Book Review: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Maybe you've experienced this: you meet someone who has traveled all over the world, maybe doing philanthropy, maybe doing anthropological digs, maybe "back packing". As you talk to them, you hope they have something to say, you're waiting for them to drop some "truth bomb" on you about the countries they have visited and the things they have seen, but they don't...they just talk about themselves...or maybe they talk without saying anything. And maybe you feel this way secretly when you read a collection of essays by an author you like. If you feel as I do, maybe you'll enjoy Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace.

DFW's forte seems to be dropping "truth bombs". He notices things that we, the readers, either don't think about or don't notice. Wallace is witty and acute, he might remark on something small; that the campaign trail coffee he was forced to drink while following John McCain's early political career "tasted like hot water with a brown crayon in it" (Up Simba). Other times he will remark on something big and less tangible; the conundrum of being a tourist for example - how you always wonder how much more beautiful a place would be without all the people there, but you in fact are one of the people there ruining it. This is a catch 22 I had never thought about, but love keeping with me in my back pocket whenever I find myself a frustrated tourist. These are only some of my favorite examples, the book is literally full observations like these.

And I don't think it's that Wallace has a better sense of awareness than other people. No natural affinity for seeing what others can't. In fact if you read DFW enough, maybe even a few times in this collection, he explains how he does it: he puts the work in, and I mean WORK. He'll remark in almost every essay that he is not an expert in whatever he is about to talk about, but then he goes on to discuss the neurological infrastructure of a lobster, the tedious grammar war between prescriptivists and descriptivists being waged in every dictionary ever written, or the inner workings of the two big radio licensing companies BMI and ASCAP. The "work" is Wallace delving into these subjects, subjects that would ordinarily bore us to death, with the concentration of a mad man. He then proceeds to resurface with a truth the likes of which many of us have never seen, and he then communicates it in a coherent and witty way to the rest of the world.

Wallace has both the ability to endure through the insignificant and the ability to then communicate significance in an engaging way, a way that forces us to consider it. Consider the Lobster is a testament to this ability. It's little wonder we might get frustrated with people who have traveled the world and can't speak to it. To me, Wallace really gets to the heart of this, in his essay "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart". In it, he touches on America's obsession with understanding how an athlete is able to do the amazing things they do, how we want a step by step mental processes of exactly how they did it and how it feels in the moment. Unfortunately according to him, America will never know because the act of not thinking about what you are doing is necessary for doing the sorts of feats that athletes do. In my mind, David Foster Wallace can do just that, but in the literary sense; he can tell you, engage you with, exactly how the totally useless bits of unnoticed information in the world is in fact dictating our lives. Then he asks you to consider the insignificant.