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Little, Brown & Company, 1999

The brief interviews of the title of David Foster Wallace's collection of short fiction refers to a series of fictional dialogues with conniving and misogynistic men speaking openly with a female interviewer. The interviewer's questions are represented only abstractly as Q. and the resultant monologues are realistic portrayals of a variety of self-absorbed, deviant and abhorrent male figures.

These interviews, which are interspersed throughout the book, underscore Wallace's expertise for rendering believable characters with authentic voices. Revealing, as they do, the darker and seedier nature of their subjects, these interviews feel much like illicitly overheard snippets of conversation. The best of these is "Brief Interview #20," the last in the collection, in which a young man relates with brazen candidness his story of unexpectedly sympathizing with a female conquest he initially describes as a "granola cruncher":

"Fluffiness or daffiness or intellectual flaccidity or a somehow smug-seeming naivete. Choose whichever offends you least. And yes and don't worry I'm aware of how all this sounds and can well imagine the judgments you're forming from the way I'm characterizing what drew me to her but if I'm really to explain this to you as requested then I have no choice but to be brutally candid rather than observing the pseudosensitive niceties of euphemism about the way a reasonably experienced, educated man is going to view an extraordinarily good-looking girl whose life philosophy is fluffy and unconsidered and when one comes right down to it kind of contemptible."

Many of the other pieces that comprise Brief Interviews incorporate the stylistic pyrotechnics for which David Foster Wallace is famous - a usage lexicon from 100 years in the future that sheds light on the deterioration of male-female sexual relations, a series of pop quizzes that degrades into a meta-fiction in which the author debates the utility of such a form, and the appropriation of ancient myth into a self-indulgent 1980's story about (of all things) entertainment.

Some of this work is less experimental. There are several pieces of flash fiction-length work, a couple of which are poignant in their transmission of a single thought or feeling, and there are actually conventional short stories, such as "Forever Overhead," evoking a thirteen year old's Summer day at a public pool.

The longest piece in the collection, "The Depressed Person," painstakingly covers ground for which Wallace is well known to have been expert. It is the story, written in a flat and clinical voice, of a character for whom chronic depression renders "every waking hour an indescribable hell on earth." "The Depressed Person" is as carefully and perfectly wrought a portrait of clinical depression that you're ever likely to find. With page after page of detailed footnotes however, it is painful to read - perhaps a desired effect - and ultimately not an engaging story.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is a difficult book, which contains what many Wallace devotees will tell you is some of his best work. I finished Infinite Jest just weeks before picking up this collection however, and I'll confess that while these stories contain the same linguistic virtuosity as Wallace's epic novel, I found Wallace's penchant for experimentation and his relentless pursuit of a single thought into its elemental origins to be tiring and better suited to the longer form. I recommend Wallace initiates begin with his book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again or even (yes) Infinite Jest before delving into this book.