The Intolerable Spillage of Self

Decent write-up of the event from a couple months ago in which James Wood offered a reading a discussion of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. To wit:

For further illustration, Wood turns to the agonizing and footnote-laden “The Depressed Person,” a story concerning a clinically depressed woman who discovers—to her own luxuriously described horror—that she is a selfish person. The real shock, of course, is that the reader has figured this out by the third page, but is nonetheless expected to trudge on. He is immersed in the depressed person’s in-bent world while being allowed to hover critically above it. Like much of Wallace’s work, this story is a balancing act in which the reader is unusually tempted to slip.

It is not one of Wallace’s best fictions, Wood claims, but being “both funny and intolerable” it is “exemplary” of his writing. Like so many of Wallace’s unreliable narrators, the depressed person unwittingly betrays her own inner ugliness. She does this not by accident, but through manic self-consciousness, here comically portrayed as psychoanalytic self-examination. Wood nicely describes this process of unintentional revelation in Wallace as “the intolerable spillage of self,” quipping that “even as you try to clean it up, you make more of a mess.” . . .

“Reading Wallace,” he says, “is like playing a reed instrument. When do you take a breath?” People chuckle. Wood becomes more serious. “I often think that Wallace is performing, and I wish he’d perform less.” Everyone nods. Wood describes starting an average Wallace story, finding it brilliant, and wondering just how long it will go on before the engaging plot is subverted by the author’s usual pyrotechnics. There seems to be part of Wallace that is never satisfied until the story becomes exceedingly painful to read.

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