Want to feel dumb? David Foster Wallace's brainy, sprawling and funny essays will leave you worrying you didn't read the dictionary enough as a child. His latest, Consider The Lobster And Other Essays, is a rollicking ride through Wallace-world, where essays balloon out with footnotes, flow charts and interjections into free-wheeling performance art. It's brain food that tastes good.
Wallace is also known for his fiction, including the hefty novel Infinite Jest, but I find his style works best for me in nonfiction. This collection and the earlier A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again are microscopically detailed examinations of life as we know it. What's appealing about Wallace's essays is how he turns simple subjects — lobster festivals, John McCain, pornography, dictionaries — into thoughtful epics.
Consider the Lobster collects the best of Wallace's nonfiction from the last decade or so. Highlights include "Big Red Son," where Wallace attends raunchy adult video industry awards, and "Up Simba," where he tags along with John McCain's doomed presidential campaign in 2000. Wallace's prose ripples with a lusty adoration of sheer wordpower, and that enthusiasm helps make some of his indulgences palatable. Ten-dollar words like synecdoche, anapest and prolegomenous are peppered in, but Wallace still strives to keep his prose non-academic and straightforward in its conclusions.
His fluid words can dance, describing the Adult Video News awards ceremony as "a kaleidoscopic flux of stilted acceptances and blue one-liners and epileptic strobes and spotlights following winners serpentine and high five-studded paths to the stage." But they can also bite in short form, like a spot-on line describing a frightened elderly lady as "poor tendony Mrs. R."
What puts some people off of Wallace is that it can look like he's showing off. The man writes novels with footnotes, sometimes with footnotes to those footnotes, and that can scream of "ain't I smart?" His works sprawl, without borders (of the 10 pieces in Consider the Lobster, several are over 50 pages long). Yet it's an honest outgrowth of the man's polyphonic interest in any- and everything. His enthusiasm is contagious.
Article comments
1 - JELIEL³
This book has been on my "To buy" list for alittle while but my store is always out of stock for it. And now following this great review, I'm sure I'll like it. Sounds like my kind of book. I'm reading a Carl Sagan book right now. So this sounds right up my alley. Good review, thanks.
2 - Don Baiocchi
Great review, Nik. I've only read Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous men so far, so I was thinking this collection should be next on my list.
3 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!