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 notebook wasn’t pocket size, and I was on Sertraline not Klonopin. I’d thought other people were types, easily summarisable clusters of characteristics, but I was unique. Yet here I was discarded as one of those guys; I’d even weeks before said to my girlfriend I wanted to move to the country and build a house. (I couldn’t build you a bookshelf but hey I was going to build a house.) Germane David Foster Wallace quote: ‘Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.’

Wallace is now associated with a certain type of reader. Hipsters, pseudo-intellectuals, sometimes toxic young men. A young person’s ‘writer’s writer’. Admittedly Wallace’s writing invites this crowd. His prose mixes studious intellectualism with a chic conversational tone; his trademark attire was a white bandana (to give him his due, he pulled it off); and he represents a ‘privileged’ viewpoint. I’m aware privilege is a loaded word…