David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

The exclusive Get-Together itself — which turns out, by X’s on-site calculation, to include less than 38 % of his in-laws’ total family, and features pre-warmed snifters of Remy Martin and unabashedly virid Cuban cigars for the males — involves the arrangement of leather divans and antique ottomans and wing chairs and stout little Willis & Geiger three-step library stepladders into a large circle, around which circle X’s inlaws’ family’s innermost and apparently now most intimate 37.5 % are to sit and take turns declaiming briefly on their memories and feelings about the dead father-in-law and their own special and unique individual relationships with him during his long and extraordinarily distinguished life. And X — who is seated awkwardly on a small oaken stepladder next to his wife’s wing chair, and from his position in the circle is to be the fourth-from-last to speak, and who is on his fifth snifter, and whose cigar for some mysterious reason keeps going out, and who is suffering moderate-to-severe prostatic twinges from the flitched texture of the ladder’s top step — finds, as heartfelt and sometimes quite moving anecdotes and encomia circumscribe the inner circle, that he has less and less idea what he ought to say.

Q: (A)Self-evident.

(B)Throughout the year of her father’s terminal illness, Mrs. X has given no indication that she knows anything of X’s internal conflict and self-septic horror. X has thus succeeded in keeping his interior state a secret, which is what he has professed to want all year. X has, be apprised, kept secrets from Mrs. X on several prior occasions. Part of the interior confusion and flux of this whole premortem interval, however — as X confides to Y after the old bastard finally kicks — has been that, for the first time in their marriage, X’s wife’s not knowing something about X that X did not wish her to know has made X feel not relieved or secure or good but rather on the contrary sad and alienated and lonely and aggrieved. The crux: X now finds himself, behind his commiserative expression and solicitous gestures, secretly angry at his wife over an ignorance he has made every effort to cultivate in her, and sustain. Evaluate.

POP QUIZ 9

You are, unfortunately, a fiction writer. You are attempting a cycle of very short belletristic pieces, pieces which as it happens are not contes philosophiques and not vignettes or scenarios or allegories or fables, exactly, though neither are they really qualifiable as ‘short stories’ (not even as those upscale microbrewed Flash Fictions that have become so popular in recent years — even though these belletristic pieces are really short, they just don’t work like Flash Fictions are supposed to). How exactly the cycle’s short pieces are supposed to work is hard to describe. Maybe say they’re supposed to compose a certain sort of ‘ interrogation ’ of the person reading them, somehow — i.e. palpations, feelers into the interstices of her sense of something, etc…. though what that ‘something’ is remains maddeningly hard to pin down, even just for yourself as you’re working on the pieces (pieces that are taking a truly grotesque amount of time, by the way, far more time than they ought to vis à vis their length and aesthetic ‘weight,’ etc. — after all, you’re like everybody else and have only so much time at your disposal and have to allocate it judiciously, especially when it comes to career stuff (yes: things have come to such a pass that even belletristic fiction writers consider themselves to have ‘careers’)). You know for sure, though, that the narrative pieces really are just ‘pieces’ and nothing more, i.e. that it is the way they fit together into the larger cycle that comprises them that is crucial to whatever ‘something’ you want to ‘interrogate’ a human ‘sense of,’ and so on.

So you do an eight-part cycle of these little mortise-and-tenon pieces. 1And it ends up a total fiasco. Five of the eight pieces don’t work at all — meaning they don’t interrogate or palpate what you want them to, plus are too contrived or too cartoonish or too annoying or all three — and you have to toss them out. The sixth piece works only after it’s totally redone in a way that’s forbiddingly long and digression-fraught and, you fear, maybe so dense and inbent that nobody’ll even get to the interrogatory parts at the end; plus then in the dreaded Final Revision Phase you realize that the rewrite of the 6th piece depends so heavily on 6’s first version that you have to stick that first version back into the octocycle too, even though it (i.e. the first version of the 6th piece) totally falls apart 75 % of the way through. You decide to try to salvage the aesthetic disaster of having to stick in the first version of the 6th piece by having that first version be utterly up front about the fact that it falls apart and doesn’t work as a ‘Pop Quiz’ and by having the rewrite of the 6th piece start out with some terse unapologetic acknowledgment that it’s another ‘try’ at whatever you were trying to palpate into interrogability in the first version. These intranarrative acknowledgments have the additional advantage of slightly diluting the pretentiousness of structuring the little pieces as so-called ‘Quizzes,’ but it also has the disadvantage of flirting with metafictional self-reference — viz. the having ‘This Pop Quiz isn’t working’ and ‘Here’s another stab at #6’ within the text itself — which in the late 1990s, when even Wes Craven is cashing in on metafictional self-reference, might come off lame and tired and facile, and also runs the risk of compromising the queer urgency about whatever it is you feel you want the pieces to interrogate in whoever’s reading them. This is an urgency that you, the fiction writer, feel very… well, urgently, and want the reader to feel too — which is to say that by no means do you want a reader to come away thinking that the cycle is just a cute formal exercise in interrogative structure and S.O.P. metatext. 2

Which all sets up a serious (and hideously time-consuming) conundrum. Not only have you ended up with only half of the workable octet you’d originally conceived — and an admittedly makeshift and imperfect half at that 3—but there’s also the matter of the urgent and necessary way you’d envisioned the original eight belletristic pieces connecting to form a unified octoplicate whole, one that ended up subtly interrogating the reader w/r/t the protean but still unified single issue that all the overt, admittedly unsubtle ‘ Q’’s at the end of each Pop Quiz would — if these queries were themselves fit together in the organic context of the larger whole — end up palpating. This weird univocal urgency may or may not make sense to anyone else, but it had made sense to you, and had seemed… well, again, urgent, and worth risking the initial appearance of shallow formal exercism or pseudometabelletristic gamesmanship in the pieces’ unconventional Pop Quiz — type structure. You were betting that the queer emergent urgency of the organically unified whole of the octet’s two-times-two-times-two pieces (which you’d envisioned as a Manichean duality raised to the triune power of a sort of Hegelian synthesis w/r/t issues which both characters and readers were required to ‘decide’) would attenuate the initial appearance of postclever metaformal hooey and end up (you hoped) actually interrogating the reader’s initial inclination to dismiss the pieces as ‘shallow formal exercises’ simply on the basis of their shared formal features, forcing the reader to see that such a dismissal would be based on precisely the same sorts of shallow formalistic concerns she was (at least at first) inclined to accuse the octet of.