Consider the Lobster

I found this book a bit challenging but interesting. I especially appreciate Mr. Wallace's sense of humor. Even when the linguistic issues did not much interest me, the prose was lively and wide-ranging.

Having attempted a novel or two by David Wallace, and found his ficttion prose intriguing in small doses, but too repetitive and dense to take in over the long haul, and consequently having not been able to finish them, I thought I would try these essays hoping that a more factual accounting, or reporting, would help me figure out what has really been on Wallace's mind. I found out quickly that he is more decipherable when in essay mode, but that the agonizing repetition is still there, to the extent that instead of not finishing them, I just skimmed the the denser content.

I do not really enjoy reading that way, but I so admire Wallace's descriptive style that I found this to be a good compromise. I particularly enjoyed his critiques of Updike and Roth, and largely agreed with them. But the difference in reading Updike and Roth is that with them you get the wonderfully descriptive prose, along with a deciperhable plot, and even some humor, and hence some incentive to finish reading them (as a 66-year old male, I have read most of their novels cover to cover). I guess I'm not young enough to fully appreciate the late, and truly great, Mr. Wallace, as he constantly reminds me in his essay about the 2000 McCain campaign.

I really like David Foster Wallace. And not because it's cool, or hip, to like him. I just think he's funny and writes like an ordinary person, only smarter. Too bad he died so young cause he was a good guy.

Reading DFW always makes me simultaneously joyful and sad. Joyful because he writes so wonderfully and makes it seem as though it just comes naturally and easily. Sad knowing that life became so painful for him it was unendurable.

This collection of essays will make you laugh out loud and also think about popular culture and politics and unique and uncomfortable ways. What good writing should do. The essay on the porn industry alone is worth the price of the book.

The writing is deft and fresh. Not simply a great athlete dazzling us with his astonishing talent, but from this amazing spew of great writing emerges a space to gain new perspectives on perhaps well worn subjects. Sorry we lost him so soon. A truly mysterious flash of talent.

This collection of essays will make you laugh out loud and also think about popular culture and politics and unique and uncomfortable ways. What good writing should do. The essay on the porn industry alone is worth the price of the book.

The writing is deft and fresh. Not simply a great athlete dazzling us with his astonishing talent, but from this amazing spew of great writing emerges a space to gain new perspectives on perhaps well worn subjects. Sorry we lost him so soon. A truly mysterious flash of talent.

David Foster Wallace is one of those authors that you either hate or love. I love him. He has all the snark and condescension of a mediocre white man, but all the intelligence and self-deprecation to charm me out of thinking so. I love his use of footnotes, and his range of interests--he can make anything fascinating. Consider the Lobster is one of my favorite of his works, but I recommend any of his nonfiction/essays.

DFW's genius shines brightly on most of these essays, though I could have done without a couple of them. His insight and tone are razor sharp, funny and poignant at times. I only wish he was still around to entertain with his wit.

Rambling, unedited, exhausting pieces. There is insight and humor throughout the book, but that is offset by tedious footnotes and sentences that just go an on and on (sesquipedalian pleonasm, anyone?). Sloppy work.

This IS NOT a review of David Foster Wallace, but rather of Hachette's horrible presentation of his work. DFW is known for his footnotes. In particular, the essay Consider the Lobster is known for its footnotes. In this ebook, the footnotes are hidden away and must be clicked on each time. Navigation within the essay and between these notes is entirely the opposite of the original spirit and intent of the essay.

First off, in the interests of full disclosure, I corresponded with Wallace back in the Nineties, and he encouraged me as to my writing style in my yet to be published novel (I'm on a third rewrite). So, perhaps this biases me here, though I'm inclined not to think so.

This book should be bought for the essay "Authority and the American Usage" alone. In fact, every incoming American Frosh (ahem, and many an American academic) should have it as prescribed (not in the lexicographic sense) reading....and rereading. It's by far the best work he's done ever in the non-fiction department. It is non-fiction work of sheer genius....and humour too.

The other essays vary in quality---See, I'm not an absolute devotee----and my supposition is that many a reader (like myself) is not going to find the intricacies of the porn industry particularly interesting. The title piece is good, especially given the droll fact that it was written for Gourmet magazine!! I'll not comment on the rest except that they vary in quality and interest from extremely good to slightly less than extremely good. Wallace IS just such a great writer.

But,CAVEAT LECTOR,the last essay "Host" was-pay attention-not written-but DESIGNED by Maria Mundaca and Peter Bernard. The credits are on the copyright page. Let that be a warning as to what lies in store. This essay took me so long to read because I would feel the onset of a migraine after three pages of trying to negotiate "Host."-This, methinks, is just too something-or-other by half for a writer who's already earned his Genius Award. Thus, the four stars.

Go forth and read.

Footnotes with footnotes? Really? I'm all for the fifty-cent word, but Wallace seems a little too infatuated with himself. I was thoroughly unimpressed. Occasionally insightful observations are dwarfed by excessive pontificating and obscure references.

this book made me feel like a worthless human being. it was like david foster wallace was there beating me with a rope and i was on a boat in the rain yelling at him to stop. i never want to feel this way again

but the writing was good and i learned a few words

These pieces do not earn the category "essay". They read like the journalism that they were. I watched Wallace a few nights ago in a 1990s Charlie Rose interview and felt connected to this bright young man. But he writes too casually, letting any thought get into the narrative. The endless digressions sap the energy of the text. I understand that his novels are that way too (i e endlessly digressive). How sad that he was unable to overcome his depression. Maybe he would have matured into a more disciplined writer.

I had heard about David Wallace from an interview of his old girlfriend and co-suicide girl Mary Karr. What is it about writers? Not being a literary person I was suspect that I would care for his writing, so I picked some essays and his book Consider The Lobster from the library. It was engrossing and his writing is smooth and easy to read. He was a very good writer.

