really going on underneath all the semiotic codes & cultural conventions,& everybody is operating out of,& so we're all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality,since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious & informed."

Conscious & informed indeed! Only trouble is,they have rationalised their feelings to such an extent that they are unable to feel anything anymore--as the male in the concluding interview cries out:
"what an empty way this was to come at women...empty. To gaze & not see,to eat & not be full. Not just to feel but be empty."

And therefore,empathise with such poor men,we must cause as DFW says,the primary aim of fiction is to "allow us imaginatively to identify with characters' pain" so that "we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing,redemptive; we become less alone inside."

Arranged around these interviews are short stories & short sketches of alternating length & structure. Most of these worked for me,few like 'Church Not Made With Hands','Datum Centurio' etc. did not.

The stand out stories are 'Tri -Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko': brilliant in its wit & biting satire,its mock epic struture is beyond praise! It recalled to mind Pope's mock epic 'The Rape of the Lock' where a trivial theme is given a grand epic treatment.

The controversial 'The Depressed Person' where Wallace ironically points out time & again that this person is suffering due to her narcissism rather than past wounds.

My fav story of this story cycle is 'Forever Overhead' which was included in Best American Short Stories (1992)-- it's a simple coming-of-age tale where a boy,on his 13th b'day,decides to sneakily jump into the community pool from a high dive. Here the form & theme coalesce beautifully.  On a different level,this story even reads like a metaphysical musing on life,death & beyond which is true in a way as"All changes,even the most longed for,have their melancholy;for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another."(one of my fav quotes though sadly can't recall the author).

This book is a good introduction to Wallace's work as most ppl eagerly(& wrongly) begin with 'Infinite Jest' & then are turned catatonic by it's verbal wizardry & stylistic pyrotechnics (as happened to me long back!). To quote Marshall Boswell:

"Brief Interviews...does,however,work as a decisive & articulate recaptitulation of Wallace's by now characteristic themes,including depression,solipsism,community,
self-consciousness--both textual & psychological--& the impact on our collective consciousness of therapeutic discourse writ large... More a clearinghouse of still vital ideas than a bold shift in direction,Brief interviews with Hideous Men is possibly Wallace's most 'characteristic' book."

Here is a link to this excellent critical analysis'Understanding David Foster Wallace' by Marshall Boswell,in case you are not satisfied with "200 words capsule reviews" & you shdn't be! Writers like Wallace need to be read with a couple of reference books & a dictionary near you & i mean that in a good way unlike Faulkner's mean swipe at Hemingway!

http://books.google.ae/books?id=3N4ir...

*. *. *

The opening story 'A Radically Condensed History of Post-industrial Life' is condensed like a haiku: only two terse passages,containing wealth of references : i was reminded of this beautifully poignant short story 'The Chrysanthemums' by Steinbeck,where a travelling salesman,in order to find some work,strikes up a conversation with a woman on her favorite topic of flowers. The woman is delighted & even hands him a few pots of eponymous chrysanthemums,only to find them later discarded by the roadside.
Here's a link to this wonderful story:
http://thatsclassic.wordpress.com/tag...

Why call such encounters only postindustrial? Such fakeness & superficiality in human relationships has been there since time immemorial so much so that when someone is being genuinely nice to you,you still wonder"Am i missing something,what's the catch here!?"
Also such examples are so common here on Goodreads: someone makes a lame joke on some thread,another laughs uproariously/someone writes a decidedly third-rate poem,another treats it as if it were the next thing to Eliot!  Only here they don't drive home alone with the same twist on their faces: it ends with a friend request & an acceptance. But make no mistakes abt it: there are no friendships here only a "reading network".

