Brief Interviews with Hideous Men ~ David Foster Wallace

Q.

This book was incredible. And horrible. And heartbreaking. And sadistic. Crammed with words and sentences and footnotes and descriptions and-

Q...

Well, sadistic in the fact that some of the stories feel so inaccessible, and spiral on for so long, that your breathing pattern actually starts to change, and your brain starts to ache and rattle inside your skull, and all you can do is rub your temples vigorously and hope that the next page is the last page, and that a new story will suddenly emerge and rescue you from the ocean of footnotes that has somehow managed to expand and engulf the actual text, has somehow managed to become the actual text.

Q, Q.

Not that that's a bad thing. It's not. Or maybe it is. And so but then what isn't?1 I think it was all part of the experience. Do you want another one? We could get one more and then call it a night.

Q.

Don't get me wrong. This book is beautiful. Astoundingly beautiful. There's the thirty-page monologue where a father describes in such grotesque detail the ways in which he hates his son, how the creature sucked on his mother's nipples until raw, manipulated the mother with tantrums and tears, stole the mother's love from the father and never gave it back. There's the story of a girl who merges souls and energies with her rapist in order to save her life. How she never stopped looking into his eyes, stroking the back of his head. How he never stopped crying, or stabbing his knife into the gravel beside her.

Q.

It's evident that David Foster Wallace {pounds fist twice on heart, and then looks towards sky (i.e. heaven)} is a genius. Was a genius2 . I don't know. He's the smartest fiction writer I've ever read, and his words and sentences are the smartest words and sentences I've ever read. It was an experience. Through and through. Was it the experience that David Foster Wallace expected me to have? Quite possibly. But one never really knows, now does one now does one now does one.

Q. 

Are you sure you don't want to get another one?

__________________

1. Right?

2. David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest," was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46. He had hung himself. His wife had found him.