David Foster Wallace newbies may not take kindly to Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Wallace's new collection of short stories. Lit-snob that I am, I've been building up a sense of preparedness over the past year; many of these stories were printed in "Harper's" and "The Paris Review," and as soon as word of a new one came over the Wallace listserv, I ran to my local comfy-couch book palace and read every single winding word, every pointless tangent, every in-depth look at the multiple meanings of a certain way of scratching one's butt (I seldom read ten-page stories in installments, but Wallace's pieces (either because of their unending, ever-unraveling analysis, or their arrogant haiku shortness) can be terribly tiresome and difficult (like a Frank Zappa song, and occasionally as offensive.) One can lose one's footing quite easily, can't one?

This devotion, dedication--why? Probably the bandana. Really, though, it was the moments during his thousand-page Infinite Jest when he cut through the booshit and let his excruciatingly beautiful dream-prose work its meta-mojo. He has ways of bringing Dumpsters to life, describing their exact shade of brown, and every swirl of rust, and every mud splatter on the "Waste Management" sticker. He's capable of eschewing the microscope and stopping the watch, as he shows in "Church Not Made With Hands" from "Brief Interviews":

This is a terrain in which there are alternating lulls and gusts of light. In which open spaces flash like diseased nerves and bent trees hang with a viscous aura that settles to set the grass on willemite fire, in which windrows of light pile up against fencebottoms, walls, and undulate and glow. The bell-tower's sharp edges shiver gusts into spectra.

In addition, there's the obligatory Mametian always-be-closing language (the stuttering, the polyrhythms, the disgustingness of conversation topic), and the incense-n-peppermint-schnapps college-dorm psychology of like, stuff. The absolute best brief interview with a hideous man is the final entry, from the point of view of a frat-boy gigolo who takes sexual advantage of a vulnerable-yet-generous "granola cruncher" for whom he feels strong attraction and disdain ("note the rhetorically specific blend of childish diction like Hi and fib with flaccid abstractions like nurture and energy and serene," says the interviewee, of the new-age "cruncher.")

As the woman's story is revealed (and since Wallace's piece is an "interview" from the male's P.O.V., we're left to wonder how biased the male's P.O.V. is w/r/t the woman's story) we gain respect for the way she's handled her hellish tragedy, and respect (sort of) for the interviewee's gradual warming-up to this woman's strength. And before we can say "mindfuck," Wallace shows us even deeper levels of mutual manipulation between the two bed-partners.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is an annoying book of intermittent genius. There's a heavy reliance on example, on hypothesis (like the story-as-pop-quiz "Octet," where the characters are "X" and "Y" and the reader must decide their fate), whereas Infinite Jest was a super-sized word-salad of character, memory, image and poetry. Wallace is at his best when he's not reminding us, á la David Letterman vis-á-vis television, that we're reading a "story" in which things "happen" to "people." However, the stories that succeed in Hideous Men are worth the hardcover price, and the ones that don't will at least add up to something you can throw at the wall when the neighbors' stereo is too loud.