The intellectual gymnastics and ceaseless rumination endure (if you don't have a tolerance for that kind of thing, your nose doesn't belong in this book), but they are for the most part couched in simpler, less frenzied narratives. The book's four-piece namesake takes the form of interview transcripts, in which the conniving horror that is the male gender is revealed in all of its licentious glory. In the short, two-part "The Devil Is a Busy Man," Wallace strolls through the Hall of Mirrors that is human motivation. (Is it possible to completely rid an act of generosity of any self-serving benefits? And why is it easier to sell a couch for five dollars than it is to give it away for free?) The even shorter glimpse into modern-day social ritual, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life," stretches the seams of its total of seven lines with scathing economy: "She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their faces." Wallace also imbues his extreme observational skills with a haunting poetic sensibility. Witness what he does to a diving board and the two darkened patches at the end of it in "Forever Overhead":

It's going to send you someplace which its own length keeps you from seeing, which seems wrong to submit to without even thinking.... They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of people with real weight.

I devoured "The Broom of the System", finding its characters, situations, and storytelling unique and enthralling. Although I was upset by it's ending (or lack thereof), I assumed it would be a good warm-up for "Infinite Jest". Wrong! So far, I've made two passes at that behemoth tome. The second time I even made it to page 200 before stopping in frustration. So when approaching "Brief Interviews", I was hoping for more "Broom" than "Jest". Wrong!

In reading "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" one notices the extent that Wallace fancies himself the ultimate postmodern author. If you were to describe to me the style he uses here, I'd have to say: "Wow, what a neat idea! Challenge and frustrate the reader with unreadable prose, paragraphs that go on for pages and pages without a break, and endless footnotes that go on in infinite detail about the same mundane topic discussed in the body of the text! Genius!"

That's all well and good in theory, but it's a bitch to read. In this book Wallace uses his vast vocabulary in such a way that you'd think it would disappear if not exercised constantly. He even goes so far as to make up new words to try out. In one piece here he twice uses the word 'weeest', not because it is a more precise adjective than 'wee' (as in "...hours of the morning") but because its three-consecutive E's make it look exotic. It's style winning out over substance. And those paragraphs! They're endless. Try holding your breath for five minutes, and you'll know what it's like wading through a DFW paragraph. I asphyxiated on more than one occasion. Especially when those marathon paragraphs were made up of but a single sentence. As for the footnotes, sometimes they added substance to the piece, but more often than not they were merely distracting. One piece in particular actually had more text in the footnotes than in the main body. I was flipping back and forth like a madman trying to figure out what I was supposed to read next.

But the biggest peeve I had was his insistence on leaving the reader hanging. There are no payoffs here. The pieces don't end; they just stop. Sometimes I thought they could have gone on interminably, but instead Wallace decided to quit at some random point. After wading through twenty or so pages of philosophical ramblings and long-winded discussions, a punchline would have helped make me look forward to the next piece. As it is, I didn't.

I must say, though, that I wish I had Wallace's talent. That's not to say that I would use it the same way he does but it would be nice to have it there when I needed it. He seems to be constantly involved in a game of showing it off. His style is self indulgent to the nth degree. "Let's see how cool I can be," he seems to be saying. "Let's see how far post-modernism can stretch." The odd thing is that Wallace is willing to admit to this fault in an interesting way. Witness the first line in the last sub-chapter of the piece titled 'Octet': "You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer." He puts this (ironic) hindrance on the reader's shoulder. But as the piece moves along, it becomes apparent that he's constructing a meta-fictional rebuke of the sub-chapters that appeared before this one. He rips their intentions and their techniques to shreds. Ad infinitum. It's a great bit of self-referential (dare I say) theatre; the post-modern writer attacking his own post-modernism, in a hyper-post-modern way. It's enough to make the reader's head spin. Mine did.

There are a couple of other pieces here that really hooked me. "Tri-Stan: I Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" is Wallace at his most fun. Using contemporary cultural objects as a new language, punning mercilessly (e.g. a line describing University of Southern California cheerleaders as "attendants at the Saturday temple of the padded gods Ra & Sisboomba" had me chuckling but good), and coining modern day epigrams such as "The Medium would handle the Message's PR", he tells a convoluted tale about modern narcissism. Although the joke runs out of steam halfway through, it's still quite a strong piece. The opening piece, "A Radically Condensed History of Post-Industrial Life" clearly shows Wallace can be a genius when he focuses his gifts. And the title pieces, a quartet interspersed throughout the book, embodies all the problems I've detailed above. But they are still quite powerful in their depiction of modern man's ugliness (or rather 'hideousness').

