Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace

I recently read the short story collection Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace. The unique aspect of this collection stems from setting almost every story in real moments that occurred in history. The collection reminds you why DFW is a true fiction craftsman but also gave way to some unsettling realizations I have about the author.

The first story - the best IMO - "Little Expressionless Animals" shows DFW at his best. Dancing between reality and fiction, the story outlines the journey of an exceptional Jeopardy contestant and her love affair with the producer's daughter. The constant blurring of that line of what is real and what is not highlights how ridiculous reality can be how. It's fun, thoughtful, and brilliantly composed.

From there the reader is greeted with the collection's title story "Girl with Curious Hair". The piece features realistic settings and concepts but seriously fucks with characterization. It follows a gang of absolute monsters in their exploits in arson, drug exploration, assault, and more. Very reminiscent of a Clock Work Orange.

It's here the collection starts to lose me a bit. I'm not so sure in our time of intolerable cruelty I need to be reading DFW's reality-bending fiction. I'm not saying I want to be comforted by my fiction, but the cruelty displayed in this story tied with the mess of misogyny, racism, and overall power struggles in the stories to come don't need to make you second guess whether men and women are capable of such things.

In the final and longest story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way", we're treated to exploratory dialogue on the nature of fiction itself. I get the sense that without a certain amount of off-putting edge DFW feels fiction is little more than a glorified advertisement, meant to make readers feel good. So he strives to make his readers uneasy; characterizing women as impossibly particular, making his characters disfigured in some way, gratuitous violence.

The thing is we never explore why making a character transgender or disabled makes readers uneasy, why playing to these stereotypes and biases for the purpose creeping your readers out is actually harmful in the greater scheme (ironically DFW complained about David Lynch doing this exact thing with Richard Pryor in his review of Lost Highway). One could argue this isn't the point of the fiction, but then what is the point?