Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

The essay "Consider the Lobster" has changed my life. Wallace's ruminations on lobster are thought-provoking and eye-opening, no matter what your personal beliefs about lobsters, boiling, and pain are. So, to be fair, I'll give you my beliefs upfront: lobster is way too much work to eat, way too tasteless without butter, and doesn't interest me at all. At the same time, I worry much more about force-fed ducks and debeaked chickens (I am an omnivore, yes) than I do about boiled-alive lobsters.

Wallace has made an important academic contribution on the subject of consuming meat, whether it be mammals or shellfish. His assigned magazine task for the title essay was covering the Maine Lobster Festival. Let me give you a smattering of the questions he raised for me (which still resonate with me weeks later): Why do we call meat by pseudonyms like beef and pork, while sea-dwelling animals are called by their common animal names? Should Maine look down on the Lobster Fest as a tourist trap, when all of us must admit to being tourists at one time in our lives? Really, how is eating lobster on a paper plate with chinzy paper napkins any different than any Midwest festival celebrating beef or corn? Is celebrating the "World's Largest Lobster Cooker" a little obscene--would we celebrate beef by cheering at the world's biggest slaughterhouse?

The highlight of the essay is Wallace's cogitation on pain--on what pain is, what thinking animals are, what preferences are, basic neuroscience, a comparison of mammals to humans and other life forms, and the behavior of lobsters in boiling water. Then comes the downfall of Wallace, the attitude which ruins every essay he writes. He's not satisfied to write a few pseudo-apologetic sentences about how Gourmet magazine readers may not want to read about the ethical aspects of their food, but he hopes they should open their minds. Nope, he harps endlessly in his conclusion about how the magazine's reader base needs to consider moving out of their sheltered gourmet-loving lives and listen to his arguments. As someone who had already been moved by his arguments, I was repulsed by his concluding lecture--almost enough just to adopt a contrary point of view to spite him.

So, now you know my take on Wallace. There are some gems in his musings, but his uppity attitude overshadows any insightful comments he makes. In his essay on 9/11/2001, he comments on the lovely, educated, but woefully mis-informed Midwestern church ladies he spent the day of September 11th with. They were just sad and woeful, but they didn't have the cynicism (intellect?) of a New Yorker who would notice that President Bush's speech was eerily similar to certain movie lines, that the television networks only showed x, y, and z, that it was a good career boost for the President, and so on. Let me set the record clear--I am a cynical liberal Northeasterner. I lived in New York on 9/11/2001. I despise our President. And I (along with my extreme left-wing and anarchist roommates) spent the entire day of September 11th sobbing in the living room, watching television. We made no snarky comments. We grieved. I might have developed some conspiracy theories later, but trust me, I was right there with Mrs. T in Bloomington, Illinois on that fateful day. Our whole nation was in pain, and just because Wallace was a super-cool former NY resident who happened to be in IL at the time, he is no better than his peers in the Midwest. I am disgusted that he used the tragedy of 9/11 to write an essay which elevates his status as one of the Americans (aka New Yorkers) who the terrorists really hate (as opposed to the Midwest Americans). (While that is not a direct quote, that is precisely the sentiment of Wallace's concluding remarks in his 9/11 essay).

The remainder of Wallace's essays did not win me over. He attended the Adult Video News annual pornography awards, and the resulting essay is aimless. He opens by celebrating the lack of pretension in the porno industry--by admiring their pure financial success when compared to the Hollywood Oscar-obsessed world. He later contradicts himself by attacking the AVN voting system and mocking the nom de guerres of the voting committee. Wallace's pseudo-intellectual statements on porn are just wrong--in 1997, he thinks that porn is going so extreme that snuff films are right around the corner. He claims that bizzaro filth means that we will be wanting to see girls die on camera. So, there are a few extreme wackos, and there are extreme fetishes in this industry--that means that all of American is jonesing for snuff films?? (I do, of course, have the benefit of nine years of hindsight on these predictions, but even so, porn is mainstream, and no women are going to get killed to sell more videos. Your reviewer promises you this. Call me in twenty years and I'll still be right.) Wallace also makes the statement that the porn industry has welcomed the mainstream Hollywood hit Boogie Nights despite the fact that "everyone in the industry is either portrayed as either creepness or filth, or a combination of both." Clearly, Wallace has not seen this film, which is a brilliant study of a range of characters, some of whom are positive and genuine, some of whom are ruined by drugs, some of whom are fighting personal demons. It's a portrayal of the industry as any other (sports, music, mainstream acting, etc), in which people have wild success and extreme downfalls. I'm sorry our author missed that point.

