‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #20’ by David Foster Wallace

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is probably my favourite short story collection, and this is my favourite story in it.

I love how it reaches out across the chasm, of course grown yet wider since its publication, between political left and right (is it just my ignorance, or is it hard to find stories that do that?), I love how it clocks a typical contemptuous, shallow perception of a person and then blasts through that perception to something beautiful, I love how it finds profound truth in even a thoroughly bogus ideological package, I love its tussle between real monstrosity and real redemption and its consideration of everyday forms that both can take. I also find it funny, moving, shocking. A proper epic of the short story form, I’d say.

I should add that, as I express my love of Wallace, I’m mindful of two kinds of claim being made about him by others. One is that he was, in many ways and many situations, a cruel and misogynistic person. The other is that that cruelty and misogyny pervade his writing too. Having read most of Wallace’s work, I find that second claim particularly hard to buy. If it’s true, I have a lot to learn on this. But then, yeah, maybe I do have a lot to learn on this. For now, I’ve read and heard a few cases against Wallace – none have persuaded me of the second claim, but I continue to be up for the discussion. The first claim, on the other hand… That one I find a lot more persuasive. According to one of Wallace’s editors, many of the Brief Interviews were even based on discussions Wallace had himself had, with him in the Hideous Man role. Of course self-awareness never absolved anyone of anything, as Bo Burnham precisely put it. Then again, we might consider the possibility of there being, in these stories, not just passive self-awareness but determined acts of self-scrutiny, self-castigation, moral striving, warning to others, attempted atonement even.

I’ve come across some clearly intelligent people saying David Foster Wallace’s books should simply not be read or taught. It’s difficult for me to describe how that makes me feel. There are elements in there of panic, of sadness, of confusion, of weariness, of fatalism… The fact is that this writing does a spectacularly good job of making me more critically alert to my demons and possible demons, and more eager to be kind and caring, and it gives me great joy in the process, and makes me feel more at home in this world. You want to take that away? I don’t feel the desire to exonerate Wallace. Far less to canonise him, as biographer DT Max puts it. I don’t want to cut the art work away from the artist either – I don’t think that would be wise. I do want to recognise his humanity. And encourage us all to fully recognise our own. I mean, acknowledge that we’re all capable of being both wonderful and terrible, and there might even sometimes be causative links between these two extremes in us, and we don’t just wilfully generate our evils out of nowhere, these things have histories, pathologies, roots stretching way beyond the scope of what we choose, and all of us are, to some considerable extent, tossed around on the seas of fate, there but for the grace of God, so to speak, and goodbut for the grace of God too, because not yet in the situation that would bring our demons mercilessly to the fore or show up the full extent of our moral vulnerabilities (and so perhaps for now blissfully unaware of these). Can we consider the possibility that people who do terrible things, and then live with the knowledge and consequences of what they’ve done, sometimes have important things to tell us, or even a related moral strength of feeling that most of us cannot so easily muster? I want to appreciate the wonderful things Wallace created (and feel gratitude and admiration towards him for them, yes), and look right into the darkness of what wrong he did too and be appalled and learn the lessons, and see and consider the probable vital links between this wonder and this darkness, and hold this all together, and breathe. And if that indeed sounds like a hell of a challenge, well, a) I think it’s a challenge we stand to realise we face with many great artists, or even, in a sense, with all people, including ourselves, and b) I think it’s a challenge Wallace’s stories, and maybe especially this one, can help with.

First published, under the slightly different title ‘Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #6’, in The Paris Review in 1997. Then collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men in 1999. Available to Paris Review subscribers on their website. There’s also, on YouTube, a great recording of Wallace reading the story, and it’s been there long enough for me to hope that it’s there legally

‘Forever Overhead’ by David Foster Wallace

“Happy Birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognise that important things are happening to you.”

Written in the second person, David Foster Wallace’s breathtaking story ‘Forever Overhead’ puts us in the body of a young boy at a swimming pool. “Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right.”

The boy is at the pool with his family for his thirteenth birthday, his sister playing with her friends, his parents sunbathing in deckchairs. As the boy strays from his family, walking towards the diving board, we go deeper into his skin, feeling his heartbeat rise, seeing his footprints disappear on the hot concrete.

