They were good, but after two of those, I understood the purpose. In a sense, it's heightening the feeling of sadness and uselessness of the protagonist.
I think outrage was exactly what Wallace aimed for. Most of the time I skimmed some part thinking "Man, just shut the fuck up". The men go from creepy to unbelievable stupid to boring as hell. The girl is completely silent, her questions are only noted by the letter Q., as if we're reading her notes. The format once again flirts with genius. If the anthology is called Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is that it's articulated around four thirty something pages stories where a female protagonist interviews different males for an unsaid reason. I have rarely been taken like this by a short story, let alone by a book.
He looks at himself with somewhat of a subtle melancholy, but never interferes. It starts with one of the best short stories I have ever read, called "Forever Overhead", where the protagonist is a 13 years old on his birthday and the narrator seems to be (it's never said) his older self. Take The Broom Of The System, written twelve years earlier, remove all playfulness and Pynchonesque allusions and you get twenty-three short stories that sink gradually into a despair that borderlines madness. If you write a four pages story called "Suicide As A Sort Of Present" you're waving orange landing strip flags in hope to get help. After reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, it's hard to believe no one ever figured out it was coming like a train in their living room. In those papers, a story written when he was nine years old that is an eerie sign of alarm.
Recently, his archives have been acquired and made available by the University Of Texas in Austin. David Foster Wallace committed suicide by hanging in 2008.
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