Deep Ruminations
Review/ By Noah Buhayar '05

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
By David Foster Wallace, the Disney Professor of Creative Writing
Little, Brown and Company • 344 pages • $25.95

It’s hard not to gush about David Foster Wallace’s most recent collection of non-fiction, Consider the Lobster. The book comprises some of the author’s best essays from the last 12 years and, accordingly, showcases his impressive talents.

Wallace (the Disney Professor of Creative Writing), who gained notoriety for his tome-like 1996 novel Infinite Jest, is clearly at home writing non-fiction. There’s no filler here. What seem like straightforward assignments—a review of Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage or a week on the campaign trail with Senator John McCain—become occasions for deep ruminations on language, politics, authority and democracy in millennial America. Even the book’s title essay, which germinates from Wallace’s coverage of the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet, evolves into a discussion of the ethics of killing and eating animals for our gastronomic pleasure (see page 34).

Not surprisingly, when Wallace turns his attention to literature, he’s an equally knowledgeable observer. “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed” could be one of the sharpest pieces of literary analysis in years. At a concise six pages, the essay deftly manages academic concepts like “exformation” along with the practical experience of teaching Kafka to undergrads who just don’t appreciate the jokes: “It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humor, but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have.”

Even when Wallace investigates the prurient world of adult entertainment at 1998’s Adult Video News Awards, the porn industry’s Oscars, he’s willing to do his homework. With no shyness toward innuendo, he embraces industry slang (examples too indecent to mention) to give us an on-the-ground view of the annual gala and its surgically enhanced cast.

Consider the Lobster dispels any doubt that Wallace is one of the most engaging, hardest working authors writing today. His penchant for analytical reasoning, for laying bare the most complex institutions, for being erudite without being dry, make his arguments deeply persuasive. Forget his self-deprecating asides, reminding us that he is not a political journalist, a literary scholar or gourmet. This is an author who has wrestled with what it means to be an authority on anything anymore—and won.