Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

May 31, 1999
Wallace, the young turk author whose ubernovel, Infinite Jest, was way too bulky for audio adaptation, throws himself gamely into the medium now, reading from his short fiction collection. In this audio debut, Wallace delivers his spry, satiric exercises in a sure-voiced, confident baritone. With the skill of a veteran narrator, he adeptly retains footing as he navigates his complex and wordy prose. His literary grab-bag trademarks include off-kilter descriptive passages, ponderous lists and footnotes, and a large portion of the tape is devoted to a one-sided interview with a psychotic sexual stalker. These odd tropes come across with humor, even tenderness, in Wallace's sensitive reading. He conveys the earnestness of a young, hardworking writer, eager to make his eccentric vision accessible through its spoken presentation. It's this sense of Wallace's strong desire to be appealing that will keep the listener with him throughout his sometimes difficult material. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover.

Starred review from December 21, 2009
A host of talented narrators and actors—including television actors John Krasinski and Christopher Meloni—deliver nuanced performances of the late Wallace's classic. But it's the author himself who steals the show: his gentle, almost dreamy voice unlocks the elaborate syntax and releases the immense feeling concealed by the comedy and labyrinthine sentences. While the various narrators ably capture the essence of the text, Wallace's renditions of such stories as “Forever Overhead” and “Death Is Not the End” are transcendent. Essential listening for Wallace fans and a fine introduction for newcomers. A Little, Brown hardcover.

May 1, 1999
Following the success of his massive, much-acclaimed novel, Infinite Jest (LJ 1/96), Wallace returns to fiction with a similarly dense, cerebral, and self-reflexive set of short works. Wallace's characters are psychological grotesques, emotionally detached and sometimes, as with the na ve young wife in "Adult World," finding an odd freedom in their distance. While the inauthenticity of male/female relations is a recurrent motif, the central theme is the nature of narrative itself, as in "Octet," where the author turns self-reflexiveness on itself, creating something that might be termed meta-meta-fiction. Fans of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme will find comparable challenges here. For libraries where Infinite Jest was popular.--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA

Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 1999
The structure of the short story intrigues and piques Wallace, prompting him to subvert it. He imitates academic writing by attaching substantial footnotes to "The Depressed Person," thus creating a contrapuntal story within the story. "Datum Centurio" is a set of definitions of the word "date," purportedly found in "Leckie & Webster's Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage," copyright 2076. The title story, appearing in four installments, consists of a string of monologues in which men talk about women. Sex in its more disturbing modes is the collection's underlying theme. A man listens intently as a woman describes being raped. Another man goes into explicit detail in his rant against men's sexual selfishness, and a woman worries that her husband doesn't enjoy their lovemaking. Like Stephen Dixon, Wallace is adept at generating streams of consciousness, rendering mental states in almost psychedelic detail. And he practices this art to perfection in "Forever Overhead," in which a 13-year-old boy is nearly overwhelmed by sensory overload while awaiting his turn at the high dive. ((Reviewed May 1, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)

May 31, 1999
Some of the 23 stories in Wallace's bold, uneven, bitterly satirical second collection seem bound for best-of-the-year anthologies; a few others will leave even devoted Wallace fans befuddled. The rest of the stories fall between perplexing and brilliant, but what is most striking about this volume as a whole are the gloomy moral obsessions at the heart of Wallace's new work. Like his recent essays, these stories (many of which have been serialized in Harper's, Esquire and the Paris Review) are largely an attack on the sexual heroics of mainstream postwar fiction, an almost religious attempt to rescue (when not exposing as a fraud) the idea of romantic love. In the "interviews," that make up the title story, one man after another--speaking to a woman whose voice we never hear--reveals the pathetic creepiness of his romantic conquests and fantasies. These hideous men aren't the collection's only monsters of isolation. In "Adult World," Wallace writes of a young wife obsessed with fears that her husband is secretly, compulsively masturbating; in "The Depressed Person," one of Wallace's (rare) female narcissists whines that she is a "solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum"--this, to a dying friend. If MacArthur Fellowship-winner Wallace's rendition of our verbal tics and trash is less astonishing now than in earlier work (Infinite Jest; A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), that is because it has already become the way we hear ourselves talk. Wallace seems to have stripped down his prose in order to more pointedly probe distinct structures (i.e., footnoted psychotherapy journal, a pop quiz format). Yet these stories, at their best, show an erotic savagery and intellectual depth that will confound, fascinate and disturb the most unsuspecting reader as well as devoted fans of this talented writer. Author tour.