There are several different, idiosyncratic kinds of things going on in Brief Interviews. Your bread and butter here are the (1) piercing views of interior monologue. Wallace has an unusual facility with voice and he puts to use here, as characters self-dissect and recriminate and justify in bottomless hall-of-mirrors sequences of self-reflection. These horror stories for the uncertain, for those who overthink. For those with anxiety that their proper outward actions might be self-satisfied, and feel deathly guilt over that satisfaction, and feel that the proper outward acts are a sham, and oh god can't they tell and-- it's maddening really. "The Depressed Person" is the best of these, perhaps, and the most justified given its subject, but others become interminable, painful, which might be the point given that we're dealing in inner turmoil here (they feel accurately painful), but this doesn't make them especially more readable. The flipside of this angle, however is the exterior monologue, the interview, the title's referent series and accompanying others, which, more on these later. The most insufferable of the self-reflexive miasmas really become especially tiresome once they fall into a worse and related trap, (1a) the post-modern literary self-dissection*, which really is a form of the first, but with Wallace himself stepping into his own cross-hairs. Or appearing to; that's the thing with post-modern devices, you can never be sure at which level they're operating. But take "Octet", a set parables pressed on the reader as moral quandaries that actually only gets as far as maybe 3.5 sections before unspooling into self-referential havoc of the most irritating variety of (1), but still setting it out as a moral quandary to the reader: "what would you do with this mess of an incomplete octet? Maybe your only way out is to explain your situation with the utmost, scathing honesty, to lay it out for the reader and to let--" AHHH, and we are collapsing Mouse-and-His-Child-style into a terrifying infinite regression. As each nested dog grins and leers, ask yourself: is this better, is this even as good, as the completed Octet would have been? It may be that this turning of the tables is actually well-planned and clever in ways I do not realize, but it seems that even if this is so, it still falls short of its initial stated goals. There is something interesting in Wallace's painful earnestness -- a trait he can never entirely shake, even at his most narratively non-self-referential -- but here it justifies the reputation he seems to have for abusing this sort of thing. Now I see where this comes from. It wasn't Infinite Jest, the self-references of which are strictly embedded, useful parts of the story, it isn't in the basically narrative-first near-novellas that compose Oblivion. It wasn't even a problem in The Broom of the System a story about stories: not even there does Wallace allow his writing to become so unmoored from itself as in "Octet", or as in -- the VERY NEXT story, driving the point home -- "Adult World" the second part of which is an outline describing the remainder of the story he was telling. After a first part that is actually quite a good example of (1), ask yourself Would part two have been better if Wallace had actually written it? It is very difficult not to come out with a yes here. The flipside is our narrative type (2), or maybe (1c), the exterior monologue, the Brief Interview, whose self-reference is typically in fact a significant layer of meaning. These brief interviews are virtuosicly delivered: Wallace's voiceless interviewer is an intriguing presence reflected in the eyes of these hideous men, hideous in distinctly believable ways. No "mere" cads and insensitives here, Wallace instead finessing intelligent, self-aware interviewees who carry themselves with some combination of apology and self-justification, people who understand why they are being scrutinized and are hideous because they stand by questionable convictions and, worse, often reveal them to be extremely everyday. The hideousness in question is occasionally overt but more often quite subtle. And they are not without their instants of pathos, perhaps even extreme pathos. Each -- and there are many, spread in four clusters through the book -- is a contribution to the startling whole but stands alone as an smoothly enclosed statement. These finely crafted units, and the final interview is one (as is the deathbed-bound monologue that precedes which might really be more of a (1) on further consideration, even though it is spoken aloud), are Wallace at his best, when he seems able to completely lose himself in the creation. Which brings us to (3) (or are we still on (2)...) the full-formed stories. The puberty-plunge of "Forever Overhead" is the most orthodox of these, albeit well-handled, but others see W.'s chameleonic voice -- whether dissecting human interaction through etymology or discussing televised entertainment struggles as a kind of neo-classical mythology (both of these through a lens of detached history, the work of unborn linguists and Homeric storytellers) -- is engaging, fascinating. And what to make of the beautiful, surreal expanse of "A Church Not Built With Hands", surely Wallace's most embellished prose, underscoring the conversational directness (word-wise; ignoring the meandering nature of real conversations DFW faithfully maintains) of much of the rest. "Church" may be just an overt form of another old Wallace trick: building worlds that are new and unfamiliar (here through sheer blinding language), and then making them stand effectively for -- and even elucidate -- our own.

*I never know when finished with a mess of a review like this whether it is more horrible or more subject-accurate, and I could discuss this in detail but will spare you that ordeal except to say--

In spite of the well-known antipathy D.F.Wallace felt for B.E.Ellis, a sentiment that I assume was mutual, this collection of stories shows a deep affinity between the two with regards to themes and, yes, sensibility (some might wonder if any such thing exists in Ellis' work, to which the answer is: yes, there's plenty of it, if you just read between the lines). What's more, this apparently unlikely similarity proves my theory to be true: David Foster Wallace is the one and only author I know of who's managed to position himself between Minimalism and Maximalism, by mastering not only the style but also the essence of both literary currents with an unprecedented and still unparalleled skill. He succeeded on an insidious terrain most authors have never even dreamt of exploring, let alone conquering, and this book is one of the best examples of how wide the range of his artistic and intellectual spectrum was.

These short stories deal with alienation, depression, obsession, aborted attempts at communication, and the more or less sincere inner quest for a meaning.
In order to convey his own sense of estrangement and bewilderment, the author juggles all sorts of literary devices while effortlessly eschewing the ossified mannerisms of bravura. He gets so deep into his characters the narration inevitably turns into the distorting lens of a stream-of-consciousness implosion of the fictional selves, whether they be first- or third-person, male or female, old or young, protagonists or minor characters, all of them walking the thin line of moral ambiguity. There seems to be nothing DFW can't do in terms of portraying human specimens. Whether it's psychological mimetism or emotional empathy or both, this liquid, chameleon-like ability to slip inside his characters' mind is doubtlessly to be regarded as his greatest talent and achievement.

Don't be deceived by Wallace's cerebral, apparently cold and, sometimes, deliberately obscure writing style. There's a poisoned fruit for the reader to pluck in each and every story in this collection, permeated as it is by a disquieting sense of unease. Wallace is a master in sliding beneath the surface of things, where a septic tank of sexual and psychological abuse, latent violence, dysfunctional family relations and mental issues waits to be uncovered; and this is where his work and B.E. Ellis', the latter's early novels in particular, happen to converge. For better or for worse, they were writing about the same things and depicting the same existential malaise, from different but perfectly compatible perspectives.

"Soon, perhaps, respected & glossy high-art organs might even start inviting smartass little ironists to contemporize & miscegenate BC mythos; & all this pop irony would put a happy-face mask on a nation's terrible shamefaced hunger & need; translation, genuine information, would be allowed to lie, hidden & nourishing inside the wooden belly of parodic camp."

What else more is there to say about David Foster Wallace? This is Jelly Belly literature, and you just keep stuffing the candy into your mouth, cappuccino melting into coconut, juciy pear augmented by the A&W Cream Soda *trademark* you just swallowed. Flavors upon flavors until all that's left is a sugar rush.

I put the book down and lie giggling at my ceiling, not just because it's funny and hip but because it's painfully, brutally sincere and honest.