2008 Woodie Awards
Wallace gives lobsters their due
Gabe Broughton
Issue date: 3/30/06 Section: Arts
The subjects of David Foster Wallace's new book of essays, "Consider the Lobster," include the porn industry, John Updike's undying narcissism and the general awfulness of "Towards the End of Time," Franz Kafka's under-appreciated "funniness," the "seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography," reactions to Sept. 11 in the Bloomington, Il., home of an elderly woman, Tracy Austin's unfortunate autobiography, the possibility that John McCain is a real leader, the Maine Lobster Festival and its unavoidable moral implications, Joseph Frank's biographical work on Fyodor Dostoevsky and the lessons the revered Russian writer has to offer the contemporary novelist and, finally, the beguiling world of contemporary, conservative talk radio.
Yes, it is a mouth full, and reading the book is no easier. Much has been made of Wallace's love-hate relationship with his readership. This has been true since before his incendiary 1996 "Infinite Jest." Since then, he has published a book of essays, two short story collections and a pop-math book on the history of infinity. Certainly Wallace is a restless intellect, and while his subjects are wildly varied, his voice, for all its academic authority and syntactic gymnastics, holds a funny intimacy.
One possible explanation for this intimacy is the strain Wallace feels between his obviously upper-class intellectual upbringing - he attended Amherst and Harvard - and his more democratic leanings. In "Authority and American Usage," he ironically begins a sentence, "We regular citizens." This strain may also help to explain why a critically-acclaimed writer would write for Gourmet magazine, where the title essay was originally published, only to delve into the ethical difficulties of boiling alive thousands of lobsters for the "gustatory pleasure" of a paying mass of festival-goers. I do not mean to imply this is a sort of posturing on the part of Wallace. As he ponders the morality of boiling liveing things, he admits that he has not "succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief [that it is fine to eat these brutally-killed foods]is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient." He ends this particular essay wondering what exactly is meant by the title of the publication, The Magazine of Good Living, for which he is working.
Yes, it is a mouth full, and reading the book is no easier. Much has been made of Wallace's love-hate relationship with his readership. This has been true since before his incendiary 1996 "Infinite Jest." Since then, he has published a book of essays, two short story collections and a pop-math book on the history of infinity. Certainly Wallace is a restless intellect, and while his subjects are wildly varied, his voice, for all its academic authority and syntactic gymnastics, holds a funny intimacy.
One possible explanation for this intimacy is the strain Wallace feels between his obviously upper-class intellectual upbringing - he attended Amherst and Harvard - and his more democratic leanings. In "Authority and American Usage," he ironically begins a sentence, "We regular citizens." This strain may also help to explain why a critically-acclaimed writer would write for Gourmet magazine, where the title essay was originally published, only to delve into the ethical difficulties of boiling alive thousands of lobsters for the "gustatory pleasure" of a paying mass of festival-goers. I do not mean to imply this is a sort of posturing on the part of Wallace. As he ponders the morality of boiling liveing things, he admits that he has not "succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief [that it is fine to eat these brutally-killed foods]is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient." He ends this particular essay wondering what exactly is meant by the title of the publication, The Magazine of Good Living, for which he is working.