Review #1 - David Foster Wallace: Literary footnote

Review of David Foster Wallace's book, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men -as seen on Westminster News Online's WOW magazine...

Unfamiliar language structures ripple through David Foster Wallace’s book of short stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, like a strong undercurrent pulling the reader through dark water. Vast, page long, footnotes insist that you read backwards and forwards at the same time. Seemingly endless sentences skip along holding your attention for pages at a time before offering the release of a full stop. In one short story a conversation is presented as numbered and sub-claused report.

The book consists of twenty-three short pieces of writing which all use vibrant language and innovative form. Each of the stories has a different narrative structure which jolts expectations and demands attention. Just when you think you’re on top of one unusual story structure, something new creeps into the next to shock you. The intensity of the writing makes it hard to penetrate, but very addictive. Vivid, ryhthmic, bouncing language and descreptions in second-by-second slowed down time feature heavily in Foster Wallace’s writing.

The three extracts which give the book its name, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, are journalistic in style. Each details a number of conversations which start with a label containing a number, date and American state. A transcription of one person’s part of the conversation is given, with the other part simply marked as Q and left blank. The reader becomes the questioner, any form of omniscient authorial voice is shunned.

Suspicion about narrative voices echos throughout many of the stories and at a deeper level seems to dictate the innovative structure of the writing. In one of the densest stories, The Depressed Person, footnotes are used instead of a narrator’s voice to offer a second viewpoint in the writing. Multiple voices remain in the piece, but the narrator’s voice is broken up and treated cautiously throughout.

Signifying Nothing is a dark comic piece of writing which describes a strange childhood memory that causes tensions in a family’s life. It’s a simple story told in the first person which is both funny and perplexing. Many of the stories make an impression simply because of the freshness of language used in them. ‘Forever Overheard’ offers a description of light and water in a swimming pool that echos David Hockney’s 1960s pictures of Californian water in intensity.

The language throughout Brief Interview with Hideous Men is vivid and fresh, it cuts through the stories assisting the reader in penetrating new narrative structures and dark themes. The originality of the writing and it’s insistence in questioning form is sharp and refreshing, it continually asks where voices in fiction come from. Foster Wallace uses language to act like the sucked lemon slice which helps to wash down the many tequila shots of radical form. Both are sharp and will not be to everyones taste, but the combination results in an innovative, original piece of writing that is bursting with attitude.