Mediated Immediacy in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Abstract

Comprising 23 separate pieces and 37 or so different voices, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men aggressively explores the warped workings of relationships—largely male-female and primarily their linguistic workings—by creating personae that shock and disgust us with admissions of bad behavior, then add offense by demanding our identification and understanding. Though it has only begun to receive serious critical attention,¹ its brazen solicitation of empathy for all kinds of mental, physical, and emotional disfigurements through likewise discomforting generic disfigurements represents a powerful development of themes and goals for fiction that David Foster Wallace had been articulating for several years, not only in Infinite Jest but also in his 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery and essay on television (“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U. S. Fiction”). Most essentially, the book continues his rejection of postmodernism’s unproductive irony in favor of a return to sincerity through metafiction. But to this concern about irony, Brief Interviews adds an unflinching critique of narcissism as an impediment to empathy and sincerity, most often as wielded by men in solipsistic “relationship” with women. Indeed, the collection is Wallace’s only work to focus on the intersection between problems of language and male-female relationships, or, as Wallace himself has described the book, on sex.²