Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

Full disclosure: I have a major intellectual crush on David Foster Wallace. Yes, yes, I know about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his amazing erudition, the mess that is 'Infinite Jest'. I know all this, and I don't care. Because when he is in top form, there's nobody else I would rather read. The man is hilarious; I think he's a mensch, and I don't believe he parades his erudition just to prove how smart he is. I think he can't help himself - it's a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart he's a geek, but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly intelligent.

The pieces in "Consider the Lobster" have appeared previously in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Observer, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Harper's, Gourmet, and Premiere magazines. Among them are short meditations on Updike's `Toward the end of Time', on Dostoyevsky, on Kafka's humor, and on the `breathtakingly insipid autobiography' of tennis player Tracy Austin. An intermediate length piece describes Foster Wallace's (eminently sane) reaction to the attacks of September 11th. Each of these shorter essays is interesting, but the meat and potatoes of the book is in the remaining five, considerably longer, pieces. They are:

Big Red Son: a report on the 1998 Adult Video News awards (the Oscars of porn) in Las Vegas.
Consider the Lobster: a report on a visit to the annual Maine Lobster Festival (for Gourmet magazine).
Host: a report on conservative talk radio, based on extensive interviews conducted with John Ziegler, host of "Live and Local" on Southern California's KFI.
Up Simba: an account of seven days on the campaign trail with John McCain in his 2000 presidential bid (for Rolling Stone).
Authority and American Usage: a review of Bryan Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage" , which serves as a springboard for a terrific exegesis of usage questions and controversies.

Here's what I like about David Foster Wallace's writing: I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing - it's also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell `footnote'?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is amazingly good, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident. Finally, the article on usage is a tour de force - when it first appeared in Harper's, upon finishing it, I was immediately moved to go online and order a copy of Garner's book (which is just as good as DFW promised).

How can you not enjoy an essay that begins as follows?

"Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near Lewinskian scale?

....... (several other rhetorical questions) ......

Did you know that US lexicography even *had* a seamy underbelly?"

And which later contains sentences such as:
"Teachers who do this are dumb."
"This argument is not quite the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to objections."
and - my personal favorite -
"This is so stupid it practically drools."

Not everyone will give this collection 5 stars, but I do.

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

David Foster Wallace wields a mighty literary voice. Although not easily accessible, this book's collection of essays is not to be missed. From an insider's view of McCain's campaign trail, to an eldritch perspective of the Boston Lobster Festival, Wallace presents the modern essay as high art.

I say it's not easily accessible because his range and precision with the English language is nearly unmatched in modern literature. You might as well purchase a pack of index cards when you buy this one because you'll either have to pause every other page to look up a word, or use the cards to write them down to look up later.

If you want to experience the highest tier of modern wordsmithing and essay crafting buy this one today.

The collection of essays features David Foster Wallace's insights into worlds as disparate as the porn industry and the Maine Lobster Festival. His erudition is filtered through a popular and provocative voice whose sardonic humor reflects a general acceptance of modern life.

Wallace's shorter essays are where he's at his best, sometimes playing the role of the critic, as in "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," and sometimes packaging tremendous poignancy in with surface humor ("The View From Mrs. Thompson's" is one of the best essays on 9/11). While his longer essays capture intriguing topics (life on the campaign trail with John McCain, the inner psychological workings of a radio disc jockey, etc.), they start to become a bit tiresome in their organization (or lack thereof). Wallace includes footnotes or sidebars as written subtexts, and while they are witty and often important, they do constantly yank the reader away from the essay itself in a manner that might infuriate some readers.

The author's real gift is to capture vignettes of the mundane and turn them into opportunities for social critique. Even though he does this with varying success, he is able to combine intellectual conversation with absurdity in a way few authors can. Peter Grier, of the Christian Science Monitor, described him best when he called him a "snowboarder with a PhD."

I'm trying to like essayists - there's just something cute about the formalization of thoughts, never growing up of needing to be approved by the English teacher that is the literary world.

