Consider the Lobster\ is the second published collection of essays from David Foster Wallace, the notable author of the 1996 novel ""Infinite Jest."" Wallace still touts the same principles in his journalism that he begged writers of fiction to adopt in his 1993 essay, ""Television and U.S. Fiction:"" write about the actual goings-on of day-to-day existence, do not avoid important moral quandaries and, most importantly, refrain from employing the cool, wry irony that threatens to sap life and the way we think about it of any meaningful content.
Incidentally, this collection's best piece, ""Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky,"" distills Wallace's earlier essay's finer points into 20 forceful pages about the state of contemporary fiction. Nominally a review of the fourth installment of Joseph Frank's five-part literary biography of Dostoevsky, Wallace argues that the Russian novelist's approach is essentially his own:
""[Dostoevsky] did not ignor[e] the unfriendly circumstances in which he was writing, but confront[ed] them, engage[ed] them, specifically and by name.""
The American novelist's ""unfriendly circumstances"" happen to be the standards by which his art is measured. Wallace writes that ""Frank's bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.""
The reportage pieces of ""Consider the Lobster"" largely conform to these criteria; Wallace's method is to take an ostensibly straightforward journalistic assignment and transform it into a vertiginous documentation of the absurd, tragic, peculiar and downright grotesque features of the American landscape. He has a realist's eye and a deranged savant's imagination, always allowing the principles of the piece to speak for themselves before unleashing a torrent of metaphysical and ethical speculation.
In the book's title piece, Wallace essentially stops reporting on the Maine Lobster Festival within eight pages, asks ""Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?"" and gets down to examining just what an answer to that question could look like.
Although Wallace is sidesplittingly funny in journalistic mode, he is clearly more comfortable on his terrain, i.e. language and literature. His essays on Updike, Kafka and Dostoevsky consistently define American literature negatively by emphasizing what today's authors are not doing. Aside from some good, but not great short stories and his occasionally brilliant essays, one thing David Foster Wallace has not been doing is writing the sort of fiction that explodes the manifold constraints he so eloquently describes.
So Mr. Wallace: We are waiting patiently. Consider your audience. Another novel, please.
\
