BOOK REVIEW: 'Consider the Lobster'


Slightly longer version of a review in today's Oregonian:




I'd wager that in book-loving circles, anyone who admits they prefer David Foster Wallace's non-fiction to his fiction -- who admits, essentially, that they prefer Wallace's essay collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" to that genius doorstopper "Infinite Jest" -- is considered something of a lit-plebe.

Well, consider me out and proud.

Wallace -- award-winning experimental-fiction writer; Roy E. Disney '51 Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Pomona College, and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient -- has carved out a lucrative side-career applying his humming brain to mundane subjects in popular magazines. And for my money, his New New Journalism is the most exciting thing to happen to magazine prose since Tom Wolfe picked up an exclamation point.

Wallace is a hilariously eccentric writer. He mixes a terrifying, academic vocabulary with conversational words like "stuff" and "totally," tucks his funniest bits into footnotes that can go on for pages, and uses what's been described as "guitar-solo" sentence structure to take urgent, unironic looks at the concerns of modern Americans -- at language, at politics, at sports, at the strange ennui that afflicts people surrounded by too much food and entertainment. Send Wallace to a gathering, no matter how ordinary, and he'll usually return with what "these magazine people" (Wallace's term) describe as a "really big experiential postcard" -- one that surprises and disturbs.

"A Supposedly Fun Thing," published in 1997, collected and expanded his over-footnoted dispatches from a David Lynch film set, a tennis tourney, the Illinois State Fair and a Celebrity cruise. His conclusions and theses are often surprisingly simple: "David Lynch likes messing with our heads for the sake of messing with our heads." "Luxury cruises wrap you in so much artificial comfort that it's actually kind of depressing." "Maybe we should turn off our TVs and be more sincere." (I'm paraphrasing.) But he's examined his subjects in such obsessive (and funny) detail that these observations feel fully proven, like a math proof definitively telling us "1+1=2."

Anyway. Little, Brown just released Wallace's second major collection of essays and journalism, "Consider the Lobster." It doesn't (and couldn't) have "A Supposedly Fun Thing"'s seismic impact. It's missing such overlooked, uncollected gems as "F/X Porn," and "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama." And it's padded with a couple of riotously mean but ultimately minor book reviews that take John Updike and Tracy Austin (!) and tear them to ribbons. But "Lobster" is nevertheless anchored by five pretty wonderful bits of critical reportage:

(1) "Big Red Son" expands on a truncated, "bipseudonymously" written Premiere magazine piece in which Wallace attends the porn industry's equivalent of the Oscars. (The original Premiere article isn't online, but here's an unhappy response to it by several Adult Video News editors.) There's nothing particularly new in Wallace's observations that porn stars are shallow and artificial, but the essay contains some of his best-ever desciptive arias.

(2) "Authority and American Usage," is arguably the best piece in the book -- a review of a new usage dictionary that quickly blows up into a profound discussion of the ethical and philosophical wars that rage behind the creation of every "authoriative" reference text. The subject sounds dull and granular, but this is a surprisingly personal piece: Wallace includes several autiobiographical asides about his own elitist grammar-snob upbringing -- and his later struggles with students and faculty who considered his insistence on Standard Written English to be "racially insensitive."

(Wallace is perhaps the only living American writer who'd respond to a passage in the introduction to "The American College Dictionary" with his own sophisticated, multi-paragraph attack on the hazards of Descriptivist principles -- but kick the whole retort off with the sentence, "This is so stupid it practically drools." Throughout his non-fiction, Wallace acts as a sort of comic ambassador between mainstream magazine readers and the academy.)

(3) "Up, Simba!" finds Wallace spending a week with John McCain's 2000 campaign -- where he gets more straightforward and prophetic analyses from the guys who hold the cameras and boom mikes than he ever could from the thoroughly swaddled candidate, his advisors, and the "tighter than a duck's butt" print journalists that surround them.

(4) "Consider the Lobster" expands a controversial and sneaky Gourmet magazine piece from 2004. Wallace attends the Maine Lobster Festival, initially writing what feels like a slightly tepid riff on his usual observational schtick -- until he very suddenly turns the piece on its ear, diving into an excruciating (and ultimately unanswerable) examination of whether lobsters feel pain when they're boiled alive.

(5) And then there's "Host," in which Wallace spends several weeks immersed in the "particular codes and imperatives of large-market talk radio" -- specifically with Los Angeles AM-radio pundit (and jingoistic O.J. Simpson obsessive) John Ziegler. (Here, if you're curious, is Ziegler's official response to the piece.) Sadly, the book version omits the original Atlantic Monthly article's graphically innovative, color-coded side-notes; they appear here as black-and-white flowcharts that earn some complaints for choppy readability. (One blogger put it nicely: "I mean, what, the guy writes this stuff in Quark?")

Personally, I found the extra navigational work rewarding -- not so much a gimmick as an accurate, conceptually funny graphic representation of Wallace's digressive thought process. I quote Wallace's own defense (in another of the book's essays) of the occasional impenetrability of Dostoevsky: "Some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation."

Indiscreet inquiries of a subversive mind
(The Oregonian, Jan. 8, 2006)

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Posted: Sun - January 8, 2006 at 03:15 PM        

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