Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

I bought "Consider the Lobster" because I wanted a little taste of David Foster Wallace's style before deciding whether or not to invest the countless hours it would take to read his most famous monster of a novel "Infinite Jest". Wallace has sold me! Very smart writing on topics the average person doesn't necessarily stop to consider (as the title might imply). Just so you know, because it certainly surprised me, there are some very scholarly essays (there's a huge one about American Usage (language, grammar), for example, as well as one about Dostoyevsky... you get the idea) included in the anthology. If you have the discipline to get through them, though, they make some very interesting points and show the amazing range of what Wallace can do (which as far as I can tell, is just about anything.)

My rating and review are specific to the abridged CD audio version. Be alert that it contains only four of the, I believe, ten essays of the text version - a fact I wish I had been aware of before making this my first daily commute audio book purchase.

This is excellent in its own right -- an intellectual smorgasbord (sp?) of issues in contemporary Americana (porn, talk radio, militant grammarians, etc.) -- but also, for fans of DFW's fiction, this is compulsory reading. There's some academic book that costs too much that posits DFW as the leader of the third wave of modernism -- following modernism & postmodernism -- and this book, along with his other collection of essays, helps explain why he might be.

What can I say? The guy is brilliant. Each essay spoke to a different part of me, and I am in awe. Of his brilliance with language, of his humanity (what a banal word, but my brain can't come up with anything else at the momment) of his completely sincere attempt to see the subject of each essay from all perspectives and be honest about his own issues in his approach to each subject. I also listened to the podcast on KCRW's bookworm in which he talked about the pieces in his book, and was taken by a lot of what the interviewer (who can be more than ponderous) said about his basic morality. Worth a listen. To be honest, I'm also one of the people who adores his fiction and finds it funny and moving so that may disqualify my opinion for certain people... And I'm also a huge fan of John Barth and maximalism (?) in general so I love every digression whether in footnotes or little boxes with arrows. It's how I think, too. It works for me.

Wallace is often at his best in essay form and his newest collection is no exception.

There's some great stuff here: including "Big Red Son," an amusing behind-the-scenes look at the Adult Video Awards; "Authority and American Usage," which starts as a review of a new dictionary and gradually devolves into not only a comparison between prescriptivist and descriptivist thinking, but an indictment of his own teaching style; "The View from Mrs. Thompson's," in which DFW watches the second plane crash into The World Trade Center on television from the safety of his neighbor's kitchen; and the title essay, where DFW gets too tied up in the realization that The Maine Lobster Festival amounts to not much more than asking a million people to stand around and watch as one million lobsters are boiled alive to actually write about whether the festival is fun or not.

The book has it's problems, obviously. There's a Dostoevsky piece that left me bored and cold. And the footnotes, which don't tend to bother me usually, are quite annoying in "Host" (instead of being at the foot of the page, they're included in little boxes that break up the text--pretty to look at, but difficult to read). But there is something to enjoy or learn in almost all of this collection's entries.

For me, though, no matter how good or bad the rest of the book is, the book itself gets four stars solely for the inclusion of "Up, Simba." This essay, originally an e-book, concerning eight day's on the campaign trail with Senator John McCain back in 2000, is one of the most thought-provoking and beautiful pieces of writing that DFW has ever produced.