David Foster Wallace and the Search for New Male Identities

In Ottessa Moshfegh’s sleepily existential novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation the unnamed narrator, describing an ex-boyfriend, tells us he wasn’t one of those guys, a ‘specific brand of young male’:

An “alternative” to the mainstream frat boys and premed straight and narrow guys, these scholarly, charmless, intellectual brats, dominated the more creative [university] departments. […] “Dudes” reading Nietzsche on the subway, reading Proust, reading David Foster Wallace, jotting down their brilliant thoughts into a black Moleskin pocket notebook. […] They thought that they wanted to be adored, to be influential, celebrated for their genius, that they deserved to be worshipped. But they could barely look at themselves in the mirror. They were all on Klonopin, was my guess. They lived mostly in Brooklyn.

The sort, she explains, who pass off insecurity as sensitivity (getting the lie passed even themselves), who perfect a persona that makes them appear above going after ‘pussy’ even though that’s all they really want, who claim they want to move to the country and build a house. The type of guy who masturbates over Winona Ryder instead of Britney Spears.

I remember reading this and thinking, ‘shit, that’s me.’ More in spirit or outlook than in a physical sense: I’ve never been to Brooklyn, my…