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Editorial Review Product Description
David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, he combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.
Amazon.com Review
Amid the screams of adulation for bandanna-clad wunderkind David FosterWallace, you might hear a small peep. It is the cry for some restraint. Onoccasion the reader is left in the dust wondering where the story went, asthe author, literary turbochargers on full-blast, suddenly accelerates intothe wild-blue-footnoted yonder in pursuit of some obscure metafictionalfancy. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's latestcollection, is at least in part a response to the distress signal put outby the many readers who want to ride along with him, if he'd onlyslow down for a second.The intellectual gymnastics and ceaseless rumination endure (if you don'thave a tolerance for that kind of thing, your nose doesn't belong in thisbook), but they are for the most part couched in simpler, less frenziednarratives. The book's four-piece namesake takes the form of interviewtranscripts, in which the conniving horror that is the male gender isrevealed in all of its licentious glory. In the short, two-part "The DevilIs a Busy Man," Wallace strolls through the Hall of Mirrors that is humanmotivation. (Is it possible to completely rid an act of generosity of anyself-serving benefits? And why is it easier to sell a couch for fivedollars than it is to give it away for free?) The even shorter glimpse intomodern-day social ritual, "A Radically Condensed History of PostindustrialLife," stretches the seams of its total of seven lines with scathingeconomy: "She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drovehome alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to theirfaces." Wallace also imbues his extreme observational skills with ahaunting poetic sensibility. Witness what he does to a diving board and thetwo darkened patches at the end of it in "Forever Overhead": It's going to send you someplace which its ownlength keeps you from seeing, which seems wrong to submit to withouteventhinking.... They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance ofpeople with real weight. Of course, not every piece is an absolute winner. "The Depressed Person"slips from purposefully clinical to unintentionally boring. "Tri-Stan: ISold Sissee Nar to Ecko" reimagines an Arthurian tale in MTV terms andholds your attention for about as long as you'd imagine from such adescription. Ultimately, however, even these failed experiments are atestament to Mr. Wallace's endless if unbridled talent. Once he gets thereins completely around that sucker, it's going to be quite a ride.--Bob Michaels ... Read more Customer Reviews (80) 
Some nice passages but also forced and voyeuristic
David Foster Wallace treats us to fictious interviews with several men. All these have typical male, mostly sexual, flaws, which are distorted beyond all usual bounds.
The stories are written brilliantly, in a laconic male voice, slightly defensive and agressive in their defensiveness, as might be the interview of a criminal offender with a psychologist or journalist.
As mentioned, the stories are mostly sexual in nature, relating to a warped perception of reality. The author, to my understanding, tries to explain the self justifications of sexual predators and offenders. Of males who defend their sexual urges, who might not be actual sexual offenders but who have it within them to be such offenders.
This, is a strange and dark way, is interesting to read, it is the same feeling which one new as an adolescent when one snooped around in the forbidden corners of the newsstand.
Yet we are no adolescents anymore and do not need to play peeping Tom. Therefore the whole book has a sneaky, uncouth, voyeuristic quality to it. Yes, it is is well written, yes, one feels privy to the authors sexual urges, and yet, finally, it leaves only an empty and hollow feeling, the same feeling one had as an adolescent after visiting this newsstands forbidden corner. Interesting, voyeuristic, self indulgent but finally nothing more. Nothing new, just a grotesque shadow of things we knew before.
Painful To Read!
This starts off with two amazing short stories, which I felt were more like long poems, each a few pages long.Both were beautifully written, and made me excited about the rest of the book.Unfortunately what followed after that point was some of the most confusing, intentionally awful series of words I have ever struggled through.I felt as though Wallace wrote this book in this manner as some kind of sick joke to all of us dupes who were tricked into buying it.A good example is "Octet, Pop Quiz #6" where in Wallace replaced the two main character's names with simple "X" and "Y."Awful.And, his use of rediculously long runon sentences were very aggrvating, as well as the enormous footnotes on several stories that were longer than the actual stories they were in.
I get it.It was all probably intentional and meant to be funny.But, it wasn't.It was annoying.I felt as though Wallace knows his audience is of higher intelligence, and wrote this book as an attempt to intentionally confuse the heck out of them because he thought it was funny.He failed miserably.
The odd thing, is that I just watched the movie.It was beautifully written.If the book had been written as the screenplay was, I would have loved the book.It's as if Krasinski painfully sorted through all the unnecessary drivel and pulled out the meat of the story.He crafted a mess of abook into a wonderful movie.I recommend that you skip the torture of the book, and just go straight to the movie.
Don't deny yourself the experience of reading this book
Before I read this book, I thought that post-modernism and metafiction was for the most part just novelty. But DFW uses post-modern and metafictional tricks to enhance his characters and comment on common human experiences, rather than to hide the story from the reader with gimmickry and flash.
Some may fault DFW for being too personal at times and too abstract at others, but these qualities allow the stories in Brief Interviews to achieve a kind of self-executing immursion that allows the reader to get more out of each one. By lifting the vail of "The Author", he is less self-concious than authors of more traditional fiction, not more so. If the purpose of storytelling is to tell the truth through fiction, then this collection hits the nail on the head. Read this book. Even if it isn't doesn't suit your taste, I guarantee you won't forget it.
someone wake me and 'splain me.
I'm not a literary genius as clearly some of the author's fans are but, I'm bright enough to know this was really self indulgent and asked a whole lot of the reader without giving much back.I did enjoy some of the interviews that revealed the "hideous men" (and a few women as well). And, I found some of what seemed to be total stream of consciousness to be interesting for a bit. But, the gibberish went on forever, the pages and pages of footnotes were annoying, not funny, and the fact that DW felt absolutely no obligation to gift the readers with any kind of resolve to any of it, ever, is a statement in and of itself.If you put 100 avid readers in a room with this book you would have 18 people smiling with their face buried in the pages, 10 people sound asleep, and 72 others intermittently looking around to see if anyone else was as bewildered and bored as they are.Abstract and uppity isn't necessarily genius.
Read This Book Now!
Funny, funny, funny. And defiantly one of DFW's most accessible. . . good for after a breakup or anytime the men in your life are being giant dicks! Bonus: after you're finished there's an OK movie version to compare it to!
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Straight forward, good read