Genre: Literary/Short Stories
Pages: 373
During his famous interview with Larry McCaffery (which I invite you to read, very interesting), David Foster Wallace was brought to answer a few questions on his novella Westward The Empire Course Takes Its Way. You can't FULLY understand what Wallace refers to unless you actually read this mesmerizing story (or try to) but here's what he said about hostility towards readers:
Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them.
There's a lot of that in Westward The Empire Course Takes Its Way and in the Girl With Curious Hair stories in general. I don't think it's all bad (read motivated by hostility) and yet it's by far his most difficult book I've ever read. The structure of his stories are very lose and they are dense with data, fact and opinions on more subjects than lines of text can pack. I sure enjoyed reading Girl With Curious Hair, but it was also somewhat of a trial.
Out of the ten stories, only three hit home with force. Luckily The Account Representative Knew CPR, Lyndon and the magnificent Here And There. The latter is by far my favorite story of the collection. The two characters seem to tell the same love story, from their respective points of view, in different rooms. Their story start side by side, but distance and alienation moves them away from each other. It's very straightforward yet it captures the slow thud of despair in a relationship where lovers are not really committed to each other's happiness. Lyndon is another shining star of Girl With Curious Hair, that chronicles the fictional journey of the narrator as an aide to president Lyndon Johnson. Luckily The Account Representative Knew CPR is very simple and touching, yet it's very short. It's the second shortest piece in the book at ten pages.
I have to admit most of the stories threw me off. Little Expressionless Animals started as an interesting, fractured narrative, that tells the story of Julie and Faye, both marked by traumatic childhood events and finding each other on the set of Jeopardy! It started clear as day to me and then I didn't lost the narrative string, but I just lost the meaning of the whole game show theme, that gets more and more present as the story evolves. I guess we can take another quote from the Larry McCaffery interview to draw some sense from it:
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants. When you read that quotation from Westward just now, it sounded to me like a covert digest of my biggest weaknesses as a writer. One is that I have a grossly sentimental affection for gags, for stuff that’s nothing but funny, and which I sometimes stick in for no other reason than funniness.
Girl With Curious Hair is a series of oddballs stories that aren't related by similar ideas the way Brief Interviews With Hideous Men were and they are yet caught up in a referential loop that The Broom Of The System was not a prisoner of. Girl With Curious Hair is a work entrenched in a tradition of writers Wallace used to love really much like Donald Bartheleme, John Barth and Robert Coover. And it helps to have read them if you want to tackle Girl With Curious Hair who doesn't hold much interest for me compared to the other Wallace books I have read. It left me out of the pages and frustrated more often than not. Maybe in a few years...