Audio Book- Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace

I just finished listening to Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. I can tell he’s talented but I didn’t enjoy it much. I would compare the experience to looking at a painting by a good impressionist artist when you don't like impressionist art, you think it’s crap but it’s really not. Despite not liking his style, I really enjoyed three of the stories. The first story was about a guy with a disfigured arm who used it as an asset to manipulate women into sleeping with him. The second is a conversation between buddies, where the one telling the story seems to be a good guy but ends up showing his true colors by taking advantage of a vulnerable girl. The third was about a man who as a teen needed a ridiculously complex fantasy in order to masturbate and could never get it just right. As I said DFW was a gifted author but as a narrator he was terrible, just awful. He had a monotonous drone and an inability to pronounce any word that started with WH without sounding like a freak. The combination kept distracting me from the stories and made me wonder why he would choose to narrate some of them himself. Was he oblivious to the fact that he sucked at reading out loud or did he know and not care? Anyway, when others narrated I enjoyed the book a lot more. I REALLY hope “brief” was used ironically in the title because these hideous men could pontificate like nobody’s business. Some of the stories started off well but would go on and on trying to make their point in the imagined interviews. Another of my main problems with the book was that DFW chose to only include the interviewee’s answers without including any of the interviewers questions. The technique gave the stories a preachy rather than conversational tone. I could handle it through an individual story but hated it collectively. Again, I think this would be another nod of support for his literary genius but I just didn’t like the style. I will say this: The guy had some pretty big balls, which I respect. You’d have to in order to write not 1 but 2 stories about potential positive side effects of rape. They were brazen and, I’m sure, designed to elicit strong visceral responses from the reader. But in both cases the character telling the story drones on for so long using vocabulary scarcely used in casual conversation that the stories felt pretentious and exasperating.

Overall, if you’re a fan of DFW and audio books I’m sure you’ll enjoy the book but I’m not a fan.