A baffling man
Although David Foster Wallace
doesn't act the way an author
should, his brilliant new book
is filled with desperation,
loneliness and addiction.

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN
BY DAVID FOSTER WALLACE
LITTLE, BROWN, FICTION, 320 PAGES

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By Vince Passaro

May 28, 1999 | A couple of years ago the young novelist, essayist and short story writer David Foster Wallace showed up on the "Charlie Rose" show. It was a delightfully painful television experience. The hook for the appearance was that Wallace's massive novel, "Infinite Jest," had just been issued in paperback.

The publicity that surrounded Wallace and that difficult, brilliant, heavily promoted but little-read novel provides a good working example of the differences between the agent-editor-media matrix's vision of a serious writer and one who actually is serious. In the happy publicity vocabulary of Nice Cover Quotes and glossy mag author profiles, Wallace is a soulful Gen-Xer with long, light brown hair, an eccentric bandanna, a girlfriend, a tennis background and the added glamour of deep thoughts and a successful rehab history.

In reality, however, Wallace is a strange, very intelligent man with bad clothes who looks in public as if he'd prefer to be wearing a full mask but makes do with a scarf over his head. He also happens to be one of the most ambitious and talented writers of his generation. His work is bitingly funny and remarkably, even wildly, imaginative; at the same time he aims for very large psychological, emotional and social issues, issues of how we live or fail to live, love and fail to love, survive or destroy ourselves.

Judging by his demeanor as well as his prose, Wallace has what appears to be a nicely productive case of chronic depression -- you can see that sore and haunted look around the eyes. Apparently he tried drugs for a short time -- a sensible experiment given his personality -- but didn't react well to them. Now he writes a lot.

What makes Wallace such a good/bad talk show guest and profile subject is that he attempts to answer fully and in nuanced ways the questions he's asked. The publicity machine can artfully photograph around him, they can catch the near-blondness while largely obscuring the monastic agonies and fanatical intensity marking his face, but they have trouble with the quotes. On "Charlie Rose," Wallace was like a giant combine moving through a field of wheat when he was supposed to be posing with a cute donkey and an old leather plow in front of the family barn. In the midst of long answers that continually posed an impossible series of new questions, moving over the humps of the host's simplistic assumptions with a clatter and bang, he stopped and asked Charlie, 'I assume all this will be edited out, right?' Each new inquiry seemed to make Wallace seethe, and his obvious awareness that he'd better try to answer in a way appropriate to a television show only made him squirm deeper into the nest of implications he created. Charlie seemed dazed.

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