Queuing to climb the ladder, he pretends to look bored while looking at the older girls’ bodies. “The bottoms are in soft thin cloth, tight nylon stretch … The girls’ legs make you think of deer. Look bored.”

Capturing the acute self-awareness of puberty, ‘Forever Overhead’ is an incredibly visceral story. As the boy slowly climbs the ladder up to the diving board, his feet hurt on the thin metal rungs. Foster Wallace gives us such fine detail, from “the wind that makes a thin whistle in your ears” to the “constellations of blue-clean chlorine beads” on the boy’s skin. The use of the second person perspective brings us so close, adding a sense of intimacy, an aching tenderness. Each time I read this story I experience it anew.

First published in Fiction International, 1991, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999

‘Good Old Neon’ by David Foster Wallace

“My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”

I know at least one person whose life was saved by this story. I’m not exaggerating. My own experience – who knows? The effect it had on me was so intense, it’s certainly not far off. Reading it at 19, trying to work out why I couldn’t find a way of being alive that felt natural, or make connections that felt effortless, or have an emotion that felt pure – it put those experiences I saw as insoluble personal failings into the context of being a human subject and having to deal in the insufficiency of concrete things. I re-read it every couple of years, so I can confirm – it’s not just a late-adolescence thing. The stubborn sense of knotty anguish that forms at the beginning gives way to a struggling acceptance of the indignity of it all, and it’s so tender, so kind, so tremulously sublime, that every time I read it again, I feel it opening up inside my lungs. “So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.”

First published in Harper’s Magazine, January 1998, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999, and The David Foster Wallace Reader, Little, Brown, 2014

‘Good Old Neon’ by David Foster Wallace

‘Good Old Neon’ might represent the apex of Wallace’s fiction for me. It’s perhaps the clearest distillation of what he was trying to do; to work within a register of generational irony in order to transcend its form. Wallace’s best work is affecting before it is smart, and ‘Good Old Neon’ holds the metafictional tricks at a distance, letting them percolate throughout the story before they emerge, finally, in a transformative way. The story is narrated by a dead man, a suicide, who considers how communication after death is not bound by time or space, but also how that transcendence cannot necessarily obviate a sense of failure. Many of Wallace’s hobby horses – Wittgenstein, Derrida – are here in some form, though the main influence on this story appears to be Buddhism; the protagonist, Neal, is so fixated on the binary of success or failure that he remains trapped in the bardo-like space of the story and needs someone to pull him out, which they (sort of) do in unexpected and quite beautiful fashion at the story’s climax.

First published in Conjunctions 37, Fall 2001, and collected in Oblivion, Little, Brown, 2004

‘The Depressed Person’ by David Foster Wallace

Psychic torment is to Wallace what the Tuscan sky was to Hazzard. Here the protagonist is not only in “terrible and unceasing emotional pain” but feels that “the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror”. So Wallace, as he often did, invented a new prose style – affectless, paranoid, recursive – to imitate the inner workings of his character’s mind. The result is at once a story about the limits of expression and an act of expression that in its virtuosity is almost joyous.

First published in Harper’s Magazine, January 1998, and collected in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999, and The David Foster Wallace Reader, Little, Brown, 2014

‘Girl with Curious Hair’ by David Foster Wallace

Our narrator, Sick Puppy – a sociopathic Young Republican with a penchant for sadistic burning –attends a jazz concert with a group of nihilistic punks with names like Grope, Tit and Gimlet. Terrible events ensue. Thanks to Foster Wallace’s virtuoso distortion of the English language, the narration resembles a writing exercise by an unhinged child in an ESL class. It is hilarious. It is also deeply unsettling: you get the feeling that anything (the most awful things) could happen; and beneath the layers of chaos and hilarity, there is a kind of stark moral terror. Sick Puppy is somebody with only shards of a personality – and beneath those shards, a roaring, violent nothingness. Good stuff.

