A review by bookiesanta
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

2.0

It's not that I didn't know that this was going to be difficult to read at times. I was warned several times, and I have swam these waters before. The Pale King was a very good book, but also off-putting and aggressively numbing. After finishing that book, and thinking on it for a bit, I really liked what he was saying, but there were times, while I was reading it, that I asked "is it worth this?". That's part of Wallace's endgame, really. Yes, he wrote for himself and his standards first, but...it's hard to read some of these stories, that go on and on, and just revel in difficulty, and not think that Wallace is doing this on purpose, that he is standing on high, an ancient ruler commanding his subjects to prove fealty by torturing themselves, a little bit, and then the proof of loyalty will be known. There are so many moments in Hideous Men that any truth gained was overshadowed and lost to the constant obstacles to be overcome. Eventually, the obstacles become the reality, and nobody remembers that they are looking for the truths. Eventually, if you are continually writing to show the dark, terrible, unlikeable sides of humans, if you are writing in a manner that upsets people so they lose empathy and sympathy for your creations, at some point, somebody is just going to assume you are dark, terrible, and unlikeable, and discard empathy and sympathy, and the message gets lost. I said, in a status update, that there comes a point in every DFW book where I ask why I am reading this. That's not a joke, that happens every time, but I eventually find the reasons I'm looking for, and we all move on. All I found in this book was Wallace, languidly flipping me the bird while he smokes his cigarette, not even bothering to deem me worthy of full extension of the middle finger.