A REVIEW OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE’S RECENT ESSAY COLLECTION, CONSIDER THE LOBSTER, IN WHICH THE REVIEWER PARODIES WALLACE’S STYLE FOR THE FURTHER EDIFICATION OF THE READER1.
It would not be an overstatement for me to say that David Foster Wallace is the most important, or at least smartest, writer working today. And I say writer and not novelist because, besides novels (including the incomparably good Infinite Jest) and short stories, DFW, as he is colloquially known, also writes a mean literary essay and often commits acts of journalism. His new non-fiction collection, Consider the Lobster, is filled with intelligent, lively discourse and complex ideas.
An Example: DFW devotes 61 pages to an essay entitled “Authority and American Usage,” which is a review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. However, the essay becomes an exploration of democratic principles, political correctness, childhood development, American culture and DFW’s own family. It is also terribly funny. I have no idea what other writer has the grace to create such a seamless essay where the ideas themselves are so powerful, fascinating and intuitive that you don’t even realize you’re developing strong opinions about linguistic prescriptivism vs. descriptivism2.
This essay alone is worth the price of admission. But if you aren’t yet ready to take my word for it, besides the Dictionary stuff, an evisceration of John Updike and some thoughts on Kafka, there are several examples of DFW’s excellent “new new journalism”[3]. In one piece, he attends the Adult Video News awards (think Oscars but for porn) with hilarious results. Other pieces include his coverage of Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign and a profile of a conservative radio host. His political journalism seems a bit simplistic, but nonetheless is rescued by his talent for finding the interesting detail and his general enthusiasm.
Notable in this journalistic category is his piece for Gourmet magazine (“The Magazine of Good Living”). Assigned to cover the Maine Lobster Festival, DFW begins with a narration of the festival, but he can’t resist entering a meditation on the pain a lobster feels while it is cooked alive, and he confronts the magazine’s readers with the question of whether they consider the suffering of the animals they eat. One can almost feel the readers of Gourmet squirming as he innocently wonders about the morality of their eating habits.
DFW is frequently lumped with the likes of Jonathan Franzen, David Eggers, Rick Moody or William Vollman, but he is unique and more appealing than they: his narcissism is lightened with self-deprecation, and his seriousness offset by an infectious sincerity. And, sincerity is what DFW is all about, or rather, he is about being against irony.
In two essays in Lobster, discussing 9/11 and Dostoevsky, respectively, DFW argues against the American over-reliance on irony (a common theme in his writing) and asks —and this is worth quoting—”[W]ho is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction.” This is an astounding call to arms.
DFW’s work is perhaps over-elaborate, and maybe he beats around the point, as I’m doing here, and many of these collected pieces aren’t very recent, but in the end DFW is doing more important literary thinking than almost anyone else out there. Members of our generation should be forced to read him.
1 Though no reader should misconstrue this effort as actually representative of the kind of prose you’ll find in DFW’s work, as you would not confuse a silhouette of a tiger with an actual tiger. You’ll note, though, that we both use a ton of footnotes.
2 Incidentally, I think this is because DFW comes off, rhetorically, as your really smart neighbor who always explains things clearly when you go to him with questions.
3 This term is not really right, but it is more accurate than “narrative journalism” or “gonzo journalism.”
