SOURCE: Johnson, Greg. “Wallace's Prose Experiment Pays Off Handsomely.” The Atlanta Journal and Constitution (6 June 1999): 13L.

In the following favorable review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Johnson investigates Wallace's place within the pantheon of experimental American authors, which includes Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and William Gass.

In recent years, experimental fiction has fallen on hard times.

During its heyday in the late 1960s and '70s, such writers of so-called metafiction as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Robert Coover were the much-touted literary heroes rescuing the art of fiction, as their partisans claimed, from the otiose, middlebrow realists (such as those villainous Johns—namely O'Hara, Cheever and Updike) who scored best sellers and top literary prizes though they persisted in the habit, decades after the modernist revolution, of including coherent plots, characters and settings in their novels and stories.

But Barthelme has been dead for...