The porn convention reporting was interesting from the standpoint that I lived in Las Vegas and used to go to COMDEX. The McCain 2000 story may have been very much in the vein of another very overrated writer who also killed himself, Hunter Thompson, but it was good nonetheless. I skipped the dictionary discussion and skimmed the Dostoevsky essay. I agree with John Zeigler the subject of "Host," it was a bit of a hit piece, but interesting too. It took until the end of the Tracy Austin analysis for him to get to what Miyamoto Musashi called “The Void” in "Book Of Five Rings." Great athletes’’ brains are wired for their sport and they really can’t explain it to you. The parts of them where reason and language reside don’t control or connect to the physical motor skills parts that make them great at what they do. They don’t think about their physical performance.

It’s a good book and an engaging read.

Full disclosure: I have a major intellectual crush on David Foster Wallace. Yes, yes, I know all about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his amazing erudition, the mess that is 'Infinite Jest'. I know all this, and I don't care. Because when he is in top form, there's nobody else I would rather read. The man is hilarious; I think he's a mensch, and I don't believe he parades his erudition just to prove how smart he is. I think he can't help himself - it's a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart he's a geek, but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly smart.

The pieces in "Consider the Lobster" have appeared previously in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Observer, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Harper's, Gourmet, and Premiere magazines. Among them are short meditations on Updike's `Toward the end of Time', on Dostoyevsky, on Kafka's humor, and on the `breathtakingly insipid autobiography' of tennis player Tracy Austin. An intermediate length piece describes Foster Wallace's (eminently sane) reaction to the attacks of September 11th. Each of these shorter essays is interesting, but the meat and potatoes of the book is in the remaining five, considerably longer, pieces. They are:

Big Red Son: a report on the 1998 Adult Video News awards (the Oscars of porn) in Las Vegas.
Consider the Lobster: a report on a visit to the annual Maine Lobster Festival (for Gourmet magazine).
Host: a report on conservative talk radio, based on extensive interviews conducted with John Ziegler, host of "Live and Local" on Southern California's KFI.
Up Simba: an account of seven days on the campaign trail with John McCain in his 2000 presidential bid (for Rolling Stone).
Authority and American Usage: a review of Bryan Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage" , which serves as a springboard for a terrific exegesis of usage questions and controversies.

Here's what I like about David Foster Wallace's writing: I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing - it's also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell `footnote'?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is amazingly good, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident. Finally, the article on usage is a tour de force - when it first appeared in Harper's, upon finishing it, I was immediately moved to go online and order a copy of Garner's book (which is just as good as DFW promised).

How can you not enjoy an essay that begins as follows?

Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near Lewinskian scale?

....... (several other rhetorical questions) ......

Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

And which later contains sentences such as:
Teachers who do this are dumb. ,
This argument is not quite the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to objections.
and - my personal favorite -
This is so stupid it practically drools.

Not everyone will give it 5 stars, but I do.

|TITLE|”CONSIDER THE LOBSTER: And Other Essays”
|AUTHOR| David Foster Wallace {1962 – 2008}
|REVIEWER| Josh Grossman, Colonel {r} U.S. Army Medical Corps, M.D., FACP
• Mentor/Tutor Basic Math
• Men/Tutor United States Medical Examination {U.S.M.L.E. III – Step Three}
• Mentor/Tutor English as a Second Language
|BOOK FORMAT| soft cover
|BOOK PAGES| 343 pages
|BOOK COPYRIGHT| Little Brown and Company 2006
|BOOK ISBN| 978-0-316-15611-0
“Opinion in Good Men is but Knowledge in the Making”
John Milton {1608 – 1674} {1}
As a reader/admirer/respecter of John Updike, “Couples, Rabbit Run, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit Redux, and Rabbit at Rest,” I was drawn to pages 51 – 59 where I revisited Updike.
As a Military Man {Chief-of-Medicine 121st Evacuation Hospital APO-SF-96220 Evacuation Hospital – Commanding Officer 548th General Dispensary APO-SF-96301} having served in and during our Far East Deployment with hard-scrabble, impoverished soldiers, I nodded while reading of towns where joining our Military Reserve Units was, “What you do to pay for college.” Yes! Most Certainly! Indeed you do exactly that!
Most delightful was the presentation, in this outstanding text, of the appellation, “SNOOT,” (2), all capital letters. Who else but David Foster Wallace has the chutzpah (3) to write, “SNOOT?”
All City, County, and University Libraries should have a copy of this exemplary text. All incoming College and University First Year students should have a copy to discuss with their Mentors. Respectfully recommended for students for whom English is their Second Language.
This illuminating text is but one of the many that the author bequeathed to us, to all of us. May David Foster Wallace (1962 – 2008) Rest-in-Peace and May His Memory Always be for a Blessing!
REFERENCES:
1. Blind Poet, Author-of-Paradise Lost
2. A person who shows contempt for those considered to be of a lower social class
3. Yiddish: Audacity
Respectfully submitted: Josh Grossman, Colonel {r} U.S. Army Medical Corps, M.D., FACP

This collection features essays on topics as broad as the porn industry, the humor in Kafka's work, John Updike's penis obsession, and conservative talk radio hosts. Once again, my mind was pretty much constantly exploding while reading these essays. DFW has this way of making me feel at once really stupid (How have I never thought about that? What does that even mean? This is kind of over my head.) and also kind of smart. (Hey! I get this part! I'm learning new crazy new concepts, and now I know what words mean!) Although he uses a lot of fancy vocab that I'm not familiar with, I like the way he makes me work for my understanding. I have to look up words in the dictionary to understand his points sometimes, and that is rewarding.

One of my favorite pieces was "Authority and American Usage," a 60-page review of Bryan Garner's new Dictionary of Modern American Usage. I'm interested in grammar, and this essay tickled all of my fancies. In addition to talking about the merits of this book, Wallace discusses the differences between the two schools of grammar, prescriptivist and descriptivist, and makes really interesting arguments for and against them. I had no idea there WERE multiple approaches to grammar usage and my inner word nerd was totally fascinated.

