Brief Interviews and the brief, aching heart of man
At the end of June, I will be attending the David Foster Wallace Conference at his previous place of employment: the University of Illinois. I thought it apt to tackle this story collection and A Supposedly Fun Thing…(his nonfiction essay collection) before I make the drive north.
I quite enjoyed Brief Interviews. I mean that in more ways than one in that the titular string of stories (the brief interviews themselves are interspersed between other, non-related stories — a keen choice used to keep a clean pace) were the best part of this collection. Here, Wallace adduces broken, deeply modern men. All of them are flawed, some are sexist, and still fewer are frightening in their cruelty. Some of the interviews get a bit grisly, and I would not recommend this book to the squeamish or politically correct.
The ways Wallace censures these men are subtle. Most of the them are self-aware enough to apprehend their hamartia, but awareness alone won’t save them from it. The author also employs a mysterious “Q” instead of revealing any interviewer question — for myriad reasons. Throughout, it is hinted that the interviewers are women (perhaps even the same woman). Thus implying that men silence women, or that the focus is so male that we needn’t know the feminine question at all. It also just makes for a better read: it forces us as readers to do a little more work, to perhaps think a little harder.
In all of them, Wallace spins a tangly yarn about morality, the male gaze, modern masculinity, and male-female relational misfire. Many of the interviewees actually hit on the interviewer/woman to whom they are describing (in detail) their heinousness with other women. Wanna know the worst part? There wasn’t a single man described here for whom I did not feel deep, tethered sympathy. Even empathy. At times it feels like Wallace is directly indicting me. The hideousness of these men is not always overt; it’s modern, it’s subtle, and it’s something I can find in every man I know — including myself. These are not the morals of Tolkien. Gray matters.
In the last interview, if you let him, Wallace will even invite you to sympathize with a rapist. It’s in this particularly gruesome interview that the book finds its heart and purpose: sincere artless human connection. He even goes so far as to subtly meta-comment on fiction at large, and on the relationship between author and reader (similar to the interviewer-interviewee relationship within the text):
“I did not care whether it was quote true. It would depend on what you meant by true. […] I was moved, changed. […] even if it was […] goo, her belief in it had saved her life, so whether or not it’s goo becomes irrelevant, no?”
This is the purpose of all good fiction.
And all of this in his winding, typical prose, which I would describe as controlled falling. As always, Wallace writes like a good basketball team: he controls the pace. With his lack of punctuation, he sort of forces you to play ball at his speed. Even the most difficult, fracturing, and hall-of-mirror-esque sentences are written to be read quickly.
Sadly, the interviews do not comprise the entire olio. There are plenty of other stories, and sure, some of them did rock my world (particularly “Octet,” which is essentially Wallace’s On Writing). Many, though, were duds. Some were so tedious that they felt like slogging through a bog in jog pants. Stories like “The Depressed Person” read like a tedious polemic against navel-gazing (something I thought we all already agreed was bad), others, like “Datum Centurio,” as some MFA writing exercise. These pieces could have been cut from the work to no great loss, in my probably controversial view. I found them missing the big heart that his masterpiece has aplenty.
Infinite Jest is, yes, tedious at times, but it always moves you more often than it lectures to you. The maximalism is justified by a maximally enlarged heart right in the center of the novel; crack the spine and there it is. B.I. is much darker, and I get the reasoning for that — a subtle, incisive dissection of the male mind does not portend a picnic — but at the same time I always thought Wallace railed against that sort of lightless writing; in fact, he openly upbraided Bret Easton Ellis for it. I know you’re maybe thinking it’s unfair to compare these little belles-lettres to I.J., but to that I offer this rejoinder: how could I not?
Inside many of the non-interview stories, I found much clever fiddling and tinkering but not enough heart. The emotional core, for me, resides in the titular B.I.s. I don’t want to work this hard for a fracturing psychological maelstrom or mere literary exercise — display for us the human heart! I don’t want you to prove to me how smart you are; show me how you feel! Sappy sincerity!…even when Wallace is openly advocating for this exact thing in the book, it still feels like we’re in a classroom, him at the head and me unable to fit a word in, sans stakes. Whereas by comparison the beautiful, sprawling I.J. felt something akin to a fatal walk through a dark wood, together.
