Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
- Narrated by
Michael Cerveris
,Bobby Cannavale
,Joey Slotnick
,Will Forte
,John Krasinski
,David Foster Wallace
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Audiobook Download Information
- Edition:
- Unabridged (Hachette Audio)
- Length:
- 4 hours, 17 minutes
- File Size:
- 117 MB (4 files)
- Published:
- September 2009
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Review by Karrie Higgins, eMusic
If you've ever been steamrolled by obnoxious innuendos from a man you wish you'd never met, then you already know a little about the experience of listening to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the audio version of the critically acclaimed David Foster Wallace short story collection. The "interviews" consist of men sharing their innermost thoughts about sex and relationships, often exposing — flasher-like — their twisted motivations and desires. Something about the audio format — maybe it's the way it cannot be slammed shut like a book, or hurled at the wall — intensifies its characters' hideousness to a whole new level.
For literati still reeling from David Foster Wallace's 2008 suicide, a small measure of comfort can be taken in precisely that: the way his essays, short story collections, and novels —including Infinite Jest, Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair — take on new life in new adaptations or multiple readings. This is especially true given the author's trademark tendency to treat writing as an intellectual and linguistic petri dish, a flair for invention that earned him numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship.
Even still, some fans might mistakenly believe the recently released film version of Brief Interviews (directed by John Krasinski, of The Office fame), renders the audiobook less interesting. Nothing could be further from the truth. While both pare down the collection, they both manage to push different emotional buttons. The movie, for its part, brings all the disembodied voices together into a coherent narrative arc, with a female protagonist conducting scientific research via the interviews. The result: a greater distance between the audience and these men. By contrast, the audiobook allows the interviews to stand as disembodied voices, disconnected from one other except by their shared themes. The effect is arguably more disturbing, and more profound.
Quotes from the Critics
"Wallace, among his other talents, blends the languages of modern philosophy, sexual angst and suburban psychological breakdown in a way that manages both to be thoroughly new in literary terms, and yet still evoke in the reader that state of mind that all great literature evokes, that sense of encounter with phenomena long familiar and suddenly, perfectly identified." - Salon
"[T]his entire volume represents a sharp falling off in ambition, nuance and vision from Wallace's previous works of fiction, books like INFINITE JEST and THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM. Only one story in this volume--a sad, little elliptical tale titled "Church Not Made With Hands," which depicts a man trying to cope with his daughter's injury in a freak swimming pool accident--evinces the lure and dazzle of his earlier work and hints at the capabilities of this immensely talented writer." - New York Times
"Wallace has always been a carefree, funny writer, but his cleverness can be a curse. In BRIEF INTERVIEWS, words wound and the humor, scaled back, bares its teeth....There is such hatred in this book that midway through it seems that Wallace's confidence as a writer masks a collapse in the man, that he's given in to his own fears, folding fiction's layers into a blanket and hiding underneath. But Wallace breaks through this mounting rage to reach a more generous emotional world....Wallace has started to fight toward transcendence....[T]his book is finally a call to action, in life and fiction both....This is a tormented, heroic book." - Voice Literary Supplement
"[I]n his wild hits and misses, his eccentric obsessions and his sinister experiments, [Wallace] is beginning to resemble another mad scientist of American literature: Edgar Allen Poe. And his hideous men, like Poe's are vexed by demons that haunt us all." - New York Times Book Review
"[W]hat is most striking about the interview subjects, and what they ultimately have in common, is their slippery, narcissistic ordinariness....The interviews hold up to hilarious, disturbing scrutiny the endlessly inventive duplicity that animates men's single-minded pursuit of sex. Acknowledging what louts they are becomes another weapon in the arsenal of loutishness." - New York Review of Books
"The perverse choices Wallace makes are disturbing and serious. He treats subject matter normally considered unfit for fiction....Yet if one accepts that the proper remit of contemporary American fiction is to deal with America as it is, and the habits of mind which make it so, then Wallace...is the most significant writer of his generation....The stories in BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN....operate at the limit of the range of the short story and under self-imposed conditions of the utmost stringency. The unmediated terrain they seek is very distant from US fiction's current habitual haunts: some of these stories never find it and others never make it back. Those that do bring news of a rare and real America." - Times Literary Supplement
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