Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

absolute pap from the king of "witless" wit.
I find this highly offensive, humorless, derivative droll-These essays are obvious to the point of subtlety (if that's possible?) But then again it all makes sense when one considers the current state of political/cultural/ stagnancy.

DFW does an excellent job presenting 4 of his best essays in Consider the Lobster on this set. Although the method of presenting Wallace's notoriously long footnotes on audio took some getting used to, his narration was very enjoyable.

'The Big Red Son' stands out as Wallace's strongest essay in this collection. It was equally parts sad, hilarious and at times outright disturbing. Wallace's narration felt more like storytelling, rather than a narrator reading a book.

His essay on Tracy Austin's 'tell all' autobiography was presented well...althouh, at times I felt sorry for Austin as Wallace read some of her more airheaded quotes.

The title essay definitely made me 'consider the lobster', as Wallace spoke of the darker side of Maine's lobster industry.

Overall, the audiobook was outstanding. Although, being an abridged edition, I felt cheated. I'd definitely pay to hear some more of Wallace's essays in the audiobook format.

This is the first book by David Foster Wallace that I've ever read, and I've already ordered my next from Amazon. These essays are, by turns, insightful and hilarious. Wallace may be the best working essayist out there.

"The Big Red Son" is perhaps the best essay in the piece. It is the definitive look at the Adult Entertainment Industry. Wallace attends the AVN awards in Vegas. The result is just sad - especially when we get a good look at former child star, Scotty Schwartz.

"Authority and American Usage" should be required reading in every Freshman Composition class. I should know - I teach one.

"Consider the Lobster" takes a serious look at a question that everyone's asked at least once in his life: "Isn't it barbaric to throw a living thing into a pot of boiling water?"

The other essays are good as well. "Up, Simba" is a look at the John McCain Presidential Campaign. Part of the problem is that the topic is a little outdated for such a long piece, but - if you hate George Bush - you'll have more reason to after reading it.

Wallace's "gimmick" is extensive footnoting. The footnotes sometimes take up more room than the actual essay. The only time this bothered me was in the essay, "Host." That piece had such an intricate series of footnotes it looked like a schematic. It didn't help matters that most of the footnotes in that piece weren't very interesting - I just skipped them.

Yes, this is good stuff. While not that impressed -- yet -- with Wallace as a novelist, his essays/articles here reveal the heart of a real, thoughtful, sensible human being. His style is so accessible, so regular and so American, he makes Keillor look crotchety and makes Hitchens seem like an anal dweeb. Yes the essay on language is worth the price alone (it's the most important piece of its kind since Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"), but so is the essay on lobsters, on porn, and on Dostoevsky. My only problem with "Host" -- it's excellent, perceptive writing -- is that the "hyperlink" stuff is gimmicky (like Cormac McCarthy's not using punctuation or capitalization - a cheap literary trick) and all the boxed entries could simply be footnotes.
Nevertheless, this is good reading, excellent reading. I'll look for Wallace's next novel and hope it's better then Infinite Jest, which out-Pynchoned Pynchon.

(Note before beginning this doubtless overlong review: My five-star rating applies to every essay in this book except for Authority and American Usage, which I do intend to read eventually but haven't yet. All apologies for the exclusion.)

Love him or hate him, there's no denything that David Foster Wallace is a distinctive voice in the American literary world right now. And while I've greatly enjoyed pretty much all the fiction of his that I've read (especially the gargantuan novel Infinite Jest), Wallace has proven in his two essay collections that he might be even better at nonfiction. And Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, which pulls writings of Wallace's from the past decade, easily contains some of his best work. The frequently bizarre fetishism that accompanies Wallace's fiction is generally absent or at least restrained here, so if you're one of the many people who found Infinite Jest or Wallace's extensive catalogue of stories to be excessively dense or pretentious, that shouldn't scare you from this collection.

As he already proved with his previous collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (especially the title essay), at his best Wallace is almost impossibly original and comprehensive essayist, always managing to cover his subject from every angle, including a few you wouldn't be likely to think of on your own. While all his essays have nominal subjects, Wallace is a master of tangents, freely ranging from his initial discussions to ruminate on, well, whatever comes to his mind. And since Wallace seems to know everything, he's free to write about anything, and I for one always find myself indulging his frequent asides and extended footnotes. He's also an extremely funny writer, both in his essays and otherwise, but not in a conventional sense. He doesn't make jokes per se; he mostly just addresses his subject matter in a deadpan, matter-of-fact way that sort of makes the comedy come out on its own.