"Up, Simba" is about Wallace's week as a Rolling Stone journalist on John McCain's campaign trail before the 2000 primary. He describes (the totally unglamorous) life on the trail, contemplates the inscrutability of John McCain as a person, and offers really interesting insights into campaign strategy. I was intrigued to learn exactly why saying, "I'm not going to vote because I don't like either candidate and I don't want to participate in the system," is invalid. Essentially, if all the moderate people don't vote because of apathy, only the more extreme people entrenched in their parties will vote, and they will vote the way their parties tell them to. So if you don't vote, you're effectively voting for the party-backed candidate.

The title essay was one of the most fun to read. DFW covers the Main Lobster Festival, where thousands of people flock to eat lobster and take in the "local flavor," which of course is destroyed by the thousands of tourists descending upon the region. This is really only a tiny part of the essay, though. Mostly, Wallace is concerned with the ethics of eating lobster. Do lobsters feel pain? If they do feel pain, do they have the emotional capacity to experience it as unpleasant? Why, at the MLF, is the World's Largest Lobster Cooker such a highly advertised spectacle when a World's Largest Killing Floor at the Nebraska Beef Festival would be totally unimaginable? It's a really entertaining, thought-provoking essay about our relationship with the food we eat that raises questions about how we justify eating living things.

I loved Consider the Lobster and Other Essays; David Foster Wallace is entertaining, funny, informative, and incredibly smart. Sometimes the footnotes-within-footnotes are difficult to follow (especially in "Host," which uses mapped boxes connected by arrows instead of actual footnotes), but the added insights were always fun to read.

Some words I had to look up:

Solipsist, synesthetic, satyriasis, anomie, senescnece, dysphemism, solecistic, salvos, pleonastic, sesquipedelian, heliogabaline, abstruse, autotelic, involuted, androsartorial, lapidary, cancrine, amentia, hortatory, synechdoche, athwart, gonfalon, luxated, germane, prolegomenous, nictitating, torsions, styptic, jingoistic, atavistic

More reviews at Books Speak Volumes, a book review blog.

While I was disappointed by the uneven quality of Wallace's collection of short stories ("Girl with Curious Hair"), I found this collection of essays to be extraordinarily good. I first stumbled on Wallace when I read his commencement address delivered at Kenyon College ("This is Water"), which is as fine a speech as I've seen. This collection of essays does not disappoint -- Wallace is an engaging and very funny essayist.

Wallace is very interested in popular culture. His opening essay on the "Oscar" type awards given at the annual convention of adult films explores this element in our culture. Wallace's trick is to be given press credentials by some avant garde magazine and then mingle with the press and participants at the covered event, providing an outsider's perspective. While the piece is often very funny, he makes his points quite well, particularly concerning the inherent misogyny of the industry.

Similarly effective is Wallace's brief stint on the 2000 campaign trail with John McCain. This is the pre-2008 McCain, when he was something of a sensation as a fresh, honest voice cutting through the BS of contemporary politics. But when he starts to win, we see some of the portents of 2008. Wallace's discussion of the alienation of young voters, the appeal of McCain, the great soul-sucking machinery of modern political campaigns, and the "inside-baseball" of what really happens on the campaign trail is terrific.

There are three pieces of literary criticism that are all quite good. Wallace absolutely eviscerates the vapid narcissism of Updike and his contemporaries. It is the most effective piece of negative criticism I've ever read, and it's very funny. His piece on Dostoyevsky points out the appeal of the great man and the inability of modern writers to grapple with the great issues the Russians so brillianty explored -- for fear of becoming the butt of irony and ridicule.

Wallace's piece on September 11 is very personal and moving. Unlike his stories, some of which strike me as cynical and self-loathing, his essays draw the reader in. The reader likes and wants to meet the author of Wallace's essays; the author of his short stories is something else again.

On the whole, this is an excellent collection and makes me want to go back and read some more of Wallace's fiction.

I came to Wallace through his fiction, which I love, but after reading this collection I realized I like his nonfiction even more.

His command of the language, his insight, and his laugh-out-loud wit are all just as much in evidence in his essays, but the essays have the advantage of being more coherent, and shorter.

The title essay, Consider the Lobster, is one of my favorites. Originally published in Gourmet magazine--amazingly--it describes a lobster festival in Maine in all its comical details before musing about the ethics of cooking and eating the creatures. Wallace somehow manages to combine hilarity with deep compassion; I found it one of the most persuasive anti-animal cruelty pieces I've ever read, although I don't think Wallace thought of it as that, so much as just musings about the subject he was commissioned to write about. But when Wallace muses, he often comes up with fascinating angles.

There are other essays in the collection I enjoyed almost as much--one about Updike and his narcissism, for example--and several that I didn't find as interesting. The long piece about the adult movie industry just didn't do it for me, nor did his lengthy and byzantinely-footnoted essay about a right-wing talk radio host. Sometimes the level of detail-within-detail just isn't justified for me by the subject matter, but of course, others may find the subjects of those essays more interesting than I did. But anyone who appreciates well-crafted, thoughtful, and funny prose should find something in the collection that's appealing. As soon as I finished it, I started his earlier collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, which says something about how much I enjoyed this one.

I loved this book. I found it funny, sad, fascinating and intriguing. The topics varied, but what I saw as Wallace's desire for meaning, sincerity, and something real showed up again and again. This is one of my favorite books.

I must warn you, however, that this book was my selection when it was my turn to choose the book for my book club, and no one else in the club felt even remotely the same way I did about the book. In fact, many of them didn't read most of the essays, saying that they found Wallace to be arrogant and that they couldn't figure out for whom he was writing. A couple of the members were upset because they didn't know all the words Wallace used and they considered themselves to be highly educated.

What I learned from that book club meeting is that this book in particular and Wallace's work in general tends to be well-received by certain types of readers.

The question is whether you're the type of reader who is likely to enjoy his work.

My best guess at the criteria for enjoying Consider the Lobster is

You like to think about things that are out of the ordinary or unusual
You like to read about other people thinking about things that are out of the ordinary or unusual
You are willing to think about things like the fact that lobsters are boiled alive when they're prepared for human consumption
You are highly interested in language usage and either have a large vocabulary or are willing to look up words you don't know
You like to read essays that include a great deal of thought about all sides of the issue at hand. If you want something simple or easy or something you might read in the mass-market consumer magazines, I would not recommend this book, because, in Consider the Lobster, Wallace goes into great detail and depth about all sides of the issues he explores.
You are not daunted by an author using a lot of footnotes.

