Considering The Lobster
It’s commonly held, both by the literati and the generally bookish alike, that David Foster Wallace was a genius. His masterpiece, Infinite Jest, remains one of the very few truly great works of postmodern literature. It’s over a thousand pages of some of the best writing I’ve ever come across. When I started reading IJ a couple years ago, I remember very distinctly having to pick my jaw up off the floor after the first few pages. I had simply never read anything that even came close to DFW’s caliber of prose nor his command of the English language. If you’re a fan of writing as an art form, it simply doesn’t get any better. It just doesn’t.
But while DFW’s genius is all but incontrovertible, the root of that genius is less overtly defined and is a curious thing to think about. While the writing contained within Infinite Jest is of truly elite and singular quality, even a scholarly, margin-blackening reading fails to reveal the totality of Wallace’s ability as a thinker. While it’s beyond (my) comprehension just how he managed to manifest a work of fiction so intricately constructed and astoundingly detailed, his candor, personal viewpoints, and humanity are, of course, only perceptible through the lenses of his characters.
Fiction allows for an author’s mind to be revealed to the reader, but only to the extent that it makes sense within the context of the story he or she is crafting. Writers who seek to inject their writing with their own personal perspectives and thoughts can certainly do so, but, as we’ll discuss a bit later on*, it can be distracting and hokey when the characters or narrator become an obvious avatar for the author. This is to say that you don’t really get to know David Foster Wallace, the man, when you’re reading IJ. You don’t care, of course, because you’re so absorbed by Hal and Don and Marathe and Madame Psychosis, et al. as well as the two lush and diametrically opposing worlds materializing as you turn the pages. You don’t know what you’re missing because it sure as hell doesn’t feel like you’re missing anything.
*“Certainly the End of One Thing or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”
But then you read his essays.
Writing is a function of intellect--it makes thoughts tangible and communicable--and the quality of that thought dictates the quality of the writing. This is obvious, but often overlooked. DFW is infamous for his outrageous vocabulary that basically necessitates keeping a dictionary or Google nearby while you’re reading. But any writer with an affinity for language can muster pieces filled with multisyllabic and sesquipedalian* qualities. That, in and of itself, doesn’t make it good at all. Often it does quite the opposite, it makes the writing annoying for people to try to hack their way through.
*See? Sesquipedalian: (1) (of a word) long, multisyllabic. (2) characterized by long words.-- (I didn’t know this one either. Guess where I learned it...)
Nobody would read a thousand page book filled with words they didn’t know unless the writing around those words was riveting. A book needs to connect with the reader in some way (ideally many ways) to keep them from throwing it out a window. All good books do this, but they do it in different ways. Many believe that genius-level writing must be revelatory. That is, it should show you things that you already know, but that you didn’t know that you knew. Others would say that genius-level writing should impart new knowledge on the reader. Still others believe that it should fundamentally change the way the reader perceives the world, ideally for the better. David Foster Wallace was a master of all three. While his fiction rightfully earned him his Genius designation, that Genius is actually most evident in his non-fiction.
Consider the Lobster is a collection of ten of DFW’s non-fiction pieces. Most were originally written for various publications including Rolling Stone (“Up, Simba”, “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”), Premier (“Big Red Son”), Gourmet (“Consider the Lobster”) and Harper’s (“Authority and American Usage”). There is a humorous irony laced throughout these pieces which stems from a pervading sense that DFW seems sort of reluctantly present and quizzically engaged in observing these events he’s covering, rather than being excited in any way to be there. Like his fiction has consistently evinced, he takes pride in eschewing norms in just about every way imaginable, and that predilection for disobeying tired journalism industry tropes is exercised exhaustively throughout.
“Big Red Son”
Somewhat strangely, the collection kicks off with the most inherently repulsive piece, which is not a statement on the writing, which is of course top-notch, but on the event the piece is covering: the AVN Awards (porn’s “Oscars”, for the enviably uninitiated). The article exudes a continuously awkward undertone which effectively conveys what DFW was likely feeling at the mixers preceding the event and at the awards ceremony itself, surrounded by cretinous folk who either sold their souls for membership within the industry, or (worse) had travelled from far and wide to be there as fans(?!).
It’s made very clear that however strange, awkward, or unsavory you might imagine a porn convention being, in reality, it’s way, way worse.
B+*
*For the sake of clarification, these grades are uniquely referent to and specifically valid only within the confines of the works of DFW. They should not be interpreted as being contained in any continuum that includes other pieces by other writers, as, if that were the case, they’d all be emphatically and unquestionably A-graded. Additionally, lower grades should not be interpreted to mean that I believe there’s anything I could have, or would have, done to “improve” them. Rather, they are merely statements meant to classify and quantify my personal level of enamoredness with each one.
“Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”
A less than glowing review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time, this piece bemoans the plunge in form of one of the three “Great Male Narcissists”*. It cleverly questions the legitimacy of an obviously talented novelist who just can’t seem to avoid making all his main characters practically imperceptibly different fictionalizations of himself, a fact which is much compounded by the fact that Updike, as the progenitor of these characters, is basically a blatant chauvinist and a pathologically self-centered asshole. It’s suggested that those qualities could, perhaps, be forgiven when the writing is stellar, but man, do they ever reek once the quality plummets.
C+
*Quotations DFW’s, the other two being Mailer and Roth
“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness, from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed”
As someone who has only read The Trial, and who found it to be quirky, disorienting, and in many cases off-putting in some weird and hard-to-define ways, this piece went a long way to contextualize for me Kafka’s multitudinous layers of meaning and, surprisingly, his humor, which can really only be described to someone who hasn’t read him as being beyond dry to the point of being nearly upsetting. It also provides a very enlightening take on how entertainment invisibly undergirds our entire society (a notion that was explored at length in Infinite Jest).
C+
“Authority and American Usage”
The fact that the phrase “seamy underbelly” doesn’t pop up in Consider the Lobster until page 66, at the beginning of “Authority and American Usage” (that is, not appearing once in “Big Red Son”) is hilarious. This monstrous review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage may be the ultimate case of DFW’s greatness and genius. To take something so fundamentally dull (basically, grammar) and craft from it a sixty-plus page opus to the English language and to the subterranean, yet highly influential, functions that language plays in our lives is unbelievable.
It’s an almost universally unrealized, or at least criminally underappreciated fact, that human behavior, interaction, understanding, and reason are all, at their core, necessarily predicated on the capabilities and efficiency afforded them by language. The truth of the matter is that having a more advanced grasp of language facilitates a much more comprehensive ability to accurately express otherwise ineffable experiences, emotions, thoughts, etc. This is a tenet that should be posted reverently in every classroom in the world.
The reality is that many of the deep-seated problems endemic in politics, education, and many technical, jargon-reliant fields are all functions of either misconstrued language or the practical limitations of language. There’s an overwhelming hopefulness that comes with realizing that some of the problems that we perceive as being impregnable are, in fact, semantic issues that could theoretically be mitigated through the application of more finely calibrated language.
For being written almost 20 years ago, “Authority and American Usage” exudes a topical applicability, especially w/r/t political correctness, identity politics, tribalism, right vs. left, etc. which are evinced as being much less novel than we might perceive them to be in 2020. By viewing these issues as problems of literal understanding, rather than political, emotional, or sentimental understanding, they become a little less daunting and a little more manageable.
This piece features some of the most enlightening and intellectually revelatory riffing I’ve ever come across and should be required reading for everyone who can read, period.
A+
The View From Mrs. Thompson’s
This piece, originally published in Rolling Stone in the aftermath of 9/11, is DFW’s personal account of that fateful day and the immediate aftermath from his vantage point in Bloomington, IL, which here serves as an analog for all of “flyover country”. It’s eminently captivating for the simple fact that here’s a master writer detailing his real-time experience amidst arguably the single most impactful event to beset America in sixty years. While the article is independently riveting, it actually pales in comparison to the visceral, emotional, and intellectual impacts imbued by some of the other pieces in Lobster, a fact which is ironic, as it covers by far the most visceral and emotional subject matter discussed anywhere in the book.
B-
How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart
This one is a show-stealer. The quirkiness of the subject (former tennis prodigy Tracy Austin’s abysmally written memoir) and the fact that it’s an exceedingly personal topic for DFW (as he himself was a tennis player and rabid fan), make this piece the hidden gem of Lobster. The backbone of the review is the abundantly thought-provoking question of what sorts of psychological markers might exist that predict athletic greatness, and what might be the cost of that greatness from an emotional, psychological, and generally human standpoint.
Probably the funniest piece in the book, it chronicles DFW’s frenetic attempt to understand just how someone he idolized could go and write a droolingly vapid and pathetically disengaging memoir that simultaneously recounts a number of inherently compelling and shockingly juicy events in the author’s own life.
A
Up, Simba
This piece, which, for me, takes home the Consider the Lobster silver medal (being edged ever so slightly by “Authority and American Usage”), depicts DFW at his most awkwardly* journalistic, deeply embedded in John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign. The inane, often kafkaesque, reality of life on the campaign trail is described with the fanatical attention to the mundane that no one else I’ve read could ever hope to conjure.