How much more can I beat up on this man? Ahh, the Tracy Austin memoir essay. 70% of this essay is pure brilliance, as a book review. I haven't read Austin's memoir, but I believe Wallace--Austin is a brilliant tennis player, but a terrible narrator, and anyone looking for inspiration should steer clear of her book. As a book review, this essay is spot-on, and one of my favorite literary pieces. But Wallace doesn't stop there. Nope, he needs to lecture on (1) how the athlete auto-biography always leaves the reader in this unsatisfied position and (2) what Tracy Austin should have written about. Wallace seems to think that his disappointment in his hero (Austin) sums up everyone's experience with hero worship. Most of us know not to expect musical or athletic heros to write literary masterpieces. Wallace can't accept that, and wants to reprimand his hero, even if he gives an "out" in the end by stating that athletic brilliance requires a certain cluelessness about their natural genius. He also makes blanket statements about "athlete autobiographies" with no supporting evidence other than his experience with Austin's memoir.

No matter how spot-on Wallace's observations are, he twists his remarks to denigrate either the reader or his subjects. The writing is top notch, the research is impeccable, but the experience of listening to this man can leave the reader with negative feelings.

David when oh when are you going to write another novel?

I'm confident I'm not the only Foster-Wallace obsessive to wish his latest book were a novel rather than another book of essays, but nevertheless it is well worth reading. 'Big Red Son', while enjoyable, felt like DFW on auto-pilot, but I really enjoyed the title essay ('tho the same criticism could be made) and his (incredibly informative) essay on language usage.

Probably a book for the true believers rather than one which will drastically expand his audience.

I was introduced to DFW by the classic essay "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again," but stupidly lost track of him until picking up "Lobster" on a whim a few weeks ago.

Let me say this first: even though DFW is a freak for the correct use of language, I love him because he can break all the pesky little rules we've all learned about clear writing (eg, no fifty-cent words, limit footnotes, limit adverbs, two simple sentences are better than one complex sentence, etc), and write vividly, clearly, engagingly, etc (see, he's already liberated my long-caged drive to adverbize.) Perhaps even better, he writes so that it feels we are in his head, and doesn't patronize his reader by tidying up messy internal disputes, which is damn refreshing.

Many of the essays are are similarly conceived (it somehow all seems to do with marketing to the least common denominator, and the way this marketing glosses over so much that is complex and difficult and important to think about, and the author's simulataneous fascination with and and revulsion regarding said marketing, in an "I'm revolted but I can't look away... and in fact am I actually that revolted?.... Gosh, should I be more revolted? Am I actually falling for this?" kind of way).

At this point, I'm thinking that my favorite is the title essay, which is among the shortest in the collection but definitely the most visceral and, at many points, just plain sad. I have a neuroscience background, and can vouch for the moral and biological complexity of the question over whether animals without cerebral cortices "experience" pain. Warning: yes, the essay's description of a lobster's behavior during the boiling process dissuaded me from eating lobster ever again.

