Conversations with David Foster Wallace by Stephen J. Burn

Author:Stephen J. Burn [Burn, Stephen J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2012-01-12T18:30:00+00:00

David Foster Wallace: In the Company of Creeps

Lorin Stein/1999

From Publishers Weekly, 3 May 1999. © 1999 by PWxyz. Reprinted by permission.

“It wasn’t till I saw the galleys that I noticed how horrific this stuff was.” Sunday evening in Normal, Illinois, David Foster Wallace and PW are lost somewhere near the lingerie department of the local Kmart, on the lookout for audiocassettes, and Wallace is taking this unforeseen pre-interview delay to air a couple of last-minute reservations about the PW interview process. “Am I expected to have insight or opinions about the publishing industry?” Wallace freezes mid-aisle, for maybe the third time in two minutes, as if he might bolt for the check-out. “Because what I know about the publishing industry could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.”

The author of Infinite Jest (Little, Brown, 1996)—the 1079-page, heavily annotated tome that has already done as much as any single book this decade to change the sound and aims of American fiction—is wearing calf-high duckboots (jeans tucked in), a nylon backpack, and a tortoiseshell hair-band too small for his head. The combination of duckboots and hairband, not to mention stubble and granny glasses, and Wallace’s all-around largeness (he stoops at about 6’2”), gives him a demeanor that’s both endearingly little girlish and hard to synthesize. He has the look of a man who needs a bobby pin.

In person, Wallace doesn’t resemble his author photos—and the skittish but basically cheerful—looking guy next to the Martha Stewart Home Furnishings display simply does not look anything like anyone who could have just written his latest collection, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, just out from Little, Brown, a cycle of darkly comic stories, peopled by sexual predators and spiritual bankrupts, in which rape and masturbation make a mockery of romantic love; family attachments are measured by the damage they do; and even the story titles (“Adult World,” “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”) dare readers to exempt themselves from the nightmarishness of Wallace’s vision.

In the brief q&a pieces, scattered through the collection, that give the book its title, a female interviewer interrogates a series of creepy men about their relationships with women. Although we never hear her questions, only their answers, Wallace thinks of her as the book’s protagonist. “Something bad happens to her over the course of the book,” Wallace says, sitting over a post-Kmart burger in a nearby diner, “like something really bad.”

Chewing to smithereens one toothpick after another (he quit smoking mid-February), Wallace is quick to agree that Brief Interviews is his most disturbing work. “I had no idea quite how upsetting the book was going to be, or that friends would see it as reflecting things that were going on with me—which, if that’s true, then I’m the literary equivalent of the person who writes ‘Help me’ on the mirror without knowing it.”

Wallace says he never planned to write the fictional interviews that lend the book its title and tone. He just sat down one week and “four or five came out.

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