Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Overview

David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, published in 1999, is less a collection of short stories than a sustained examination of self-awareness as masquerade. It contains twenty-three formally diverse pieces (monologues, metafictional thought experiments, impressionistic fragments, and one-sided interviews), all orbiting a recurring figure: the man who speaks at length in the direction of sincerity, yet circles endlessly in performance, deflection, and delusion.

Critics have long noted the book’s formal restlessness. Wallace moves between narrative modes like a novelist demonstrating range: the titular interviews are printed without the interviewer’s questions; other stories mimic pop-psych surveys, or collapse into metafictional spirals. The effect is disorienting by design. What emerges is less a sequence of narratives than a cartography of male self-justification.

The men Wallace presents are rarely monstrous in the conventional sense. They’re articulate, fluent in the language of guilt, and often disturbingly aware of their shortcomings. Their hideousness lies in the ease with which they convert that awareness into camouflage, self-knowledge weaponized to avoid transformation.

The Interviews

The “Brief Interviews” chapters, which give the collection its name, are the clearest examples. Stripped of any external voice, these transcripts leave only the men’s answers. Critics have pointed out the importance of this silence; how the unseen, unheard interviewer (almost always female) becomes a stand-in for the reader, or for an absent judge. The men fill this silence compulsively. Some perform virtue. Others confess, but in the self-congratulatory manner of men who’ve learned that contrition, too, can be a form of control.

As Matthew Alexander observes, the male speakers in these stories don’t suffer from a lack of language but are consumed by it. Their compulsive verbosity, directed at a passive female listener, becomes its own form of evasion: a way to expose flaws without accountability. Rather than fostering change, this language collapses into a performance of insight.

Wallace, through these monologues, stages not only the breakdown of modern masculinity, but the way introspection itself can harden into yet another pose.

Standout Stories

That idea of what I would phrase the vanity of knowing, runs through the strongest stories in the collection.

The Depressed Person is a particularly difficult piece. It is a long, claustrophobic monologue by a woman so saturated with therapeutic self-awareness that she becomes incapable of human connection. Critics have called it cruel. I think it’s exacting. Wallace doesn’t mock her condition so much as anatomize the recursive solipsism of modern suffering. The pain is real. So is the performance of that pain. And Wallace, to his credit, refuses to resolve the contradiction.

Octet, perhaps the most openly metafictional story in the book, breaks the narrative altogether. It begins as a series of “pop quizzes”, basically moral vignettes meant to implicate the reader; but soon collapses into a direct address (Think fleabag). Wallace stops pretending. He tells us he’s failing to write something sincere, and then tries again, in increasingly desperate revisions. The story becomes recursive: an artifact about its own inability to mean. Few critics dwell on Octet, but it strikes me as the Rosetta Stone of the collection. It reveals Wallace’s own struggle to write truthfully in a culture where performance is indistinguishable from confession.

Then there’s Think, a tightly framed encounter between a married man and his wife’s younger sister. The story unfolds in real time, saturated with the man’s interior calculations: how he might look kneeling before her, what she might be reenacting from a movie, how catalog imagery overlays real life. She is topless. He kneels. But instead of seduction, he clasps his hands and begins to pray. The gesture is ambiguous (we don’t know if it’s religious, erotic, or theatrical), and she stands, arms crossed, increasingly unsure how to respond. “It’s not what you think,” he says. Then again, it never is. What Think captures so well is the psychic split between perceived meaning and real intent. The man imagines how he appears, how she appears, how the entire scene might be read by her, by himself, by some invisible third eye.

His prayer becomes another gesture in a media-soaked tableau. Even the woman begins to wonder whether to join him, unsure not just of what is happening, but of what it would even mean to echo his pose.

Where the Form Falters

The collection is not without flaws. Church Not Made with Hands is a symbolic fog really; it’s linguistically dense but emotionally opaque.

Critics have described it as abstract and self-contained, and I would agree. It feels like an exercise rather than an offering. There are other such moments, where Wallace’s brilliance lapses into bravura. The style overtakes the insight. The structure becomes the subject. And while this is thematically consistent, it mirrors the characters’ tendency to talk instead of feel. And to a reader it can grow tiring.

One critic noted that Wallace sometimes “moralizes with such gravity” that the irony loses tension. In weaker stories, the reader becomes more aware of Wallace’s technical gymnastics than the human moments they are meant to contain.

What Can The Interviewer’s Absence Mean?

Feminist critics and #MeToo-era reappraisals have turned renewed attention to the book’s portrayal of gender. Wallace’s decision to silence the female interviewer is not incidental. It reframes the stories not simply as testimonies, but as performances against a deliberately vacant listener. The men speak, unchecked, because no one interrupts them. They are narrators in a vacuum, and that vacuum becomes part of the indictment.

Stories like _Brief Interview #2, which recounts an ambiguous rape scenario, have drawn attention for their refusal to signal the narrator’s guilt directly. But scholars such as Rachel Haley Himmelheber have argued that Wallace’s method is precisely this: to withhold moral cues, to leave the reader unsettled in ambiguity. The horror, in these stories, lies in what is not contested. The men tell their stories unopposed and indict themselves more thoroughly than any outside commentary could.

Wallace himself once wrote that misogyny among men often reflects a deeper fear: of women’s autonomy, rejection, or unknowability. The collection reflects this fear not by dramatizing male villainy, but by mapping male evasion.

Knowing Without Changing

This is a book that dramatizes language as a defense mechanism. Its men speak as if performance were redemption. They confess without consequence. And Wallace, despite (or because of) his proximity to their psychology, refuses to let them off the hook.

Across the strongest stories, Wallace documents a particular cognitive pattern, what we might now call the “wellness-adjacent narcissist”: the person who speaks eloquently about their flaws in order to avoid actually changing. The pain is real, yes. The insight may be hard-won. But the language of growth, in Wallace’s hands, is too often a script rehearsed in private.

Critics like Steven Moore and Zadie Smith have praised the book for capturing this paralysis on how the modern intellect, armed with irony, folds in on itself.

And this paralysis has found new avatars. The rise of #literallyme characters: men who are often antisocial, hyper-self-aware, and incapable of change; reveals something unsettling about male identification today. These men are outcasts, narcissists, or sociopaths, yet are idolized precisely for their unfiltered performances of thought. What’s admired isn’t their redemption, but their refusal of it.

Wallace’s men belong in this lineage. They’re not tragic because they are evil but because they know exactly what they’re doing. The most frightening thing this book reveals about us is the possibility that we can understand everything we are doing, and continue anyway.