Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Wallace builds the book's title sequence out of transcripts, B.I. #20, B.I. #40, B.I. #59, scattered out of numerical order through the rest of the collection, in which an unnamed woman interviews men about their romantic and sexual failures. Her questions never appear on the page. Only the letter Q. marks where she spoke, so a reader has to reconstruct what was asked from the shape of each answer, which puts onto the page exactly the labor these men refuse: listening past a monologue to find the actual question underneath it.

The Depressed Person performs the same refusal from the opposite chair: a woman in therapy narrates her own suffering in language borrowed from support groups and self-help, calling her friends her support system and apologizing for sharing her pain even as she monopolizes every call with it, while a thicket of footnotes, some longer than the paragraphs they annotate, tracks every qualification she adds to keep from being heard too clearly. Adult World, split into a conventional narrative and then a numbered outline of the same events, makes the point a third way: give Wallace's people a story and they will find some formal apparatus, jargon, a survey, a footnote, to hide behind instead of saying the thing straight.

Cutting the interviewer's actual words does more than a formal trick: it makes the men's self-justification the entire visible surface of the page, unbroken by any pushback, so the reader has nowhere to stand except inside a logic each subject has already rigged in his own favor. By B.I. #46 or #59, the shape of Q. has become legible on its own terms, curious, patient, occasionally worn down, a whole second character built out of absence.

The footnotes in The Depressed Person are not asides, they are where she actually lives, adding disclaimer after disclaimer to protect a version of herself above reproach even as she exhausts everyone who loves her. Wallace lets them crowd out the main text by the story's close, formal proof that her self-awareness has become one more way of avoiding the thing she is aware of.