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Wednesday, February 01, 2006

Consider the Lobster
David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown

Reviewed by Robert Mentzer

True story. As an undergraduate, my friend took a creative writing course from David Foster Wallace at Illinois State University. On the first assignment he turned in, Wallace wrote, ?I swear to God if you ever turn in a piece of shit like this to me again I will flunk your ass. I shit you not.? The meaning of this anecdote is open to interpretation, but to me it suggests several things about Wallace's way of relating to others.

Wallace is what you might call a ?polarizing? writer, inspiring the strong positive feelings of fanboys and MacArthur Fellowship judges and the equally strong vituperation of bullshit-calling detractors. (Don't get my editor started!) His hyper-wordy prose style is both informal and strangely stilted (imagine a more eggheaded Tom Wolfe), and his maximalist style conveys a sense of a world bursting with information, with perspectives that are infinitely reducible: Wallace's footnotes have footnotes. His best is very good indeed: Infinite Jest is the rare Pynchon knockoff worth keeping; the novella ?Good Old Neon? is deeply empathetic and genuinely moving. But it must also be said that Wallace is an annoying writer, overlong almost without fail, eager to show off with technical jargon and eccentric abbreviations that serve no clear purpose. His lesser fiction veers into caricature and formalist wheel-spinning.

Which may be why some of his best writing is nonfiction. For whatever reason, he seems to bridle less at the conventions of belles letters, and the result is often a close look at a subject you haven't thought much about, and a series of questions you haven't thought to ask. Plus, funny! The title essay of his last collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, is nothing short of hilarious, as Wallace winces and gaffes his way through a miserable vacation cruise, alienating himself from the ship's crew, losing at chess to an elementary-age girl and questioning the premises of the vacation industry.

If nothing in Wallace's latest collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, quite reaches the level of ?A Supposedly Fun Thing,? at least nothing is as obnoxious as ?E Unibus Pluram: Television and American Fiction,? which sketched an argument about (I think) how fiction should never be any fun, and which contained the phrase ?existentiovoyeuristic conundra notwithstanding.? Consider the Lobster is wide-ranging in subject matter and tone, with essays on the business of pornography and the ethicality of boiling animals alive in order to eat them. Throughout, Wallace's central thesis is that increased self-consciousness brings increased misery.

Provocative thesis! The problem is that Wallace can't step outside without stumbling over further evidence of it. The reason we admire athletes is because ?they can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.? Dostoevsky is a great writer because he lacked self-consciousness: ?Can you imagine any of our [contemporary] major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this? ... People would either laugh or be embarrassed.? Porn performers lack bodily self-consciousness and sometimes normal social skills. Everywhere the same intellectual thicket: we wonder how other people see us, and then we wonder how we look while we're wondering how other people see us.

The poverty of this approach is most glaringly apparent in Wallace's response to 9-11. ?The View from Mrs. Thompson's? is largely a narrative of his own experience of that unsteady day, spent watching CNN with neighbors in central Illinois. It's an emotional essay on an emotional topic, but in reaching for support, Wallace ends up treating his neighbors something like noble savages:

?What these Bloomington ladies are, or start to seem to me, is innocent. There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room? Nobody's near hip enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We've Seen This Before?.some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America?than it was these ladies.?

But I know hipsters who were devastated by 9-11, and I remember my working-class bartender that night cracking terrible jokes. It may simply be that Irony vs. Sincerity is not the main distinction on which all social interactions turn. Certainly it seems unlikely that Osama Bin Laden would make the distinction.

There are high points to the collection. ?Up, Simba,? Wallace's ride-along with the McCain2000 campaign, is of interest in anticipation of 2008, and his analysis of Bush's campaign strategy in those primaries is dead on: ?It's in the Shrub's own political self-interest to let the GOP race get ugly and Negative and have voters get?bored and cynical and disgusted with the whole thing.? It's true, and Wallace nails the central narrative of those primaries: the Bush campaign's goading McCain to ?go negative,? which the McCain campaign did, to disastrous result. Similarly perceptive is ?Host,? which examines John Ziegler, a Southern Californian right-wing talk-radio host. Wallace notes that Ziegler ?is not a journalist ? he is an entertainer. Or maybe it's better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved.? Yes, that sounds just about right. The portrait of Ziegler that emerges is fascinating in its particulars ? his obsession with O.J. Simpson, his weird personal habits (in a parenthetical notation, Wallace observes that ?He never leaves his chair during breaks, for example, not even to use the restroom?) ? but it is even more compelling in its extrapolations on the workings of the right-wing news business, which is ?based around finding stories and causes that will make white, middle-class Californians feel angry and disgusted, and then hammering away at these stories/causes day after day.?

The technical jargon and slang employed throughout are meant to make us believe that Wallace is an authority on whatever subject he's talking about. But for all the hours of research Wallace clearly put in, when he gets to the big stuff, he blinks. Is McCain an honest politician? Well, he is and he isn't. And is it unethical to eat lobster? Wallace is ?confused.?

So let's return to that note Wallace left on my friend's story. Brilliant motivational tactic or bizarrely aggressive pedagogy? One does get the sense that Wallace is not especially interested in a fair fight: the broadsides against the social skills of pornographic performers, the guilt-trips laid at the feet of unsuspecting Gourmet readers. He even finds a way to criticize John Ziegler for presenting the same persona to an interviewer that he presents to his listeners. My friend corroborates this tendency with tales of students leaving Wallace's class in tears and of his general tendency to never, ever drop a point at anything less than unconditional surrender.

Finally, a lot of Consider the Lobster feels kind of dated, and Wallace's arguments begin to seem misplaced. ?Authority and American Usage,? an essay about prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar (roughly as appealing as it sounds), spends pages attacking ? annihilating, really ? the philosophy behind political correctness. Political correctness? We have South Park now. Tell me something I can use.

Visit A Million Monkeys, Robert Mentzer's blog, and view an illustration of a monkey in place of the blogger's photo ? plus a bunch of other stuff.