Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Beautiful bits (Forever Overhead) but I found the “interviews” that gave the collection its name a tedious literary exercise.

Draining, scarifying, funny, hyperactive, elevating. ‘Content warning’, as we say now. For instance, the person described in this passage is one story’s hero, a powerful agent: [her] prototypical sandals, unrefined fibers, daffy arcana, emotional incontinence, flamboyantly long hair, extreme liberality on social issues, financial support from parents they revile, bare feet, obscure import religions, indifferent hygiene, a gooey and somewhat canned vocabulary, the whole predictable peace-and-love post-Hippie diction… i.e. He comes up with a perfect encapsulation of a facile social trend, but throws away his anger about it, makes us realise that our efforts to be tasteful / rational / grown-up are, here, making us small. DFW was an early mover in the revived 'Third Culture' we can all enjoy: i.e. writing about the highly technical in terms of its high meaning. But he was different: his syncretism came out of the negations of high postmodern theory, rather than the usual humanists with science backgrounds. Or like just another manipulative pseudopomo Bullshit artist who’s trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimention and commenting on the fiasco itself. ‘On His Deathbed, Holding Your Hand’ made me cry a lot.

So I liked most of this and really didn't like others, namely "Tri-Stan" and "On His Deathbead", and just didn't 'get' parts ("The Devil is a Busy Man", "Yet Another Example"). Overall pretty good, but not his best.

It’s really fascinating reading DFW books having only learned about him in the first place not long ago via a piece about the author in some paper, can’t remember which. But it soringboarded me into reading In the Land of Men, which is a memoir of a woman who was EIC of Esquire’s fiction department as DFW rose to prominence. Reading DFW with that context is interesting to me because so much of his work reads like a desperate attempt to come to grips with his own toxic masculinity, which is why some people are repelled by his preoccupation with his now sad subjects. It’s no wonder than white men would be his primary audience though. I can’t help but be interested in unspooling his work knowing exactly where it led and knowing the way in which he treated people despite his proclaimed aspiring viewpoint with This Is Water. Mirroring in these interviews, it seems clear DFW had mental health problems similar to most men in society, but his wrestling with them became more acute as he accrued cache and power. The way he transcribes or translates these people was sure to be polarizing. It’s fascinating and horrifying to hear personal truths of a subject, especially when they are reflected onto the interviewer in a way only a book can be, since it’s filtered through the mind of the writer. The structure of each piece I’ve read always has an inedible DFW mark on it that I find both easy to follow, even though it diverges from the typical—and also a weird kind of ownership or responsibility. Like he can’t actually formulate things in a manner too accessible to people because each piece is a very specific artifact of his thinking and thought process, even if it’s via other people, in this case.