Consider the Lobster

I’m so glad I had the chance to return to David Foster Wallace with this. It rekindled the same obsession/immersion of his writing and point of view that I had with Infinite Jest, but then quite a lot more. (I would advise, if you haven’t read either, reading this before Infinite Jest. It gives you a more introductory sense into the brilliance of DFW that I imagine would only deepen comprehension when you actually take on the commitment that is IJ).

I’ve heard so many people emerge from Consider the Lobster with so many often highly differing experiences. For me, it was (as Wallace talks about in his famous “This is Water” speech) what one chooses to think about, rather than how well one thinks. Each of the book’s essays are Wallace immersed in an environment in which he is a pedestrian figure, not in any way affecting or manipulating context, and quietly analyzing that environment in a deeply profound and divergent way.

The AVN Awards as an environment more human, complex and vibrant than the Oscars, a usage dictionary as a battleground for an epochal war of linguistics that shapes all of our lives, Kafka’s reception of college studies as an opening into the obtuseness and lack of richness of American humor, Tracy Austin’s impenetrably bad autobiography as realization of the stoic, simple genius of the professional athlete, the camera technicians at the back of a 2000 presidential campaign bus as political commentators par excellence, and on and on.