Yesterday, I caught myself, yet again, recommending this collection to a friend. It’s that kind of book: the kind that becomes an obsession, the kind that turns you into a bore because you can’t stop forcing it on friends/acquaintances/strangers in the street.

David Foster Wallace has a unique voice, approaching fiction writing with a scientific precision, dotting his stories with footnotes (and even dotting his footnotes with footnotes). This sounds horrifically self-indulgent, and with a lesser writer it would be, but Foster Wallace is firmly in control. He spent his education as a “philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic”. This shows up in his work, stories that almost read like essays, the collection as a whole could be a textbook for studying the human condition. What this description misses, however, are the thick veins of humour running through the collection, from the titular series of stories, where he allows the interview format to reveal the perversions and misguided machismo of his male subjects, to the opening story, the two paragraph long, “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life”. His scientific awareness of the devices used in the construction of fiction has allowed Foster Wallace to put together an original, unique collection.

That Foster Wallace embraces the device known as “Meta-Fiction” may bring eye rolling and sighs from some, but he does so with such extremity and self-knowledge that it becomes infectious. In the story “Octet” he lays all of his tricks and devices out in the open, but great enjoyment comes from decided if this “100% candor” is just another trick. In this fictional forum, truth is degraded to comic effect and, depending on how the reader views this “honesty”, as trick or truth, the inflection of the story is completely changed.

This is an intelligent form of fiction completely void of cliché and so absolutely captivating that it can only lead to obsession. The next stop has to be his sprawling, 1000 page epic, Infinite Jest, often described as a modern-day Ulysses. Maybe this comparison will indicate the level of complexity and talent from which David Foster Wallace is operating.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace (Abacus, £7.99) is out now.

Review by Graham Foster