There comes a moment in David Foster Wallace's latest collection of essays, Consider the Lobster, when one can no longer avoid the increasingly conspicuous fact that, frankly, David Foster Wallace is one strange guy. For instance, he casually announces, without the self-satisfied feather-ruffling of those who cultivate quirkiness for their own narrative advantage, that he had to delay his trip to cover the John McCain campaign trial for Rolling Stone because he happens "to have dogs with professionally diagnosed emotional problems who require special care" and that it takes him "several days to recruit, interview, select, instruct, and field-test a dogsitter." At another critical juncture, he reveals that much of his childhood trauma on the playground was a result of precocious and excessive attention to the rules of English grammar. Add to this his unusual biographical résumé—big shot novelist of the 1088-page tome Infinite Jest, mild recluse, former drug addict and tennis prodigy, cult hero, mathematical genius—and what you are really left to think is: Huh? Who is this guy? Who is David Foster Wallace?

It is a strange question to pose, given the extent to which we're trained not to let lurking authorial personae distract us from matters of content, but one that Consider the Lobster demands. As is his wont, Foster Wallace has filled his pages with an endless array of footnotes, footnotes of footnotes, interpolations, parenthetical notes, and even, in the concluding essay "Host," boxed-off pieces of supplementary information linked back to the main text with arrows. His tendency to extreme self-clarification is at times grating—and in the case of "Host" virtually unreadable—but Foster Wallace is careful to reward the reader who hears him out, as some of the collection's most humorous side notes are those in nearly microscopic print (for instance, who knew that "Cannabic Solipsism" is a technical term for "the adolescent pot-smoker's terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable"?). Granted, page-long annotations do suggest a certain self-indulgence, but they also reveal something more earnest—Foster Wallace's genuine desire to make the reader comfortable with his writerly authority. It turns out that underneath the obsessive self-annotation, Foster Wallace (let's call him simply DFW henceforth as a tribute to his own fondness for abbreviation) is simply invested in his communication with the reader in a way that, in our era of snark, is none too common.

Cultural criticism—that vague moniker under which the essays in Consider the Lobster fit most naturally—is a dicey matter. It is difficult to point out America's assorted woes without being too accusatory, and nobody wants to read a guilt-trip about why political apathy is Bad and why eating animals (in this case, lobsters) is Cruel. Furthermore, it is not only worn to discuss The Problem with Modernity—as, broadly speaking, DFW does—but it's also worn to call attention to the wornness (a surprisingly common defense mechanism among cultural essayists). What makes Consider the Lobster so effective is that DFW seems to grasp this predicament intuitively without going through the ungainly motions of expressing it.

The essays gathered in Consider the Lobster are eclectic and not uniformly profound. Their subjects range from the hilarity of Kafka to the unapologetic garishness of the porn industry to the titular meditation on the ethics of carnivorism, inspired by a trip to the Maine Lobster Festival and funded with what can only have been unintended irony by Gourmet magazine. While the shorter essays (those on Kafka and Updike in particular) are entertaining, they mostly serve to punctuate the collection's more insightful offerings.

At Consider the Lobster's conceptual center are two hefty pieces, "Authority and American Usage" and "Up, Simba"—about the "seamy underbelly of US lexicography" and McCain's presidential bid, respectively—that begin to hint at what, if anything, might connect this motley assortment of essays. In the latter, DFW ruminates on the intertwined questions of McCain's charisma and young voter turnout (or lack thereof). In "Authority and American Usage," he uses what is nominally a review of Bryan A. Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage as a platform for addressing not only what George Orwell famously dubbed "the politics of the English language," but also, fittingly, the rhetorical strategy involved in advancing a delicate argument. The most common problem in the writing classes he teaches, DFW notes, is "the error of presuming the very audience-agreement that it is really their rhetorical to job to earn." This seems a pretty basic element of writing but is, for reasons it takes DFW a half-page footnote to illuminate, in fact more difficult than people tend to recognize. While he makes this point in order to tout Garner's rare ability to tread the imperceptible line between two warring rhetorical modes (a feat that, in DFW's opinion, merits three separate headings labled "WHY BRYAN A. GARNER IS A GENIUS"), it seems fair to laud DFW's own prose with a similar achievement.

