Wallace gives lobsters their due

Author: Gabe Broughton

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.

This kind of passionate interrogation of the modern human condition is, according to Wallace, noticeably absent from most contemporary fiction. It has to do with something like guts, and in "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky," Wallace explains why Dostoevsky had it. "The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction and engagement with deep moral issues that we - here today - cannot or do not permit ourselves."

Wallace's desire for directness, and even dishonesty, extends beyond literature. His main explanation for the staggeringly low voter turnouts in recent political elections is, quite simply, bullshit. It hurts to be lied to. And to be lied to over and over, systematically, produces apathy. This is not a new subject for Wallace. An excerpt from "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again": "... advertisement that pretends to be art is, at absolute best, like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you."

Wallace's quest for the genuine, for the real thing, attracts him to John McCain. He is so impressed with McCain's refusal of release from prison in Vietnam in favor of other prisoners that despite McCain's sometimes "scary" politics, Wallace can't seem to take his eyes off him. The attraction is not exactly political - Wallace never planned to vote for him. He is more interested in whether the real McCain, who Wallace believes exists above the campaign, can remain intact under strain of the American political machine. To quote another contemporary novelist, "you've got to pay such fierce attention." Wallace does.

His prose is dense, circuitous, often beautiful. But perhaps most importantly, in contemporary America, where the pornography industry grosses a greater profit than mainstream cinema, where every athletic prodigy is allowed a ghost-written autobiography, where thousands of citizens hoard like animals around the world's biggest lobster cooker each year in Maine, David Foster Wallace is a painfully funny writer.