One of the reasons I love this book is that I found it satisfying. Yes, it required a good deal of work on my part, but I felt that work was rewarded. If you are the type of reader who prefers to read for pure pleasure or escape, you may not enjoy this book.

If you do think this is the sort of book you would enjoy and you put in the effort, I think you will end up really liking it.

Some of these essays I've already read because they were translated in Italian from time to time; others I didn't and like them, others were not so interesting, but all of them were wonderfully written. There is nothing better than reading a book of DFW every year, just to remember what is really writing about.

Alcuni di questi saggi li avevo giá letti perché pubblicati in italiano; altri non li avevo letti e mi sono piaciuti molti, altri un po' meno perché l'argomento non mi interessava poi tanto, ma tutti sono stati scritti con la sua meravigliosa prosa. Non c'è niente di meglio che leggere almeno un libro l'anno di DFW, solo per ricordarsi che cosa significhi veramente scrivere.

David Foster Wallace is good at delving into the imponderable. I particularly enjoyed his book about the history of the contemplation of infinity (Everything and More). Here he takes on similarly heady topics, with some lighter themes mixed in.

One standout is the title essay, which explores the issue of animal sentience, the question being whether the inner life of a lobster is anything remotely like the inner life of a human. There is simply no answer to this question, and philosophers who have tackled the question in recent years have bungled it extremely badly. Consequently the most one can do is to contemplate the implications of certain answers, and DFW's essay on the topic is as good as any I've come across.

Perhaps the only thing more impenetrable than the mind of a lobster is the mind of John McCain. Here's a guy who is so principled that he apparently refused to be released from a P.O.W. camp because it violated the letter of military policy. Yet he can be seen regularly cowtowing to the likes of Jerry Falwell and G.W. Bush just to gain a few points with the lunatic fringe of the religious right. DFW followed McCain during the 2000 campaign, and his essay comes as close as is logically possible to explaining how these various attitudes can inhabit the same brain.

DFW's writing style is not for everyone. If you're a fan of Hemingway you might find that it makes your head hurt.

The collection of essays features David Foster Wallace's insights into worlds as disparate as the porn industry and the Maine Lobster Festival. His erudition is filtered through a popular and provocative voice whose sardonic humor reflects a general acceptance of modern life.

Wallace's shorter essays are where he's at his best, sometimes playing the role of the critic, as in "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," and sometimes packaging tremendous poignancy in with surface humor ("The View From Mrs. Thompson's" is one of the best essays on 9/11). While his longer essays capture intriguing topics (life on the campaign trail with John McCain, the inner psychological workings of a radio disc jockey, etc.), they start to become a bit tiresome in their organization (or lack thereof). Wallace includes footnotes or sidebars as written subtexts, and while they are witty and often important, they do constantly yank the reader away from the essay itself in a manner that might infuriate some readers.

The author's real gift is to capture vignettes of the mundane and turn them into opportunities for social critique. Even though he does this with varying success, he is able to combine intellectual conversation with absurdity in a way few authors can. Peter Grier, of the Christian Science Monitor, described him best when he called him a "snowboarder with a PhD."

I liked this even more than A Supposedly Fun Thing... This one too ranges, subject-wise, across the map but I found the subjects more to my liking. The lobster piece considers how basically stupid and arrogant is the idea that lobsters don't suffer when boiled (duh). Other highlights include an informative inside look at the film porn world, Kafka, a heavy long piece on grammar and literature, midwest America's view of 9/11, Tracy Austin's lame autobiography, and an everything you could possibly want to know look at the world of American right-wing talk radio. All of this delivered, as always, with Wallace's fine humour and warmth.

Consider the Lobster is a collection of muscular essays from the late David Foster Wallace on an absurdly wide range of topics. Each of them was commissioned by a particular magazine with a particular topic, hence Wallace's tendency to direct his voice at his readers like a canon. However, Wallace can never be contained by the banalities of his topic here. His work on the AVA's is a particularly damning portrait of the pornography industry, in all its unimaginable insanity and sadness. I particularly like the piece on the American Usage Wars, which involves an impressive demonstration of Wallace's knowledge regarding the history of English grammar debates over the course of the last several decades. Not all of the pieces here are great-the one on McCain in particular is repetitive and mundane. And DFW's tendency to use lengthy footnotes to 'fragment the linearity' of his text is a mere affectation. Still, this represents the work of a great mind, whose creativity and intellect will sorely be missed.

I tell people to read DFW's nonfiction before they read his fiction, because I think you get a good sense of the type of guy he was: a hyper-aware observer of his surroundings. On top of that, he had to be one of the most humorous observers as well. There are a lot of hilarious encounters and situations here, but also a lot of dense and thoughtful reflections on the way the world works. Consider the Lobster might be a more consistent collection than A Supposedly Fun Thing, and in turn a little om that regard. Again, the writing is incredibly verbose, so don't enter into reading it lightly.

Extraordinary. Keen powers of observation combined with the utmost command of language. Poignant and funny. I adore DFW’s nonfiction writing. I know his fiction is hailed as among the best but I find his nonfiction to be as compelling, entertaining, and engaging as any others’.

David Foster Wallace is arguably one of America's greatest living writers. While he's probably best known for his fiction, particularly Infinite Jest he really shows his range, humor and intellect with his non-fiction. In Consider the Lobster, he examines everything from Kafka being underappreciated as a humorist to covering the Adult Video News porn awards in Las Vegas. While some of the essays feel a bit dated (most of them were written pre 9-11) the writing hasn't lost any of its bite or edge. It's hard to write about CTL as a whole because since its simply a collection of largely magazine articles that appeared in everything from Harper's to Gourmet magazine, and the eclectic nature and wide variety of topics makes for an interesting reading experience. The one thing that does tie it all together is Wallace's prodigious writing talents and the lens with which he views the world, which is both urbane and cerebral yet grounded and playful. When you put the book down, you walk away with the distinct feeling that DFW could dissect any topic or subject and bring it to life. The following is a brief summary of each essay:

BIG RED SON - the aforementioned essay on the porn awards. Shows the porn industry in all its self-important, crass, tasteless glory, and also shows how at the end of the day it really is just a business like any other. LOL funny at times.

