Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
Published 1989 · 109,034 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Postmodern Fiction
How hard is Girl with Curious Hair to read?
Girl with Curious Hair scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 74 out of 100
- Wallace deploys an unusually wide register — legal and academic jargon in one story, crude vernacular in the next, and television-industry argot throughout. The collection's vocabulary is not uniformly elevated but is demanding in its range: readers must follow corporate-speak, philosophical terminology, and thick Southern dialect within the same volume.
- Sentence structure: 82 out of 100
- The syntax ranges from deliberately stunted, affectless short sentences in stories like 'Everything Is Green' to the maximal recursive sentences of 'Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,' which opens paragraphs that loop through multiple embedded clauses and parenthetical qualifications. The collection is formally varied by design, each story adopting a syntax that mirrors its narrator's psychological state.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- Wallace's central concern here is the relation between irony, sincerity, and emotional emptiness — highly abstract territory. 'Westward,' the collection's anchor novella, is an extended metafictional argument about the failure of postmodern fiction to produce genuine affect. The stories dramatize abstract problems (what it means to feel things on television, whether irony is a defense mechanism) rather than conventional narrative conflicts.
- Information density: 78 out of 100
- Each story packs multiple registers, cultural references, and layers of self-commentary into tight spaces. 'Little Expressionless Animals' and 'Westward' in particular require the reader to track plot, metafictional commentary, allusions to Barth and television culture, and shifting emotional tone simultaneously. The prose rarely wastes a sentence but frequently embeds meaning at several levels at once.
- Narrative indirection: 76 out of 100
- Wallace rarely states his themes directly; they emerge from the friction between a story's apparent surface and its formal choices. 'My Appearance,' for instance, reads as a celebrity portrait until its unease about performed sincerity becomes the actual subject. The longest story, 'Westward,' is openly about the act of writing postmodern fiction while being one — a hall-of-mirrors structure that demands readers think about what they're reading as they read it.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- Television functions throughout the collection as a pervasive symbol for mediated experience, emotional flatness, and the colonization of interiority by surface. Recurring images — game-show sets, studio lights, the camera as eye — carry freight beyond their literal meaning. Wallace's symbols tend to be cultural artifacts rather than natural images, which makes them legible but also demands recognition of their cultural significance.
- Ironic distance: 88 out of 100
- Irony is both the subject and the dominant mode of the collection, and 'Westward' mounts an extended critique of exactly this posture. Wallace's narrators are frequently arch, self-aware, and protected by layers of meta-commentary — which is also the condition Wallace is interrogating. The reader must hold the ironic surface and its critique simultaneously, making this one of the more demanding deployments of ironic distance in postwar American fiction.
- Resolution withholding: 78 out of 100
- Most stories end in unresolved emotional stasis or deliberate ambiguity. 'Lyndon,' a Johnson monologue, withholds any stable judgement of its subject. 'Westward' ends mid-gesture, refusing the catharsis its metafictional argument has been building toward. Wallace is systematically suspicious of resolution, treating it as a form of dishonesty about how experience actually feels.
- Structural complexity: 80 out of 100
- The collection is formally heterogeneous: a teleplay-style story with scene headers, a dramatic monologue, a novella with chapter-level metafictional interruptions, and minimalist vignettes. 'Little Expressionless Animals' cuts between timelines and points of view without transition. 'Westward' nests stories within stories while arguing against the convention it's employing. Readers must reorient to a new structural logic with each story.
How Girl with Curious Hair is regarded
Girl with Curious Hair holds a literary regard score of 72 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.