Consider the Brainiac

20Mar06

Consider The Lobster
David Foster Wallace
(Little, Brown and Company)

Although American writer David Foster Wallace (DFW) is known primarily for his fiction (Infinite Jest, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and most recently Oblivion), I think his non-fiction is best. Anyone who read his 1997 collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, can tell you he’s one of the funniest writers working today. He might not be as consistently funny as your David Sedaris or your Sarah Vowell, but his sharp and extremely thorough observations put him into a class of his own.

His non-fiction follow-up to A Supposedly Fun Thing… is Consider The Lobster. Collecting essays and reviews since 1997 first published (albeit in substantially abbreviated form) in such diverse publications as Premiere, Gourmet, Rolling Stone, Harper’s and the Village Voice, the book covers (in order) the pornographic movie industry, John Updike, Franz Kafka’s sense of humour, American grammar and usage, 9/11 (poignantly and without sentimentality or jingoism), former tennis star Tracy Austin, John McCain’s 2000 Republican leadership campaign, the lobster (and specifically/horrifically the Maine Lobster Festival), a biography of F. M. Dostoevsky and talk radio. I list off these topics not simply because they are all fantastic, but to show the breadth of what DFW can do. The guy is incredibly, incredibly smart and is able to digest tremendous amounts of very complex data and turn it into clear, precise (oh, the precision), original and funny prose. What I wouldn’t give for those chops.

While some have referred to DFW as “that footnote guy” (and he does love his footnotes), the notations are not schtick; instead they are a by-product of a rigorous assault on his subjects. Reading DFW, you get the sense that mere sentences cannot contain all the information and nuances this man can give us. We need footnotes, and footnotes of footnotes, and interpolations, and subtitles and glossaries of relevant vocab!

What really makes DFW, and in particular Consider the Lobster (an homage to M. F. K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster, I’m assuming), is his thoughtfulness as a writer. In his profile of Arizona senator John McCain, DFW forces the reader to consider, really consider, what happens to a person when he or she spends five years as a P.O.W., as McCain did. Like most of his writing, he doesn’t just reference this as a matter of biography, as others might, he draws you into it, makes it fresh (and shocking) and relevant again. His books aren’t easy reads (After 343 pages, I’m ready for a break), but DFW provides some of the most satisfying reading I’ve done in a while.

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