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“It’s not going to sound good at all, I’m afraid,” warns a character in David Foster Wallace’s collection, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999, Little, Brown). “Can we talk about it before we react? Can you promise?” The story cuts out. We don’t learn what the bad thing is, though given what’s come before there are certain logical conclusions. For a book that describes in detail various bodily acts, from sex to toilet stuff, there’s a lot left to the reader’s imagination. The book comprises several standalone stories, one about a boy trying to jump off a high diving board, another that captures the claustrophobia of depression. They are variously realist and highly metafictional: “You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer,” Wallace writes in “Octet,” a story told through the self-consciously clunky frame device of a series of pop quizzes.
But the cohesive meat is in the 17 “interviews” described in the title, threaded throughout the book in a series of four groups. They are written, for the most part, in a Q&A format, but as though the Q’s questions have been removed. All we get are the answers. A Couple are held at institutions, one at a center for continuing care in Eastchester, NY, the other at a domestic violence outreach center in Aurora, Illinois. Otherwise they are conversations at bars, maybe, or in apartments—“Let’s have one last one and that will be it,” one of the men interjects; “You want to hold it in and let it absorb. This is mine, I grow it,” says another—or overheard snippets from men talking nearby. The men discuss their erotic adolescent fantasies and seduction techniques and rape and complicated Relationships with their fathers. Two of the conversations appear to be transcripts of the questioner’s breakups. All of them, to different degrees and through different techniques, attempt desperately to control the narrative. The book is exhausting and engaging, a puzzle that, when put together, creates a rollicking picture of the banal, grimy underbelly of heterosexual patriarchy.
There is a dominant critical point of view that asks consumers of art to disregard the biography and behavior of its artist. This directive strikes me as similar to that of a judge asking a jury to forget a piece of information they’ve just received from an attorney or a witness. “How can a jury disregard what it’s already heard?” asks a man on trial in the 1959 film Anatomy of a Murder. His lawyer, a canny James Stewart, whispers back: “They can’t, lieutenant, they can’t.” Similarly, in reading Brief Interviews in 2023, I can’t unknow that in her 2009 memoir, Lit, the writer Mary Karr wrote that Wallace had thrown a coffee table at her during their Relationship, or that in 2018 Karr tweeted that he had also “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school.” She added that she “had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.”
I like to read books written by humans (rather than, say, books collaged by AI) because books written by humans can contain so much humanity in them, the full breadth, the good and the hideous. We put ourselves into our art. In Brief Interviews, men talk about women to a woman whose own voice has been removed from the narrative. Not into that? All good. Despite the best efforts of certain political actors, we do still have a choice as to what books we read. Why not pick up Mary Karr instead?
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