Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster WallaceMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I enjoyed it, but it was a tough read.
Unlike what the title might suggest this book is a collection of short stories. Some, but not all, of them are structured like interviews. Some, but not all, focus on a male character. Some, but not all, are about awful people.
The vibe of the book is that it is a meditation on thinking. An extremely cynical meditation, but a meditation none the less. You could say it is a meditation on how useful it actually is to think. Almost all of the stories draw a contrast between a very thought out idea, and the very base (or trite or simple) version of the same. The suggestion being how similar they are. He manages to bring this out consistently, and often hilariously.
My favorite of the bunch was the penultimate short story. It talks about love in very difficult circumstances. Has a lot of twists and turns. And is just really thought provoking. Another one I really likes is the story called Signifying Nothing. Just a hilarious of how we deal with our problems in real life. The Depressed Person is another impressive story about how thinking about a problem does not lead to a solution. There are also a lot of footnotes in this one, going waaaay meta. Speaking of meta, we have the Octet. Here the narrator is dealing with the problem of writing a cohesive collection of short stories.
That is the biggest problem with the book. It is sometimes, too meta for its own good. Sometimes it is hard to see where the story is going and if it is worthwhile to waste your brain cell to decipher what David Foster Wallace is trying to say. But it always leads you to an alleyway that you have never explored before. If you are willing to work through a book, and I mean work through it, then this is the book for you. Otherwise, might I suggest the Witcher series. It is a more fun, more sincere book that also has a lot of philosophy peppered in.
At the end I will just add that much like Consider the Lobster this book is going to remain with me a long while. I might even reread it at some point. After all, there are a number of stories in this book that I have no clue about (I am talking about you the last story 🥺).