why I can Consider the Lobster Forever
David Foster Wallace is goddamned amazing. I know I just said this about Sean Stewart, but if you will only let me call one author amazing, I take the Stewart thing back. Go read Wallace.
The late David Foster Wallace is a sort of literary giant among people of a certain age. he was supposed to be the new Norman mailer or John updike and then he hung himself and now he’s more along the lines of the literary worlds Tupac or Biggy, (his posthumously released novels are all of the remastered and cobbled together albums released by Tupac’s and Biggys producers.
I picked up Consider the Lobster on a whim, (the real reason I picked the book up can’t be explained here,) which is the downside of a family member having found this blog through Google,) and am hugely glad I gave the book a try.
The book is a collection of Wallace’s essays, most published originally in magazines such as Harpers, Esquire, etc. This sounds a bit dull. It isn’t. At all.
DFW has done for the essay what the manhattan project did for the bomb. It doesn’t just explode, it reacts on an atomic level and blows the fuck out of everything.
To describe why Wallace is such a wonderful writer is difficult.
First of all, he’s the first author since Buckley whom I’ve needed to read with a dictionary at my side. But that doesn’t mean anything, just because an author is verbose doesn’t mean he’s any good.
I suppose there are a couple of things that make Wallace stand out so when compared to every other essayest I’ve ever read, and I do mean every one.
The first is his ability to document how he thinks in such a way that you really feel like you are thinking along with him, when he is thinking about something which causes him to randomly think about something else, he illuminates the associative connection in such a way to leave you feeling that you could have easily had the same thought. This skill might not sound like much, but its a boon when reading Wallace the why’s of which I’ll get to in a second.
Secondly, Wallace is interested in everything around him.
The first essay in the book has him on assignment at the AVN’s, the porn industries annual awards show. While other academics, (and Wallace is partially an academic,) would get stiff and awkward, Wallace goes about the awards show with a curiosity and cheer that is refreshing. But he’s no less an academic.
This isn’t to say that his interests aren’t prurient, but he expresses those interests in an educated way. He manages to strattle the line of on the one hand applying a huge array of perceptive powers to a tawdry event and at the same time to let you know he isn’t unaffected by the tawdriness around him. He can be crass without offending because he’s a combination of clinical, honest, and… eager to experience.
Wallace is one of those guys who can’t manage to stick to a single topic for very long. The porn awards show piece is really more about the porn industry itself than it is about the actual awards show, although Wallace describes a lot of the show, the middle third is spent in rumination on porn in general.
Knowing what each essay in the book is supposed to be about does you no good for the most part. When Wallace is asked to write an essay for gormay magazine about the Maine lobster festival, he instead talks a bit about the festival and spends the rest of his allotted space wondering about the ethics of eating a lobster and especially about killing it by boiling.
When reviewing a sports memoir he gets distracted by memories of his own sports career, the details of which are the best part of the essay, and also by the mindset athletes need to cultivate if they want to win.
The piece which I thought was the best of the book, was Wallace’s piece for Rolling Stone about John Mccain. In 2000, rs hired dfw to go on Mccains buss for a week to write up a profile.
Wallace, who is not a political journalist, writes about politics with more astuteness and deliberation than anyone I’ve ever read. He dissects one day of the campaign to in such a thorough way that it leaves one stunned. Its too Byzantine to get into here, but to simplify he tries to separate the spin from real life with mixed success.
Wallace can be extraordinarily difficult to read. Not so much during the “send David Wallace somewhere and see what happens” pieces, but in his purely academic essays.
Several of wallaces essays are on primarily academic subjects, and these, for me, are the weakest of the collection. He has three essays on authors, one on Kafka, one on Dostoevsky, and one on Updike. These essays are interesting, but Wallace isn’t fucking around. They are dense and complicated, and while they are laced with wallaces characteristic humor, they are hard going indeed, and having only read three novels by dostoevsky, and one by Updike, I honestly found these works a little tiresome. However, Wallace writes about these men with such an energy that he can take your vague interest in what he’s talking about and suck you in so that you actually give a damn.
Wallace’s writing style jumps back and fourth between overeducated and Midwestern. He’ll use the words solipsistic and fuck in the same sentence, spend paragraphs pondering something heavy and ethical and then offhandedly note that one of the porn actrices he’s watching is hot.
He mixes his tone, so that he’s serious one minute, slyly humorous the next, making even his essays about cafca and Updike worth the time spent reading him.
I plan to read everything else Wallace wrote right away, starting with A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do again.
Wallaces nonfiction is accessible. If you have a good vocabulary, and read regularly, you won’t find it daunting, you’ll find it exhilarating. I recommend Consider the Lobster highly. However, a warning. I hear that wallaces fiction, especially his novels are hugely “literary” and obscure slogs. I’m still going to read them, but if you’d like to read Wallace as advertised by me, then pick up some of his nonfiction first.
Five out of five stars.
Wallaces website. http://www.Heaven.god
Pages & Rages 