But seriously, David Foster Wallace? After I had finished this, mainly finished not finishing any of the single essays, I got the impression that this is an an attempt to create the absolute unreadable work, an anti-art prank. Not unreadable in the sense of undecipherable, more like in the sense of local newspaper meets interminably boring literary analysis.

I also thought it was a bit magaziney, in two senses of the word. First of all, it gives the impression of someone who sets out from zero-knowledge to gather bits and pieces of the topic they've selected without much personal commitment (only what you'd call intellectual vigor), as opposed to the great writer sort of thing, desperately trying to make sense of the conflict in their inner world and putting it on paper as coherently as you possibly can. I guess that's the point of it too, being an intellectual journalist, but I think it's completely unnecessary to distance yourself from the subject like that. It distances the readers as well. Second of all it was way too obsessed with details and superficial things.

It's not new or original either IMO. I'm reminded of the 80s/90s way of thinking a lot here, or what's my conception of it anyway. And people like P.J. O'Rourke. The humorists or whatever. Pretty basic stuff.

And I'm not saying that maybe it's just me. If you seriously like this kind of stuff, you're distracted from reality in some major way.

Consider the Lobster is very much in the vein of DFW's 90s essay collection 'A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again'. The style is perhaps a little tighter, a little more mature, a little wiser. The effect just as pyrotechnic. Once again DFW turns his vast and wide 'ranging intelligence to tackle the gauntlet Philip Roth laid down a few years ago, namely, the 'American Beserk', and how to tackle it. Many older writers have given up, the sheer hubris and purposeless of so much modern US activity way beyond their comprehension and radar. DFW, having grown up with the twin saturating forces of TV and marketing, probably goes further than any other contemporary writer (well, maybe along with Delillo), in attempting to grapple with this mightiest of themes.

So, we have in this collection 'Big Red Son', an essay on the porn industry which adopts a similar tack to an essay I recently read by English writer Martin Amis which uses irony to undermine the whole industry - i.e., don't adopt the feminist approach of saying how disgusting and degrading it is, just point out how ridiculous it is i.e. 'Ms Jasmin St Claire's cult celebrity status stems from her having broken the "World Gang Bang Record" by taking on 300 men in a row in Amazing Pictures' 1996 World's Biggest Gang Bang 2.' DFW may criticize what he considers to be the prevailing form of commentary in savvy American life, but boy does he use that device. This book positively drips with irony.
Certainly the End of Something or Other is a short piece, a book review on John Updike's recent novel 'Toward the End of Time' which both acknowledges what a great stylist Updike is, and just how much of a GMN (great male narcissist) he is. DFW and Updike are very different beasts in the American literary firmament.

What else?: a short, fairly uncompelling piece on humour in Kafka; an essay on Authority and American usage - a 20,000 word dictionary review which is way funnier and more interesting than you would expect (with a cracking riff on DFW's own attempts to teach standard white English to his black students).

The View from Mrs Thompson's is DFW's September 11 piece, an original take on those morbid events from his original observation point in the Midwest (as an antidote to all those East Coast literary views). It is one of those pieces that spends its whole time setting up the pieces, like the game Mousetrap, before delivering a thudding whoompf in the final sentence.

How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart is a piece that takes in tennis and celebrity sports biographies - two passions of DFW. He comes to the conclusion that the banality and cliche ridden personality of elite sports stars is not only accessory but fundamentally necessary to their talent.

Up, Simba is a long political piece covering the vicious 2000 Bush v McCain Republican primaries. This is competent, and revealing to those not familiar with US political campaigns, but I felt it was too jaded and never quite took off. Far better is the political content of 'Host', the final essay, with its original sub folders for footnotes, which pins down the right wing paradigms of John Ziegler and his WHAS radio station.

If this isn't enough, a couple of thought provokers on whether lobsters feel pain when steamed alive in the eponymous title essay, and a foray into 19th Century Russian classics with a review of Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky biographies.

All in all a witty, brain fuelled tour round modern America, and some of its more interesting and original sideshows. More essays soon please DFW.