Sex, Lies and Semiotics

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 it the Asset."

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.

When it comes to more socially accepted sexual relations, Wallace cautiously leans toward nurture rather than nature. "Today's postfeminist era," he writes, "is also today's postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what's really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions...and so we're all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality." It sounds good on paper. But on the evidence in this strikingly original collection, it won't work between the sheets.