CERTAINLY THE END OF SOMETHING OR OTHER ONE WOULD SORT OF HAVE TO THINK - a review of John Updike's Toward the End of Time. The least interesting essay in the collection. Unless your a fan of Updike, you can safely skip this.

SOME REMARKS ON KAFKA'S FUNNINESS FROM WHICH PROBABLY NOT ENOUGH HAS BEEN REMOVED - DFW laments Kafka being underappreciated as a humorist and on a deeper level how the idea of what humor is has changed dramatically.

AUTHORITY AND AMERICAN USAGE - A brilliant essay on just what makes a dictionary authoritative and who decides what is "correct" in a language, particularly American English. A bit dry and academic at times, but my favorite essay in the bunch.

THE VIEW FROM MRS. THOMPSON'S - Half essay on patriotism and half memoir on what DFW was doing while the events of 9-11 were unfolding. Certainly the most straightfoward of all the essays and the most gut-wrenching.

HOW TRACY AUSTIN BROKE MY HEART - Excellent essay on the insipid nature of sports biographies, and how this insipidness reveals how many brilliant athletes are genius in a way that the rest of us have a hard time relating to and understanding.

UP, SIMBA - DFW trailed John McCain's campaign trail for a week during the 2000 election as a correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine. Excellent political piece.

CONSIDER THE LOBSTER - Do lobsters feel pain? An interesting moral and philosophical essay that falls flat because it doesn't really answer any of the questions it poses.

JOSEPH FRANK'S DOSTOEVSKY - A largely academic essay on Dostoevsky and the nature of contemporary literature.

HOST - Excellent and experimental essay on talk-radio host John Ziegler and an exploration of why talk-radio is dominated by right-wing pundits.
It is a bit difficult to read due to the experimental nature of how the footnotes are arranged, but well worth reading.

Recommended.

David Foster Wallace can write up a storm and, if the topic interests me, I'm there. The problem is too many of these essays culled from various publications Wallace wrote for bore the heck out of me.

I enjoyed his visit to Las Vegas for the annual AVN awards as it was both hilarious and penetrating (excuse the use of the bad pun given this was an awards show honoring the "best" in porn video). I also loved most of the essay on the Maine Lobster Festival but he went too far in trying to get to the bottom of whether lobsters felt pain. At first, it was fun to debate in a sort of late at night way you may have debated anything in your youth but it just went on and on with no end in sight.

The same with the other essay I slightly enjoyed about tennis star Tracy Austin's autobiography and how athlete biographies often fail to measure up. Wallace so often repeats himself and not so much hammers home a point but dulls it to death.

The stuff on writers or politics just put me to sleep. The essay on US lexicopgraphy interested me because I work in editing but it too quickly made my eyes glaze over.

Maybe Wallace just needs an editor to reel him in as he does write well in spurts. It just did not work for me as I guess I'm more of a Chuck Klosterman or P.J. O'Rourke fan when it comes to essayists on modern culture.

My favorite books are the ones that stick with you for days and days and days after you read them, books that imprint themselves all over your brain so that when the neurons are flashing about in your cerebral space, they always seem to illuminate the cache of insight and language of that one book. My favorite books are by authors who start to annoy your friends because you inevitably wind up talking about them everywhere you go and no one really cares what Cormac McCarthy might think of the fiscal cliff.

David Foster Wallace and his essay collection Consider the Lobster are just that kind of pair. The title essay is by no means one of my favorites and yet the other day, as I was searching the Shoreline Central Market for some rosemary bread, I saw those lobsters roving about their glass cages, claws pinched together by white plastic bands, and I instantly thought of Wallace's essay and of the socioeconomics of seafood and the ethics of live seafood captivity and of Upton Sinclair's harrowing vision of US food production circa 1900 (something, I should add, that Wallace doesn't actually mention).

Now, I think I can boil this lingering synaptic activity down to a few things (boil it alive!) that everyone always seems to say about David Foster Wallace and this particular collection.

The essays in Consider the Lobster are crazy diverse--we read about the heartbreaking fandom of porn addicts, about grammar wars and talk radio, about 9/11, and about everything we could have ever wondered about life on a John McCain media bus in 2004--and so it's no wonder that everywhere I turn there seems to be a connection waiting to happen.

And yet despite the fact that Wallace seems to throw himself into such a variety of scenarios, the book is cohesive in its tone (Wallace is always there with his narrative honesty, quirky stylistic flourishes, and long train of footnotes) and its themes: this almost feels like one big essay on politics and the contradictions of the human spirit. Wallace is wicked smart and wicked thorough, and this means that we both learn the precise details and big-picture ideas in way that eventually seems to connect all the dots, in a way that makes those synapses fire and keep firing long after the book has gone the way of those Central Market lobsters, down the hatch and out the backdoor.

Look at Foster Wallace's relationship with Mary Karr before buying this novel. He is a documented predator and abuser of women. I don't care how talented he is, I will never purchase a book of his again.