Never is this skill more apparent than in the book's powerhouse opener Big Red Son, an account of Wallace's visit to Las Vegas for the 1998 Adult Video News Awards (Sort of a much less pretentious pretentious version of the Oscars, except involving porno movies). Wallace's rattling off the names of some of the industry's more promiment performers and titles (most of which probably aren't safe to reproduce here) is funny enough, but the humor goes into overdrive when he discusses the sights on display at the Adult Software exhibition("Imagine that the apocalypse took the form of a cocktail party") or pornography's recent "bizarro sleaze" movement, both of which had me laughing to the point of physical pain. Of course, the adult-film industry is an easy target for potshots, but Big Red Son is far more than just an extended mockery; it's a comprehensive treatment of the AVN awards in particular and the porno industry in general, complete with plenty of amusing anecdotes, eye-popping statistics, and thoughtful reflections on just what provides adult movies with such wide-ranging and enduring appeal.

While Big Red Son is definitely my favorite here, every essay I read was at the very least interesting, especially the longer ones that allow Wallace plenty of room for in-depth examination and discussion of complex topics. While Wallace isn't really an ideological writer, at least not in the left vs. right sense (although he is pretty clearly what you'd generally call a liberal), two of the book's extended essays deal directly with politics. Host is superficially a profile of right-wing LA radio host John Zeigler, but it quickly branches out into a look at the several of the dominant aspects of our cultural landscape: the rising prominence of the talk-radio industry and the business considerations behind it, the current state of political debate and why right-wing sentiments are becoming increasingly appealing, and the very evolution of media itself as more and more information options become available. The all-encompassing breadth of Wallace's treatment of Zeigler's show is hard to believe, as there are all sorts of prolonged asides and footnotes-within-footnotes arrayed all over the pages, addressing seemingly arcane material like just how a radio show broadcast gets on the airwaves and painstaking process of properly fitting the right amount of advertising into a show comprised of incendiary political rants.

Wallace's other foray into politics, Up, Simba, provides a first-person account of Wallace's trip to South Carolina with John McCain's improbably near-successful campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. Once again, Wallace goes into exhausive detail on pretty much everything you could want to know about, from biographical details on McCain; to the incredibly taxing existence of the correspondents and technicians on the campain trails; to the widespread disillusionment with modern politics and how it both helps and hurts McCain's chances; to the agonizing decisions that go into avoiding the negative-campaigning trap and crafting the image of a candidate who's not supposed to have an image. Wallace makes the ideal writer for a piece on the whole McCain "anti-candidate" phenomenon, as the manages to place everything in perspective and make some salient points without ever resorting to the opposing pitfalls of excessive preachiness or excessive cynicism. His relative outsider status and lack of a vested interest in the outcome actually make Wallace's insights feel even more convincing, as he has no axes to grind: while he obviously possesses a great deal of admiration for McCain as a man, Wallace makes it clear that he (like me) finds many of McCain's policy ideas extremely frightening. Wallace even manages to throw in a screed against non-voters (his logic being that not casting a ballot merely doubles the importance of the vote for an establishment candidate) without resorting to the same tired old pieties. At any rate, while they obviously deal with a decidedly different subject than Big Red Son, Host and Up, Simba provide two more examples of what makes Wallace's essay style unique and thought-provoking. Whether talking about pornogrpahy or politics, he doesn't take a position and argue it; he tries instead to provide the reader with a deeper understanding of the forces and ideas at work.

Of the book's shorter essays, two are worth a special mention. The first, How Tracy Austin broke my heart, sees Wallace taking on the subject of sports memoirs in the wake of his crushing disappointment at the sheer banality of Tracy Austin's autobiography. It may not sound like much of an essay premise, but Wallace eventually launches into a discussion of the painful irony that the exploits of our greatest athletes are so transcendent that they simply can't survive the transition to the page. It's actually sort of poignant watching Wallace struggle with this realization, as his initial excitment at reading about the life of one of his favorite tennis players dissolves into a realization that no autobiography can ever really provide a window into what separates the likes of Larry Bird and Michael Jordan from the rest of us.

My other favorite among the shorter essays here, the titular Consider the Lobster, starts out similarly to the much longer A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Much as that piece chronicled Wallace's dystopian experiences aboard a cruise ship, Consider the Lobster sees him visiting the annual Maine Lobster Festival, which he basically describes as a nightmarish tourist trap whose democratization of lobster-eating pretty much sucks all the fun out of it (if you've spent anywhere near a significant amount of time on Cape Cod, as I have, Wallace's observations on the self-contradictory nature of mass tourism will definitely ring true). Much as with How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, though, Wallace's dissatisfaction with his experience is just a springboard for a broader, if in this case somewhat unrelated, discussion surrounding the moral issues that come with boiling lobsters alive for the sole purpose of eating them. Far from an angry, PETA-style manifesto, though, Consider the Lobster is really a meditation on ethics and the moral compromises we all make for the sake of convenience. After all, Wallace notes, we could easily make it through life without eating slaughtered animals, but most of us don't, and more to the point, we don't even generally acknowledge the possibility that rampant animal-eating may undermine our cherished moral pretensions. Why, Wallace asks? Well, he doesn't provide any answers, but it's still an interesting question, and one of many you may find yourself asking after reading Wallace's writing.