*”Awkward” here being a sort of backhanded compliment and a nod to the fact that DFW’s degree of objectivity and forthright observation of the entire experience at large is so far removed from what we’ve become accustomed to from the traditional mainstream media (not to mention the indie, craft-brewery sort of highly specialized “news” outlets) that it feels unusual at times, but in the best possible way. We’re allowed to accept (or reject) the information casually and without having to pop any veins straining to shove a biased and misleading square peg through the round hole of our critical perception.
Interestingly, the lack of traditional (biased) journalistic qualities that DFW embodies in this piece is precisely what make it such good journalism. Despite being on assignment for (and hilariously adopting for himself the personal name of) Rolling Stone, a historically left leaning publication, he remains steadfastly objective, pointing out McCain’s faults when they surface, but also studying and exploring extensively his virtues.
With a page count that places it well within the realm of journalistic novella, much of the enjoyment and satisfaction that “Up, Simba” induces comes from DFW’s detailed descriptions of torpor, monotony, and sheer boredom that infiltrate large segments of daylight on the campaign trail. Of course, these periods of extreme inactivity are also frequently interrupted by intervals of extreme frenzy. The result for everyone involved is a sort of haze wherein achieving true rest and being truly alert are simply not achievable, a fact which makes judging minor flubs from candidates in the midst of this grind seem obscene and unfair.
There is also a entrancing level of behind-the-scenes insight into the day-to-day, and even minute-to-minute complexity of the campaign process, where candidates and their teams are constantly planning and delivering painstakingly crafted statements while often simultaneously privately and publicly reacting to similar statements and sound bites that are breaking from or about the competition. It casts a new light on the art of campaigning and the truly remarkable quality that candidates must possess in order to even hope to mentally and physically survive the process.
A+
Note: The piece also contains the most hilarious description in the entire book: “...and coffee that tastes like hot water with a brown crayon in it.”
Consider the Lobster
If “Big Red Son” was an X-rated exposé on the darker corners of collective human behavior, “Consider the Lobster” is its PG-rated counterpart. Here, DFW is on location corresponding for Gourmet magazine at the Maine Lobster Festival, an annual event that celebrates arguably New England’s most prized and proudly touted export. After setting the scene, which is brimming with savagery and violence that is not only accepted, but encouraged, he delves into the impact of an event like this from the perspective of the delectable guests of honor, the lobsters.
The moral conundrum that DFW is confronted with as a sensitive carnivore at what is basically a celebratory genocide of oceanic bugs is hilariously parsed apart. The ins and outs of both the carnivorous and cruelty-free arguments are explored in non-judgy way that ultimately reveals the hilarity of the uniquely human problem of having to feel bad about the death required to keep us alive.
A-
Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky
Almost unquestionably the most bland piece in the collection, “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” is a review of a four part Dostoevsky biography series by Joseph Frank. Like the Kafka piece discussed earlier, this one will likely only resonate with you if you’re read Dostoevsky. My experience with him is limited to “Notes from Underground”, which, though very short, is one of the most challenging books I’ve read.
DFW expounds upon some of the things which he found interesting in Frank’s series and makes clear the fact that one of the trickiest aspects to reading Dostoevsky is trying to understand just how different every aspect of 19th century Soviet life was from what we’re used to in the West. That, combined with the intrinsic difficult in translating Russian to English, makes Dostoevsky a very difficult read on several levels. An interesting piece, but ultimately not one that embraces a neutral reader the way most of the others do.
D+
Host
The final piece in Lobster is an expository piece on John Ziegler, the conservative talk radio personality, conducted in 2004 with the backdrop of Nicholas Berg’s taped beheading being released by al-Qaeda. The piece is a hyper-enlightening description of some of the inner workings of talk radio, the underappreciated challenges of being a talk radio host, and the real motivations behind the often intentionally polarizing viewpoints espoused by the hosts. It discusses the curious phenomenon of talk radio being dominated by right-wing, conservative characters and why their left-wing counterparts are all but non-existent.
NOTE: “Host” also features DFW’s most outrageously frenetic footnote work. Conjuring memories of "House of Leaves", the footnotes are all over the place with arrows directing you up, down, and side to side. Like "House of Leaves", it’s likely that this method is intended to imbue a sense of confusion or disorientation that is sometimes felt during a rant or tirade typical of Ziegler and/or other talk radio personalities.
Like in “Authority and American Usage”, DFW’s take on PC culture, as well as many other significant social issues of today, is strikingly relevant. More than anywhere else in Lobster you get a gripping, selfish sadness for the fact that he’s no longer with us to comment on our current state of affairs. You get the sense that a voice and keen eye like his would be invaluable amidst the slew of asinine commentators in the twitter-sphere and elsewhere today.