An appropriate thought because the next time has just rolled around. Wallace publishes a new work of fiction this month, "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," a collection of stories that, like his earlier collection, "Girl With Curious Hair," as well as "Infinite Jest," is filled with desperation, loneliness and addiction.

Early reviewers from the likes of Publishers Weekly and Kirkus seem baffled by this book. Its formal innovations, its ironic play across the plain of ideas in addition to character, make it a difficult book for average readers to pin down. "Opaque" one review called it. In fact, "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" continues Wallace's record of presenting new turns, new valleys and imposing palisades in the landscape of American short fiction. Wallace's selections of voices are in the best sense theatrical and historically nimble: in "Girl With Curious Hair," for instance, his characters included an unstoppable lesbian contestant on "Jeopardy," a skinhead girl, an actress making an appearance on "Letterman." Here, he takes up figures possibly more obscure, less pop-cult than sub-cult: a murkily identified refugee of central Europe or the unnamed individual at the center of the story "The Depressed Person." They all speak in a language subtly undergirded by their own appropriate historical knowledge. Wallace writes of young boys at the pool, middle-aged men in uncomfortable sexual situations and the aforementioned depressed woman who unbearably narrates her pathologies in the neo-vocabulary of healing and therapy. Perhaps most extraordinary among the collection are the clinical documentary impersonations of certain unpleasant men whose dysfunctional reminiscences -- mostly sexual but occasionally otherwise -- constitute the series of fragmentary selections Wallace calls "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men."

The interviews, which are scattered throughout the book, suggest some sort of endless psychological entrance interview or massive and unbounded sociological study. They are in a question-and-answer format, but the questions are omitted, represented only by a blank line beginning and ending with "Q." With the questions left blank, we are without the soothing presence of the "normal," and are left to face the warped reality of late-20th century life in its purest sense, entirely free of context, reduced to language and vocal impersonation, like a rough cut, unnarrated Frederick Wiseman documentary, all sound and no picture.

In one, Wallace presents a highly damaged middle-aged man of what one guesses is East German birth recounting his earliest masturbation fantasies, set at what he calls the State Exercise Facility, where his mother dutifully kept fit and where he, a sickly child, accompanied her and his brother. He watched with the dread and horror of the physically inept as they threw weighted balls at each other and perspired. In his fantasy, stimulated by early viewing of "the American situation comedy 'Bewitched,'" he was able with a gesture of his hand to freeze all motion in the gymnasium and hold insensate everyone in the large room, while beckoning the woman he desired, the only other animate being in the tableau, to join him for a frenzied liaison in the middle of the gymnasium floor, all the other exercisers, including Mama, standing paralyzed and oblivious around them. His schoolbook English syntax is perfectly formal and incorrect in all the right places, as he explains that the fantasy was not so easy to sustain:

This may appear so outlandish, of course, from the perspective of how little logic is in envisioning a sickly youth causing sexual desire with only a hand's motion. I have really no answer for this. The hand's supernatural power was perhaps the fantasy's First Premise or aksioma, itself unquestioned, from which all then must rationally derive and cohere. Here you must say I think First Premise. And all must cohere from this, for I was the son of a great figure of state science, thus if once a logical inconsistency in the fantasy's setting occurred to me, it demanded a resolution consistent with the enframing logic of the hand's powers, and I was responsible for this. If not, I found myself distracted by nagging thoughts of the inconsistency, and was unable to masturbate. This is following for you? By this I am saying, what began only as a childish fantasy of unlimited power became a series of problems, complications, inconsistencies, and the responsibilities to erect working, internally consistent solutions to these. It was these responsibilities which quickly expanded to become too insupportable even within fantasy to permit me ever to exercise again true power of any type, hence placing me in the circumstances which you see all too plainly here.

Note the sharp, nearly unconscious doubling of meanings here in "erect," and "exercise." Other interviews include what seems to be an overheard conversation between two lecherous traveling salesmen, and one subject's reminiscence of his father's life as a men's room attendant in a fancy hotel. You might call these pieces tours de force, but you might also as easily see them as entirely new ways of creating fiction.

Wallace, among his other talents, blends the languages of modern philosophy, sexual angst and suburban psychological breakdown in a way that manages both to be thoroughly new in literary terms, and yet still evoke in the reader that state of mind that all great literature evokes, that sense of encounter with phenomena long familiar and suddenly, perfectly identified.

Wallace is a third-person writer in a first-person age. As a result, he appropriates first-person forms and uses them to give himself and us a third-person perspective. Instead of fiction's usual series of self-assertive paragraphs he prefers to employ the most obnoxious, or annoying, or mundane narrative formats of our time like a hermit crab inhabiting discarded shells. In "Brief Interviews," these include the questionnaire, the Q&A, the structured notes that approach but do not achieve the level of a story, plus footnotes galore (many running to three pages or more), futuristic dictionary entries and, in a story called "Octet," the pop quiz:

Pop Quiz # 4

Two late-stage terminal drug addicts sat up against an alley's wall with nothing to inject and no means and nowhere to go or be. Only one had a coat. It was cold, and one of the terminal drug addicts' teeth chattered and he sweated and shook with fever. He seemed gravely ill. He smelled very bad. He sat up against the wall with his head on his knees.

This took place in Cambridge MA in an alley behind the Commonwealth Aluminum Can Redemption Center on Massachusetts Avenue in the early hours of 12 January 1993. The terminal drug addict with the coat took off the coat and scooted over up close to the gravely ill terminal drug addict and took and spread the coat as far as it would go over the both of them and then scooted over some more and got himself pressed right up against him and put his arm around him and let him be sick on his arm, and they stayed like that up against the wall together all through the night.

Q.: Which one lived.

Redemption Center indeed. In this passage, as in all of Wallace's work, the hope of redemption, redemption of the most significant kind, flickers through the text like a weak but still present flame, and what comes through of him as a writer and mind are his sense of profound irony, his intellectual scope and something too of his well-handled, almost talismanic pain. Wallace has planted himself firmly as the American writer of his generation to watch, to match and, most urgently, to read.
salon.com | May 28, 1999

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