AS WE'VE MENTIONED, there's a whole counter-revolution in male depictions going
on these days. While indirectly due to a post-feminist generation of American
college boys taught that their only proper gender-role was to wallow in
universal guilt, its direct origin comes from Britain and a slew of "laddie"
magazines, many of which have now established successful
U.S. editions.
It's spread to two cable shows, FX's The X Show (a daily
hour of Maxim-like lifestyle features on beer tasting, rowdy football-fan
behavior, strip-club etiquette, et al.) and Comedy Central's The Man
Show (a weekly half-hour of Almost Live-like comedy spiels built around the
same topics).
These shows and magazines don't rebut the neo-sexist image of Man As Slime.
They revel in it.
More reveling, albeit with more tragic consequences, gets portrayed in current
novels (Richard Ford's Women With Men) and movies (Neil LaBute's In
the Company of Men).
When Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace started spewing
forth stories into assorted magazines last year under the common title
"Brief Interviews With Hideous Men," I was prepared for more of the
same. More male-as-intrinsically-evil-predator,
female-as-innocent-prey-or-righteous-avenger.
Thankfully, Wallace is too smart for such one-dimensionalities.
The men who narrate their life stories to an unheard female interviewer, in
segments scattered through Wallace's new story collection of the same name, are less hideous
than merely pathetic. The sins they either boast or whimper about consist of
little more than wanting to have sex with women and achieving that goal via
somewhat-obvious come-on routines. The men never stop to consider the extent to
which their "conquests" might have seen through, and chosen to play along with,
these stupid seduction tricks.
If anything, these elequent, rambling narratives show not how bad the men are
but how deeply PC-self-consciousness has hurt women and men.
That Wallace's low-level Lotharios can so readily proclaim and/or bemoan their
own self-perceived hideousness, based on nothing more than fulfilling (or
wishing to fulfill) their casual-sex desires, shows how ready the characters
are to accept the new sexism's double standard, that a man can only choose to
be either male-but-not-human or human-but-not male.
Some of the collection's other stories don't quite carry the same emotional
heft. "Octet" is little more than a longwinded postmodern writing exercise in
the limitations of postmodern writing exercises. He does better with "Adult
World" and "The Depressed Person," in which two young women are psychologically
trapped deep within the private hells of their own recursive thought
patterns--until sudden, unexpected realizations let than have moments outside
their own heads, brief moments that still show them ways out.
These heroines' obsessive-compulsive thought patters are ideally mated to
Wallace's obsessive-compulsive prose style, which, as always, is the real star
of the book. Alternately concise and expansive, it leads you in with acres of
rambling asides and aburd levels of detail that appear more like rough-draft
notes than exited text--then zings you with a morsel of verbal perfection.
SIDEBAR: One of the collection's pieces is in the first issue of the new
quarterly journal Tin House, which, like Starbucks' in-store magazine
Joe, is a would-be middlebrow litmag with Northwest money behind it (Portland, in this case) but N.Y.C.-based editors.
A dumb hype piece in the Village Voice raved on and on about
how Tin House represented something all new and daring and cuttin'-edge.
Don't believe it. Aside from the Wallace piece and Richard McCann's downbeat
liver-transplant memoir, all of it's competent and none of it's really good.
Would be avant-gardists love to quote something Picasso's supposed to have said
about the chief enemy of creativity being good taste. Tin House has good
taste up to its armpits, and that's about the worst insult I could give it
right now.
TOMORROW: The Rainforest Cafe is the world's easiest satirical target--EVER!
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