Reading David Wallace inspires, in equal measure, the low level serenity of an Adderall buzz and the psychological unraveling of a manic bipolar episode. The essays in this collection stem from comically unreadable and almost appallingly `dense' (the one on modern grammar usage which is ostensibly a review of a dictionary but digresses enough times to make someone like Pynchon roll his eyes with a flabbergasted sigh) to almost shockingly intimate (the one about 9/11 cryptically referred to as `The Horror' in which your humble narrator betrays himself as not only a `serious' church-goer but a friend to old ladies everywhere and describes the hysteria of falling bodies with such spooky clarity you wonder how this can be same guy who spends oh a good twenty+ staggeringly dull pages describing the decor of a porno awards show which should, in fact, be really, really interesting). It is worth noting that the porno essay (while of course a little inflated at 50 pgs (the basic problem with a lot (but not all, natch) of these frequently meandering essays) has a few merciless humdingers, like the section in which intrepid David (referring to himself ad naseum as yr. corresp.) spends time with infamous sleaze-titan Max Hardcore and comments on his B-girls whose dichotomy of personal affectation--ie: wishing to raise a puppy with 14-yr old esque longing vs. sporting quite proudly (?) deflating/inflatable breasts--is a perfect, spot on summation of just how depraved and confusing the adult entertainment industry can be. The modern language essay had some great lines too, of course, and as a SNOOT myself, I did appreciate a few of the more heady and relentlessly erudite passages (particularly all that rigamarole about the teen pot smoker trying to articulate his own sense of linguistic understanding vs. that of society at large). Tonally, the book manages to stay pretty consistently funny and reassuring and Wallace posits a lot of heavy philosophical questions, not least of which comes from the eponymous essay wherein the author wonders if it is an okay idea to boil alive a sentient creature for our own gustatory pleasure. The descriptions of the lobster clinging and clawing in the pot alone are worth the admission price. And who knew that these funky crustaceans were once thought to a form of `cruel and unusual' punishment when fed to prisoners more than once a month or whatever? Weird. The short version is that if you dig Wallace's style and don't mind wading through the seemingly endless (and vaguely narcissistic) morass of footnotes compounded by footnotes and interpolations and the whole bit (don't get me started on the final essay `Host' which is...well...you'll see), you will find a lot to love here. Just try not to get too snooty about it.

Consider the Lobster, and Other Essays is a non-fiction book by the late, acclaimed journalist and novelist David Foster Wallace. I first heard of DFW on a recent NPR interview, and, like many NPR stories, I found his life fascinating. Then a good friend of mine was talking about him and it reminded me of the interview, and soon after he loaned me a few DFW books. Wallace was a highly intelligent man with an enormous vocabulary and an unusual-but-enthralling writing style. He is widely renown for his command of language and syntax, and it's nearly impossible to read his writing without a dictionary. This is the first book of his I've read. The essays are reviewed in the order in which I read them.

"Consider the Lobster" was written for Gourmet magazine in 2004. Wallace took a trip up to the Maine Lobster Festival and was hired to write about his experiences there. He goes in to great detail about lobster cooking, how there's a huge boiler that can cook a hundred lobsters at a time. He talks about how smelly the MLF is, how hot the weather was, and how long the lines were. Then he discusses lobster biology in great detail and eventually delves into the heart of the article: do lobsters feel pain when they're being boiled alive? The piece was quite interesting, both objectively and subjectively. Wallace articulates the arguments for and against in his normal style, but he throws in his genuine confusion about the subject as well. He explains that he has certain animals he likes to eat and that he just prefers not to think about what they have to go through in order for us to eat them, to which he then muses on our minds ignoring these ugly truths. By the end of the article, Wallace has made no clear choice about lobsters and whether or not they feel, and neither had I. I just wonder how Gourmet felt about this piece?

In "Up, Simba," Wallace was hired as a pencil for the famously liberal Rolling Stone to write about one of the 2000 Presidential candidates. Wallace was put with Sen. John McCain. The piece is long (nearly 80 pages) and sometimes trying, but the overall quality of the essay was excellent. If you've ever wondered what it's like to be on the campaign trail, not the Hollywood-style glitzy trail, but the Real-World-lots-of-downtime-bored-out-of-your-mind-extremely-hectic trail, then you'll love "Up, Simba." The piece doesn't really get deep into politics, but instead muses on the authenticity of McCain and various other politicians. Wallace is constantly torn between whether or not McCain is genuine in his concern, or, letting his cynic take over, the man is just putting out an image. The article was revealing and interesting and slightly boring all at the same time, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. By the end, as with "Consider the Lobster," Wallace has made no choice on McCain's genuineness. For me, the cynic was silent and I dared to believe.

"How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" is a short review of tennis star Tracy Austin's autobiography. It was written for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Wallace played competitive juniors tennis when he was younger and he decided to read and review the famous starlet's book. He basically said it was rubbish, horribly written, badly edited, and offered little-to-no real insight on Austin. He then goes on to muse on our [American people's, not mine:] fascination with celebrities and why we want to read about their lives, especially athletes. This piece was quite thought-provoking, and its brevity makes it much easier to read in one sitting.

"Big Red Son," written for Premiere magazine, is Wallace's account of the AVN Awards, which is basically like the Academy Awards for adult videos. Reading this piece was kind of like staring at a train wreck. I was repulsed a few times, but equally intrigued. Largely, while Wallace does cover the adult video industry, he goes into inane details about certain performers or directors/producers lives outside the screen, and this is possibly even more terrifying than the sex. The lack of humanity in many of the people is frightening. The vain "look at me and laud me" attitudes was loathsome. And the apathetic views of some directors (e.g. Max Hardcore), not caring how humiliating a situation will be for a "starlet," was downright sickening. Wallace talks about the awkwardness of the situation, standing in the bathroom between two male performers, silently obeying male-urinal etiquette. He muses how odd it is to be behind a woman in the buffet line that he's seen up close and personal. He talks about how cheap and foreign everything is, from the awards show itself to the people there. By the end of "Big Red Son," it's easy to see Wallace's disgust with the business and I shared his sentiments. It's just mind blowing how crude some people can be. Still, this essay is worth the read, if only to somewhat try and understand a group of people you'll never be able to really understand.

"Authority and American Usage" is a massive, exhausting book review of Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. I read about a third of this piece before I abandoned it. I just really didn't care much about the finer points of American usage, and there were way too many words I didn't understand. Hardcore English fans may enjoy this, but I couldn't do it.

"The View from Mrs. Thompson's" recounts Wallace's experience with 9/11 and the following days. I really liked this piece a lot, the way he mused and questioned the Horror. Possibly my favorite short essay in the collection.

"Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" was particularly interesting because I like Dostoevsky (though as of writing this I've not read any of his books) and I wanted to read Wallace's thoughts of the man. This piece is actually a review of Joseph Frank's books on Dostoevsky, arguing that Frank's works are unique and great. Throughout this piece Wallace inserts random philosophical musings, asking deep questions that at times make you stop and think seriously about things. I enjoyed this essay quite a bit, and recommend it if only for the philosophy.

