In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace does an incomparable job of mapping the male experience, from the comic and shallow, to the distraught, the needy, and the self-absorbed. Who else can pull off a meditation on the effects of technological advancement on dating one hundred years in the future, composed in the form of an entry in a digital guide to grammatical usage? Within Wallace’s stories we encounter blazing intelligence, linguistic mastery, and re-appropriation of forms. This certainly isn’t to suggest Wallace’s work provides a fictional counterpart to Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. How my female friends and I had discussed these men in detail, but always with a quizzical incomprehension for the skittish guys who couldn’t commit, couldn’t connect, who were always so inconsistent in their desires. The men depicted within these stories form a compendium that maps the vicissitudes of the male mind, with an emphasis on the ages-old disjunction of the sexes, better known as romance. I read the book fervently and with a scrupulous eye, paying close attention to the nuances of thought, the paradoxes of desire, the calculating ways weakness is used as bait to seduce, the way some men are confident and conniving and yet also riddled by self-doubt and lack of self-knowledge. As a woman who came of age alongside these men, who has a brother, a father, a lover, and friends, I was intrigued. Secrets of those bearing a Y chromosome would be revealed, he promised David Foster Wallace had explored the shadows of the psyche of his generation and had rendered them on the page in all of their dark, desperate beauty.
“It will help you understand the way men think!” he exclaimed.
My boyfriend insisted I read Brief Interviews with Hideous Men when we started dating.
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