A book of twenty-four lonelinesses inside the situations built for love — the communication-and-solipsism spine as…
echoes
From: DFW on Brief Interviews with Hideous Men — 1999 radio interview attributed to Bill Thompson's Eye on Books, heard via a late-2008 memorial rebroadcast
- Early text:
[scene] Wallace's own gloss: the book concerns a
loneliness bred within the very relationships where love is expected —
the sexual and the parental; the stories are facets of one jewel of
darkness, distinguished by voice [00:33–00:55]; he reframes the
interviewer's sex-and-behavior summary as loneliness [01:52–01:58]; the
working title was 24 Kinds of Loneliness, after Yates's Eleven Kinds of
Loneliness [02:27–02:45]; the two Devil Is a Busy Man stories are about
the impossibility of giving, as a subset of the loneliness [09:05–09:16]
- IJ echo: the oeuvre's densest thread — whether anything connects
isolated interiors — running from the pre-1996 corpus through IJ's
figurants and rooms full of people alone together; BIWHM is its
post-IJ concentration, per the author's own framing here
- Weight: shared-preoccupation