by JULIET WATERS

I once took David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest on a six-month road trip through Central America. I figured six months would be long enough to read a 1,700 page psycho-philosophical thriller about tennis, Quebec terrorists and porn. It wasn’t. I remember the reading experience as something like being stuck in a relationship with a man you could really, truly love if he would just, for one minute, shut up. I tried, but the meandering subplots, the footnotes within footnotes, it was too much. This was not challenging literature, it was merely demanding.

Essays by DFW are not usually all that different. His recent collection Consider the Lobster includes work that goes back as far as 1994. They are with a few exceptions, interesting, provocative tests of patience (see in particular an entertaining but exhausting essay on the Adult Video News awards which appeared in Premiere magazine in 1998).

So why read Consider the Lobster? Well, for me it’s personal. As someone who has spent roughly a fifth of my life living on the coast of Maine, the ambivalence I have towards DFW is not something I have towards lobster. I couldn’t resist the title essay and in reading it, fortunately, I discovered a nice thing: a shortish essay by DFW with an average of one footnote per page, limited in scope to two or three themes—the history and biology of lobster, the malaise of contemporary tourism and the problem of cruelty to animals. But more important than all these things, a sign that he is learning to let a topic go, to allow the reader some space to have an opinion of his or her own.

Normally when DFW takes on a subject, whether it be the porn industry, the importance of grammar or biographies of sports celebrities, you can pretty much count on him having an opinion, or two, or 300. Although he doesn’t have a love of hardcore porn, he is clearly willing to be almost too open-minded on the subject. Although he feels heartbroken by tennis prodigy Tracy Austin’s apparent inability to write anything interesting or insightful about her life, he understands that the best athletes more often than not are people who don’t do much thinking. So he’s happy to do all the thinking they’ve never done. And no one, not Stephen Pinker, not Bill Bryson, not any of the people who he takes to task, would want to be stuck alone in an alley with DFW on the subject of American standard usage.

For some reason, however, he flails on lobster. He provides interesting facts (who knew that up until the 1800s there were laws against feeding lobsters to prisoners more than once a week because “it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats”). He writes an engaging narrative of a day at the Maine Lobster Festival in all its smelly tedium. He is thorough in presenting an inconclusive debate about how much or how little pain lobsters really feel when boiled alive for our pleasure. He is informative on the weirdness of the dipping in butter of what are essentially giant insects.

But he fails to grasp the core of the issue. He places the act of lobster eating in the context of all carnivorous dinner experience without recognizing what makes it unique: that it is one of the few meals in our society where you can easily be, if you choose, the murderer, the torturer and the butcher of your own dinner. The state of not knowing whether this act makes you psychotic or authentic is what makes it one of the richest eating experiences available, gastronomically and psychologically. That DFW never makes this obvious point may make him seem a little less smart. I think, however, it makes him a little more readable. n

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace,
Little, Brown, hc, 342pp, $34.95