Other standouts: "Up, Simba," about the author's travels with a press contingent during John McCain's 2000 "Straight Talk Express" ride for the Republican presidential nomination. This is one that, again, just ends up damn sad, showing just how meaningless political campaigns are. [Side note to those who have read this essay -- DFW's account of McCain's well-documented POW years is fantastic, but raised a questions I'd never thought of before, and apparently DFW didn't either -- Could young McCain have "refused" to be released from the POW camp based on his adherence to a code? I mean, if the VietCong had wanted to release him for publicity reasons, they could have just knocked him upside the head, dumped him in a jeep, and driven him to wherever they wanted to leave him. The very fact that I'm thinking this probably means that I am one of the young American cynics DFW both chastizes and sympathizes with in the course of the essay.] Also outstanding are "Big Red Son" and "Host," the latter of which is made fascinating by the use of sidenotes, with sidenotes on sidenotes, and I think in one case a sidenote on a sidenote on a sidenote. (I like the sidenotes; there will be dissenters I'm sure)

Do it -- this is filet mignon -- I mean lobster -- I mean uh a high-quality vegetarian feast for the mind.

At the beginning of one of the Roadrunner cartoons, as we proceed through the standard intro, Wile E. suddenly turns to camera: 'Allow me to introduce myself - Wile E. Coyote, Soooooooopergenius', and he presents his card, which says this. Unfortunately Wile E. peaked too early to qualify for the MacArthur Fellowship that was otherwise surely his by right.

There are two particularly revealing (perhaps 'tactically unsound' would be better) essays here.

The first is a slagging off of Updike as (together with Roth and Mailer) one of the 'Great Male Narcissists'. Takes one to know one. Lessee... There is the 'humble correspondent'/neo-Gibbonian (is that a word?) footnote schtick; there is the obsession with keeping it up - some of the essays here are the length of small books (let us not talk about Infinite Jest); there is the endless polysyllabic humour ('leptosomatic' for 'skinny' is only funny so many times) - as Gore Vidal said of Henry Miller, arcane words are put to use, often accurately.

The second is about Tracy Austin. The riff here is that overachieving sporting 'geniuses' are absent all introspection, and can't write, and that this is somehow mysterious and disconcerting (at least until he has written an essay about it) to an everyday, run of the mill, non-overachieving guy like David Foster Wallace. Duh - see previous paragraph.

All very well for while, but you wouldn't want to _live_ under Niagara.

If you Google the cross of "David Foster Wallace" and "Wile E. Coyote", you currently get fifty or so hits. The truth is out there.

I read so many books that I rarely read one that I would consider the "page turner." CONSIDER THE LOBSTER not only fits into that rare catagory, but it is a work of non-fiction, the half of the bookstore I barely read.

David Foster Wallace's essays cover a large range of topics with a sort of disbelief; his irony and rhetoric monitors are turned on high. The most interesting aspect of this collection is not that the topics are thoroughly explored and grippig, but that the reader can start to sense what kind of person David Foster Wallace is.

This collection has commissioned pieces from "Premiere", "Rolling Stone", and "Gourmet" and all three essays prove that DFW does not enjoy social gatherings, has no use for topics like porn, politics, and food (how much of a difference is there between these three?) but has the capabilty to find enough things to write about that the printed article has to be cut to fit the magazine's space (in the case of "Rolling Stone", the piece DFW turns in is so large that it would take the entire print portion of the magazine and some of the ads.) Even still his relative boredom and disgust does not get hidden by any means. The best example of this is "Big Red Son", the essay written for "Premiere", which is him attending the 1998 Adult Video News Awards. Throughout the essay, you can tell that DFW is not amused or entertained by the movies or adult film stars but feels rather lonely in this setting.

His lack of enthusiasm in his commissioned pieces drive them the same way his enthusiasm drives his more literary explorations.

The best essay in the collection "Authority and American Usage" works because DFW is so engrossed in the material (the language battles) and his final assessment that the long essay (over sixty pages) is engaging enough to read in one setting. The idea that he is more interested in literary thought than worldly thought carries over into "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" and "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed", both of which display more thought and interest by DFW than his more regular subjects.

As a whole this collection represents David Foster Walace as a more interesting and talented writer than many others, and CONSIDER THE LOBSTER is further proof of his genius. (He did win the grant.)