I admit that there were some pieces here that I couldn't finish, either out of frustration or ignorance. That's probably more my fault than Dave's. Still, he could have helped me out a bit. But he never did. So even though I admired his talents, I didn't like his book.


Ick. Not for me.   September 14, 2004
 17 out of 26 found this review helpful

Supposed to be great. Critics loved it. So original. I thought it was boring and annoying. A collection of short stories about unlikable people, a lot of gibberish that was intentionally unintelligible. Which is fine for a while, but an entire book is too much. I really disliked it. I applaud any attempt to do something completely different, so I give it two stars instead of one, but jabbing knitting needles into my eye sockets would be different too, and I wouldn't like that much either.


Read anything but this book.   July 21, 2000
 13 out of 14 found this review helpful

I consider myself a big DFW fan (Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing... are two of my favorite books), so I bought this one when it first came out in hardcover. If I had to write a one-word review it would be:

Masturbatory.

Fortunately, I am not constrained to a single word, so allow me to elucidate: reading this book was sheer torture. I can't believe I finished it (I only did because it was the only book I had at work and I read it on my lunch breaks). It reads like the unedited prattle of a Creative Writing Grad Student trying to parody Wallace's better works. I am quite surprised to see so many positive reviews. Perhaps you have to be an English Major or Grad Student (I am neither) to enjoy this relentlessly experimental drivel. There are a few good ideas but fewer successful executions. Many of the "stories" resemble bizarre pedagogical exercises (like: "Now, class, try and write the most absurdly self-referential arch/hip/pomo essay you can. And make sure it is really unenjoyable to read, so as to offer nothing to anyone who doesn't suffer from the delusion that they are smarter than everyone else." <---- that was my imagining of what the assignment that created some of the fiction in this book must have been).

This was the only book I have ever read where I felt like it was a test: Which will prevail? The reader's desire to try and get something out of a book he has paid for by an author he loves, or the urge to throw the book across the room because the pretentiousness has become too irritating? I wish the throwing urge had gained the upper hand earlier.

Read any other Wallace book before taking on this one.


Challenging and easy to misunderstand, but very rewarding   July 19, 2001
 13 out of 16 found this review helpful

I think that a lot of people who have written reviews of this book have missed its point. For example, one person said, "The book is full of random stories, some good, some not so good" but these are not random stories at all. Another said, "Wallace fancies himself the ultimate postmodern author" but has obviously completely missed the point of the book.

This book is a parody (or at least an examination) of post-modernism rather than a post-modern book. If you have read DFW's essays, "E Unibus Pluram", or "Greatly Exaggerated" in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, you will know that DFW is at once repulsed and fascinated by the movement, and although he could be described as post-modern, he is also laughing at it, and wondering about its implications for society.

Brief Interviews is about how neurotic our post-modern society has become, with our obsessive self-examination and ironic distancing of ourselves from everything; and how ridiculous we are for knowing we are doing the wrong thing and doing it anyway, as in "The Depressed Person" and the Hideous Men who know that they are hideous but think that by acknowledging their hideousness it will be somehow less wrong. The Depressed Person's constant telephoning of her friends to ask them if they like her is very similar to DFW's musings on writers wondering if readers will like their books in "Octet", where he writes a final piece explaining everything that he was trying to accomplish in the previous pieces, showing how ridiculous the interjections of authors have become, and why its wrong to always be worrying about what people are thinking of you.

The reviewers who are treating this as a collection of independant short stories are, I believe, missing his point. These are all basically the same story with the same point told in different ways. Right from page one where everyone is worrying if the other people like them, through to the depressed person calling her friends to find out if they like her to DFW's musings about whether reader's will like his fiction, you are being exposed to the same ideas over and over. If you want to enjoy and understand this book, you will have ask yourself a lot of questions and compare everything he says to what he has said before. It's a very funny, thought-provoking book and deserves a very careful reading.