Word: hideously
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...drunk, rolls down the window and lets the drunk see...twin Stalins! "Drink a little less," Uncle Joe advises, and the limo roars off. This Stalin takes in the world with a savage candor. At a meeting with his hatchetman Lavrenty Beria, "I caught a whiff of that hideous cologne that Beria favored, the cologne of an unctuous headwaiter, the cologne of a rapist...
Another Herald letter to the editor proclaimed Lamont "the most hideous college building of its type in America." This writer also compared the library to a cheese factory, then modified his statement, writing, "It is worse than that, more like a garage or livery stable...
David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (Little, Brown; 274 pages; $24) is a mixed bag of 23 essays and short stories that display a range of intellect and talent that is unseemly for any one writer to have, let alone show off. Like the author's earlier work, this collection is designed to keep readers from getting too comfortable. You know the feeling if you had trouble keeping up with the plot lines, arcana and footnotes that spread like kudzu through the 1,000 pages of Wallace's 1996 novel, Infinite Jest...
Wallace is not what is now sneeringly called an elitist. But he is a bit of a pedagogue. Under the dazzle, his writing is often instructional. The hideous men and a few frightful women in the new book exemplify what can go wrong in a society when the romance of individualism turns inward--and loosens restraints. In one story a father exposes his penis to his son as if it were a threatening club. Elsewhere a man exploits his deformed arm to seduce women. "Inside my head," he says, "I don't call it the arm I call...
Once Wallace gets our gawking attention, his deviants become like the Krafft-Ebing case histories in Psychopathia Sexualis, grotesque illustrations of fundamental errors in personal relations. To what point? Wallace suggests coyly that Hideous Men is meant to interrogate the reader, to elicit fresh responses to horrors that have lost their edge in the age of information overload. Sometimes this works; when it doesn't, we get a facetious exercise like the "pop quizzes" in Octet that pose dire situations mimicking academic test questions...