His interactions with the audience were deliciously invasive, the blatant disregard for the emotions of his unfortunate audience victims accentuating his treatment of the women in his monologue. Indeed, the S&M enthusiast (Tom Dowling) benefitted spectacularly from being embodied, although this lengthy scene could be improved by a few judicious edits. In some cases, taking Wallace’s characters from page to stage was remarkably successful, particularly Kieran Ahern’s performance as the love coach, teaching his eager students what makes a good lover. Consequently Dolphin and Cartwright’s production is variable in its success: there are exceptional performances from many cast members and much of the stage direction is superbly handled, but these are accompanied by moments where, stripped of its original context, the script flounders. In other ways, however, there is much about the novel that does not translate well to another medium, losing much of its acute literary analysis when dramatised. Indeed, Josh Dolphin and Penny Cartwright’s adaptation (currently running at the Burton Taylor Studio) follows in the footsteps of Dylan McCullough, Andy Holden and David Raymond Conroy, and David McGuff, all of whom placed Brief Interviews on the stage. In some senses, the vividness of Wallace’s language and the short-story form providing neatly delineated monologues means that Brief Interviews immediately lends itself to stage versions. In a tour de force of postmodernist metafiction with a moralising attitude, Brief Interviews is a critique of self-obsession and misogyny through a series of (sort-of) vignettes taking the form of interviews. There could not be a better description of the characters who provide the subjects of his 1999 collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. The very world around them … seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions inside the self.’
Though usually family men, they never really love anybody - and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women. They never belong to any sort of larger unit or community or cause. The characters written into existence by Updike, Mailer, and Roth, he argued, are ‘always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying and deeply alone, alone the way only a solipsist can be alone.
Entitled, in characteristically unapologetic style, ‘John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?’, Wallace attacked the “Great Male Narcissists” of post-war fiction. In 1997, David Foster Wallace wrote a scathingly piercing review of John Updike’s Midpoint for The New York Observer.
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