The three remaining essays I did not read. I had no interest in the odd way "Host" was arranged on the page, nor did I care about the subject. Similarly, I never liked Kafka and had no desire to read Wallace's views on him, and the same goes for the review of John Updike work.

All in all, Consider the Lobster was a great read. It falls into a genre I never read, and the break from the norm was fun. I felt like I was slowly learning a bit about Wallace's life with each piece I read. Wallace's cynicism gets heavy throughout some works, and it's really no surprise to learn that the man eventually killed himself. Still, his writing is top-notch, his essays are enjoyable, and his musings mix humor with seriousness. Everyone should read a few DFW essays in their life, and Consider the Lobster is a great place to start.

An erudite dilettante like writer David Foster Wallace would likely have me running away from him at a cocktail party, but on paper, his stream-of-consciousness curiosity and ribald sense of humor meld nicely into ten genuinely entertaining essays that sift through the minutiae of life which others would ignore and somehow bring meaning to all of what he observes. The topics vary greatly and have little to do with one another until you begin to realize they reflect one man's sensibilities and passions. Through the lucid expression of his seemingly bottomless curiosity, Wallace is able to achieve a sense of intimacy and a depth of honesty that allows him to get away with the omnibus nature of this book.

The all-over-the-map title essay where he provides a discourse on lobsters is a vivid illustration of Wallace's idiosyncrasies and a good litmus test of whether one has the patience to follow his belligerently fact-filled mind. First viewed as low-class food before the Industrial Revolution, lobsters were eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. So venal was the perceived taste that in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. Then he shifts dramatically to talk about the pain response when lobsters are boiled, animal cruelty issues overall, the role of PETA, the de-beaking of chickens and how we have come about to eat other animals through euphemisms for edible mammals ("beef", "pork"). What starts out as an amusing essay on lobsters turns into a philosophical discussion on why other animals have to suffer to satisfy our own taste buds.

Such is Wallace's breadth of knowledge and investigative prowess that he can run the gamut on topics as diverse as Kafka; the pornography industry; the lack of honest disclosure in former tennis player Tracy Austin's ghost-written autobiography; John Updike; Bryan Garner's grammar primer, "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage"; a five-book life of Dostoyevsky; the state of contemporary talk radio; and John McCain's appeal across party lines during the 2000 election. His take-no-prisoners approach paints a picture of Updike that may rile his fans as Wallace explores the prolific author within the context of his contemporaries and mercilessly demonstrates the ongoing limitations of Updike's style in his depiction of his characters. On the other hand, Wallace focuses on the comedic side of Kafka, as Wallace feels the often bleak, surrealist author displays a centrifugal irony in his work, focused on the horrific struggle to establish a human self wherein humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.

My favorite essays relate to Garner's grammar book and McCain's appeal. In the former, Wallace explores territory that has preoccupied Lynne Truss in her popular book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", but he takes the topic several steps further into what he calls the "seamy underbelly", showing how current rules around grammar are tied up in the social issues defining our country now. It's a fascinating perspective that Truss did not really cover. The McCain essay is also quite enlightening. Having just read McCain's book, "Character Is Destiny: Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember", I have a better sense of why McCain has a broader appeal than our current President, even though he has many of the same reactionary positions. Wallace incisively shows how McCain gets to the core of political issues versus others more preoccupied with market-tested posturing. Be forewarned that Wallace does tend to get pedantic at times and meticulous in sourcing his information with even footnotes having footnotes. Regardless, it's the monomaniacal researcher that makes Wallace such an interesting fellow, and it's his sharp writing style that makes you want to pay attention to him. Highly recommended.

This really is a fantastic collection, I'm kicking myself now for not having gotten into Wallace's stuff sooner. These pieces somehow manage that oddest of qualities in modern non-fiction writing: being in earnest. Wallace seems interested in offering us serious examinations of things that we would rather dismiss as irrelevent or beneath us (I mean the Maine lobster festival?). Granted many writers do that these days, but Wallace is one of the first I've come across who seems to regard this as not just some delightful novelty, but as a sober desire to genuinely understand the bizarre hodgepodges that make up contemporary life. For the curious at heart.

Absolutely in love with David Foster Wallace. Picked up this collection of essays on a whim after seeing him listed alongside Montaigne and Sam Johnson and all the other Greatest Essayists of All Time, and thinking it was a mistake, or maybe that he made it into the list because Millenials have terrible taste (sorry), I was surprised to find the best and most flowing modern prose infused with some of the deepest, most moving insights on the most unlikely of subjects. Whether talking about a porn convention or a lobster festival or reviewing a dictionary or talking about tennis, Wallace touches upon something much grander (and oftentimes funnier) than you could have ever imagined. A great soul, and (because of his recent suicide) a tragic loss for anyone who enjoys literary talent of the highest and most humane level.

This is the first book by David Foster Wallace that I've ever read, and I've already ordered my next from the store. These essays are, by turns, insightful and hilarious. Wallace may be the best working essayist out there.

"The Big Red Son" is perhaps the best essay in the piece. It is the definitive look at the Adult Entertainment Industry. Wallace attends the AVN awards in Vegas. The result is just sad - especially when we get a good look at former child star, Scotty Schwartz.

"Authority and American Usage" should be required reading in every Freshman Composition class. I should know - I teach one.

"Consider the Lobster" takes a serious look at a question that everyone's asked at least once in his life: "Isn't it barbaric to throw a living thing into a pot of boiling water?"

The other essays are good as well. "Up, Simba" is a look at the John McCain Presidential Campaign. Part of the problem is that the topic is a little outdated for such a long piece, but - if you hate George Bush - you'll have more reason to after reading it.

Wallace's "gimmick" is extensive footnoting. The footnotes sometimes take up more room than the actual essay. The only time this bothered me was in the essay, "Host." That piece had such an intricate series of footnotes it looked like a schematic. It didn't help matters that most of the footnotes in that piece weren't very interesting - I just skipped them.