In the interest of practicality, let's reduce this discussion to only "Authority and American Usage" and "Up, Simba" for the time being, as these two longer essays, by exploiting the luxury of space, manage to be both the most interesting and best exemplars of DFW's narrative ingenuity. As DFW makes clear in "Authority and American Usage," he is a SNOOT—his term for the sort of obsessive grammarian who, by his definition, "knows what dysphemism means and doesn't mind letting you know it." He knows things about the rules of proper usage that could baffle even the most self-congratulatory grammar Nazi. Yet even in trying to explain the complexly academic battle between linguistic descriptivists and prescriptivists, DFW keeps his language comfortably casual without letting his colloquialisms slip into the realm of the contrived. What keeps his SNOOTitude from seeming condescending is, again, exactly the same tactical skill for which he praises Garner—the ability to adopt a rhetorical strategy without calling attention to it as such. His sense of all the possible contortions of language, rather than sending him off into obscurity (well, except for the occasional recondite word choice: rhetor? styptic?), keep him from slipping into the careless patterns of expression he so laments; his obsession with language converts readily into an obsession with clarity. In his unrelenting awareness that "we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation," DFW makes sure never to forget his audience.

Take, for instance, the following description of Mrs. McCain's assistant: Wendy "is back here at the beige table eating a large styrofoam cup of soup." While any grammatically-attuned reader can't help but conjure up an image of poor Wendy chomping inopportunely into this styrofoam receptacle, it's a forgivable (and, all things considered, probably intentional) grammatical lapse because it's indicative of how DHW, a SNOOT of epic proportion, gains credibility from his familiarity of tone. His prose, even as it treads conventional ground, relies upon the speech-like integrity of its language to re-enliven even the most tired of scenes. He can take a story that the news cycle during the 2000 presidential race virtually hammered to death—the tale of John McCain's gruesome years as a POW—and make it carry actual weight. As he contemplates the possibility that McCain's catch-phrases about causes beyond one's own self-interest might actually be sincere, DFW writes:

Try for a moment to feel this. The media profiles all talk about how McCain still can't life his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it's important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the nuts and having fractures set without a general would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened.

And we can imagine it, because he's so clearly and urgently asking us to.

And to what end? This command to put ourselves in McCain's position, in essence, forces us to confront our own inclinations towards cynicism. And, as gradually emerges in such moments as these when DFW wrestles with urgently against our instinctive judgments, what DFW is attempting in Consider the Lobster is to shake us out of our cynicism by waging a war of his own. His guiding concern, insofar as the essays share a common purpose, is that in our age of marketing and media saturation we no longer know how to react to those moments when cynicism just won't cut it. It is a complicated point and one that is he able to make effectively only because he has wooed us so carefully with the intimacy and humor of his tone. By the end of Consider the Lobster, it is impossible not to feel that this problem—the automatic favoring of cynicism over "open conviction"—is not only an issue for our culture at large but also for David Foster Wallace very personally.

DFW's exploration of cynicism, to be fair, is probably not supposed to be what holds Consider the Lobster together. In fact, it's possible that nothing is supposed to hold Consider the Lobster together, which would excuse its minor imperfections. The collection has just enough thematic coherence that the essays that don't quite fit the mold awkwardly stick out—it is certainly funny when, in the essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," DFW analyses the tennis star's laughably poor prose, but neither is it especially illuminating. The same goes for his take-down of Updike. But even if we're not supposed to attribute a governing motive to Consider the Lobster, it's also no coincidence that the collection's best moments are those when we can see its author's embattled presence working through his own relationship to American culture on the page.

In one particularly memorable moment, as he watches "the Event" of 9/11 unfold on the television in the company of the Midwestern middle-class church-goers of Bloomington, Illinois, he writes:

There is what would strike many Americans as a marked, startling lack of cynicism in the room. It does not, for instance, occur to anyone here to remark on how it's maybe a little odd that all three network anchors are in shirtsleeves, or to consider the possibility that Dan Rather's hair being mussed might not be wholly accidental, or that the constant rerunning of horrific footage might not be just in case some viewers were only now tuning in and hadn't seen it yet.

This point about the exploitative tendencies of television are inevitably true, but, more troublingly, so is his realization that "whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America"—the America, that is, of crass commercial cynicism—than it was the America of his naïve compatriots. Here we have DFW at his most astute—he manages to render that strange double state we inhabit in which we rely on cynicism to access reality while finding it simultaneously repellant. Consider the Lobster, when at its best, is a successful attempt to inhabit this uncomfortable purgatory. It does not really offer a way out, but for some reason, perhaps because as DFW forces us to confront our pervasive culture of "congenital skepticism" he is always right there with us, it is enough that he has tried.

And so, to return to our initial question, who is David Foster Wallace? He may not give us much on the level of specifics—save for odd revelation about his dogs' behavioral idiosyncrasies or his existentially paralyzed reaction to tourism—but somehow, viscerally, we get him. Or at least we get him as an ethos, a presence on the page. We get that it is possible to think genuinely about how hard it is to be genuine and still retain the wit and cynicism that we seem to need in order to think about anything at all.

 

David Foster Wallace's unwitting influence can be blamed for any failed attempts at colloquial ease that Amelia Atlas '06 has undertaken herein.