Collected in Girl with Curious Hair, W.W. Norton & Co, 1989

‘Incarnations of Burned Children’ by David Foster Wallace

Just a couple of pages in length, but it feels like the molten product of some golden imaginative moment. Similar in subject matter, though very different in tone to Carver’s ‘A Small Good Thing’ – and even better. If I had to rescue just one story of all those represented here from the flames, it would probably be this one. It is emotionally devastating, articulating the unthinkable. Simply brilliant and terrifying all at the same time. It shows that the author, famous for his sprawl, could also work in miniature. Don’t read it if you’ve just had a baby. Otherwise this is my pick for the finest story I know.

First published in Esquire, April 2009. Collected in Oblivion: Stories, Abacus, 2005 and now The David Foster Wallace Reader, Penguin, 2018. Read the story online here

‘Forever Overhead’ by David Foster Wallace

Most of David Foster Wallace’s work was ‘closed’ to me for a long time. I found his style overbearing, heady with detail, footnotes and stylistic play. Reading this story was a turning point for me. It’s in the second person (a rare example of when the use of the second person actually works), and I’ve seldom felt closer to a character than in this story. It minutely describes the moments of a boy ascending the diving board and preparing to jump into the pool.

From Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown/Abacus, 1999

‘Forever Overhead’ by David Foster Wallace

When David Foster Wallace writes in the imperative, you stop and listen. You accept his personal as universal in the story ‘Forever Overhead’ because he’s gifted it to you in such an airtight condition, that you don’t feel a single draught when you read it. It’s spiked with the usual DFW arrangements, which are filtered through the punch of the present tense. While the focus is on a boy about to dive into a pool, it’s the process rather than the result that’s tested out here. It’s a disservice to pathologise every bit of text that DFW wrote, and to relate this piece directly to his mental health. The process of thinking and its consequences need not always be understood in a clinical context; it can be more interesting to reach for an alternative. Thinking is both a gift and a curse in ‘Forever Overhead’. One of the most impressive things in this story is how the narrator’s thoughts order and manipulate time. You can see that this was achieved through utter graft and witness the energy it must have taken to capture anticipation so accurately: “There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.”

In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Little, Brown, 1999. Can be read online here

‘Mister Squishy’, by David Foster Wallace

I am frequently confused by literature’s seeming lack of interest in corporate life. We work constantly, in the industrialised west, answering emails on our holidays, checking our phones just as we wake up, but so much fiction seems to be interested only in the stuff around work. ‘Mister Squishy’ shows how you do it, the entire story taking place in a focus group where they are testing reactions to a new chocolate snack, the narration switching between corporate jargon and acutely observed characters who are struggling to fit the moulds that capitalism requires them to fit.

Oblivion was the first time I really got David Foster Wallace, having tried (and failed) to read Infinite Jest and having thoroughly disliked Girl with Curious Hair. I found this at one of those bookstores that has more Moleskines on display than actual books, and since I saw very little else of interest, I thought I would give Wallace another try. I am glad I did: if there is one story I wished I had written, this would be it.

First published in McSweeney’s #5, 2000, as ‘Mr. Squishy’ under the pseudonym Elizabeth Klemm, collected in Oblivion, Little, Brown, 2004

‘Octet’, by David Foster Wallace

This is Wallace at his po-mo-est. It takes the form of a series of ‘Pop Quizzes’ sketching out scenarios for unrealized stories, complete with fatuous pop-psychology questions for the reader. It has footnotes. Sometimes very long footnotes. And it conducts a commentary on its own performance that takes up-its-own-arse-ness to a whole new level. But it shows what makes Wallace so essential as a writer: his immense psychological acuity – and I mean immense to the point of freakishness. No writer since Muriel Spark has been so adept at putting her characters on a skewer – the thinnest, sharpest, most surgically precise skewer imaginable – (and of course the author is just as much a character as anyone). That said, Wallace does it with more compassion than Spark. And he does it even when the characters have none of the heft and texture expected in literary fiction, or fiction of any kind. They don’t even have names. All they have is their problems. No, the pyrotechnics are smokescreen. The story is all about the pain and nausea inherent in self-consciousness.

(in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)