I would suggest, dear reader, that when considering Consider the Lobster, that you consider it in the same light as David Foster Wallace's collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Use that book as your frame of reference for style and content and you can place this collection firmly into the category of "typical" DFW. That being said, if you thoroughly enjoyed A Supposedly Fun Thing... then you'll likely thoroughly enjoy this one as well; by that same coin, if you're on the fence, you're unlikely to be won over; and if you dislike DFW (If you truly and I mean honestly and passionately dislike DFW, well then I suggest some rigorous therapeutic interventions) then this collection will probably do you no favors.

So in this reviewer's opinion: Consider the Lobster is more of the same. But that's a good thing.More...

One thing that CtL has over ASFTINDA is that it reads like an essayist's equivalent to a DJ's mixtape. While the essays individually are more than capable of standing on their own (e.g., apart from each other; i.e., in their original printings) they are arranged in such a creative way here that they build upon each other. The essays are vaguely self-referential, perhaps purposefully so; "jokes" from a given essay may rely heavily on you properly "getting" and then retaining the thesis of a preceding essay. I submit as an example: "Authority and American Usage" contains several sections that are slightly humorous in their own respect but can only be truly appreciated as bracingly so when you recall Wallace's thesis on Franz Kafka's humor from the prior article and the accompanying explication of said humor and why it is thoroughly pointless to try and explain any joke anywhere, let alone Kafka's absurdly dark and probably pathological comedy (which is totally drained of its humor when you try to offer any kind of explanation. I offer as further evidence for this that (after a protracted bout of laughing) I read aloud (to A.) a passage from "Authority and American Usage" and how it's humor is underscored by the thesis of the Kafka essay to which A. offered scarcely an acknowledging chortle). In this way, CtL may be Wallace's finest collection to date; the interleaving of the essays, their strength when taken as a whole, an obscurely surreal recursion. It's really all quite expertly done.

Perhaps the highlight of this collection is the maturity that Wallace is showing. Previous collections have his tone and style coming off as a bit of an effete intellectual, a nerdy-but-hip smartest-kid-in-class tone that is simultaneously masterfully humorous and maddening. Like maybe he's just trying to make you feel dumb but then again maybe it's thesaurial sleight-of-hand to play into some particular joke. Which is not at all to suggest that he has discarded this completely. But maybe like he's toned it down a bit (maybe?)? His signature style is definitely still there but he seems to have grown into it, it's a better fit. Whereas before it may have felt borderline confrontational (see above), it comes across now as disarming. For example, in the midst of "Authority and American Usage", Wallace comes across (on the one hand) vaguely condescending of SNOOTs (just read the essay...) and then on the other hand admits to being one; and then he takes a deeper dig on SNOOTs by eviscerating their essays and articles and other writings (e.g., the heavy-handed and jargon-laden "worst ever" publications of Comparative Lit profs) by using the very same over-the-top vocabulary to get to that point (I mean seriously: do you know anyone to drop "solecistic" in casual conversation?). The whole routine can be a little jaw-clenched maddening but is for those same reasons endearing and worthwhile.

It is also seems worth mentioning that Wallace masterfully frames pretty grand subject matter in all kinds of tangential and frankly genius-like-a-mad-scientist ways that it's formidable and a bit frightening. Example: Wallace uses "Authority and American Usage" as a vehicle to discuss linguistic politics and the critical role of socialization, language learning, and regional dialects on individual growth and development (Compare/contrast with similar arguments posited in Freakonomics). Example: Wallace uses his coverage of McCain2000 in "Up, Simba!" to discuss the political brokerage through media outlets and the bizarre power dynamics at work between journalists, politicians, and their handlers (let it also be known that this becomes painfully apparent when the essay's title appears in the text; it's a real head-slapping moment with a kind of chilling aftershock). Example: how Wallace goes to work on the ethics of food in "Consider the Lobster", working through the logic rather elegantly and then stupefyingly relinquishing it all with the atavistic admission that that simply isn't enough to tear you away from the desire to enjoy something delicious. In light of all this, it's no wonder an aspiring author Such As continues to find himself enthralled and intimidated by this literary Cronus.

Parting shots? I have two: the first regarding my "four of five" rating and the second a mere sidebar.

First: though the tone in CtL shows a refreshing maturity and welcome evolution, and though every essay is engaging and timely and brilliant, there also seem to be moments of tedium. Perhaps this is expected and unavoidable. But an essay on a book on the life and times of Dostoevsky (e.g.) can disappoint. Abandoning the F.N. format for a House of Leaves-esque series of drawn boxes is more distracting than textually informing (even if the essay's content is exhilarating and terrifying). And maybe it's just me but "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" seemed (via the text) a parody of itself as much as it was a parody and/or review of the book in question.

Second: while I don't believe that these kinds of things, should matter, I'm also of the opinion that Wallace should have fired the photographer. Or perhaps chosen a better photo from that particular shoot. I realize that folks may want their book jacket photos to be relatively current, and I realize that our bodies change over time, and all of that is fine; but I also wonder if his publisher could have perhaps insisted that they find a photo that did NOT make him look like a squinty-eyed and slightly slumped Jeffrey Lebowski. Seriously sir, that's your credibility at stake here.

Yes, this is good stuff. While not that impressed -- yet -- with Wallace as a novelist, his essays/articles here reveal the heart of a real, thoughtful, sensible human being. His style is so accessible, so regular and so American, he makes Keillor look crotchety and makes Hitchens seem like an anal dweeb. Yes the essay on language is worth the price alone (it's the most important piece of its kind since Orwell's "Politics and the English Language"), but so is the essay on lobsters, on porn, and on Dostoevsky. My only problem with "Host" -- it's excellent, perceptive writing -- is that the "hyperlink" stuff is gimmicky (like Cormac McCarthy's not using punctuation or capitalization - a cheap literary trick) and all the boxed entries could simply be footnotes.
Nevertheless, this is good reading, excellent reading. I'll look for Wallace's next novel and hope it's better then Infinite Jest, which out-Pynchoned Pynchon.