Reviews for Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

The average rating for Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-01-31 00:00:00 jeffrey racine Full disclosure: I have a major intellectual crush on David Foster Wallace. Yes, yes, I know all about his weaknesses - the digressions, the rampant footnote abuse, the flaunting of his amazing erudition, the mess that is 'Infinite Jest'. I know all this, and I don't care. Because when he is in top form, there's nobody else I would rather read. The man is hilarious; I think he's a mensch, and I don't believe he parades his erudition just to prove how smart he is. I think he can't help himself - it's a consequence of his wide-ranging curiosity. At heart he's a geek, but a charming, hyper-articulate geek. Who is almost frighteningly smart. The pieces in "Consider the Lobster" have appeared previously in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Observer, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Harper's, Gourmet, and Premiere magazines. Among them are short meditations on Updike's 'Toward the end of Time', on Dostoyevsky, on Kafka's humor, and on the 'breathtakingly insipid autobiography' of tennis player Tracy Austin. An intermediate length piece describes Foster Wallace's (eminently sane) reaction to the attacks of September 11th. Each of these shorter essays is interesting, but the meat and potatoes of the book is in the remaining five, considerably longer, pieces. They are: Big Red Son: a report on the 1998 Adult Video News awards (the Oscars of porn) in Las Vegas. Consider the Lobster: a report on a visit to the annual Maine Lobster Festival (for Gourmet magazine). Host: a report on conservative talk radio, based on extensive interviews conducted with John Ziegler, host of "Live and Local" on Southern California's KFI. Up Simba: an account of seven days on the campaign trail with John McCain in his 2000 presidential bid (for Rolling Stone). Authority and American Usage: a review of Bryan Garner's "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage" , which serves as a springboard for a terrific exegesis of usage questions and controversies. Here's what I like about David Foster Wallace's writing: I know of nobody else who writes as thoughtfully and intelligently. That he manages to write so informatively, with humor and genuine wit, on almost any subject under the sun is mind-blowing - it's also why I am willing to forgive his occasional stylistic excesses. (Can you spell 'footnote'?) You may not have a strong interest in lobsters or pornography, but the essays in question are terrific. The reporting on Ziegler and McCain is amazingly good, heartbreakingly so, because it makes the relative shallowness of most reporting painfully evident. Finally, the article on usage is a tour de force - when it first appeared in Harper's, upon finishing it, I was immediately moved to go online and order a copy of Garner's book (which is just as good as DFW promised). How can you not enjoy an essay that begins as follows? Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of US lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a near Lewinskian scale? ....... (several other rhetorical questions) ...... Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly? And which later contains sentences such as: Teachers who do this are dumb. , This argument is not quite the barrel of drugged trout that Methodological Descriptivism was, but it's still vulnerable to objections. and - my personal favorite - This is so stupid it practically drools. Not everyone will give it 5 stars, but I do.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-12-25 00:00:00 Eugene Jarecki Consider The Essay This is a fine collection of essays. It does not seem to be put together following any particular collective logic, but all the essays seem to be good advertisements to DFW's intuitively imaginative, explorative and curious writing method. Would need to read more of DFW's essays to be able to comment on the logic of this particular set of essays inhabiting the same book. It is, however, vintage DFW and hence cannot be rated below 5 stars, even if a couple of essays were so-so. Interpolation: For practical purposes, everyone knows what an essay (or a book review) is. As usual, though, there's much more to know than most of us care about'it's all a matter of what your interests are.  The first extremely explicit essay on an inside look into the Porn industry turned this reviewer off slightly (being the prude that I am) but from then on it was increasingly easy to figure why so many of my most respected friends have such an intellectual crush on DFW. I have too now, I guess. Or maybe it is puppy love. Hard to know for sure. IJ is such a bad place to first encounter DFW, he is all infinite there (with no restrictions on his interpolative imagination), the finite essays are so much more fun, accessible and lovable and most importantly, imitable (at least in intent, if not in style). The biggest crush-inducer, however, is how many of DFW's sentences and ideas you actually want to remember and use for yourself. Therein lies the most important reason to fall in love - he is really placing himself at a level that you can aspire towards. Not too difficult, not too complex, but deliciously complex enough to stretch comprehension and understanding. It is not terribly difficult to fall in love from there. Interpolation: This reviewer acknowledges that there seems to be some, umm, personal stuff getting worked out here; but the stuff is, umm, germane. As you get into the essays, you will find that the jungle of footnotes and the sub-foot-notes (and sub-sub… well no point in scaring off potential readers) will soon become a veritable tangle. Not to mention the thicket of interpolations - interpolation upon interpolation upon interpolation, ad infinitum. I had read a New York Times piece with a great quote from DFW in reference to his endnotes: "Most poetry is written to ride on the breath, and getting to hear the poet read is kind of a revelation and makes the poetry more alive. But with certain literary narrative writers like me, we want the writing to sound like a brain voice, like the sound of the voice inside of the head, and the brain voice is faster, is absent any breath, and it holds together grammatically rather than sonically." Interpolation: Not sure if this applies to his fiction as well but, if you happen to miss the footnotes, you would miss half the fun, not to mention half the book. This reviewer was never able to figure out if DFW is showing off or if he just couldn't help being a genius. It was a source of constant amazement to observe how DFW uses a review (or any given essay) to explore every pet topic imaginable. It was even more amazing to imagine how his editors let him do that. In illustration of this amazement: For it turned out that the more interesting a […] happenstance was, the more time and page-space it took to make sense of it, or, if it made no sense, to describe what it was and explain why it didn't make sense but was interesting anyway if viewed in a certain context that then itself had to be described, and so on. With the end result being that the actual document delivered per contract to Rolling Stone magazine turned out to be longer and more complicated than they'd asked for. Quite a bit longer, actually. In fact the article's editor pointed out that running the whole thing would take up most of Rolling Stone's text-space and might even cut into the percentage of the magazine reserved for advertisements, which obviously would not do. Surely, you get the drift... Interpolation: On 'DFW': 'David Foster Wallace' is a pretty long name. David, Foster or Wallace, however, by themselves wouldn't be enough to indicate who you are referring to. Hence it has to be the whole name - David Foster Wallace, which being too long is 'DFW' - the best option for fans who want to talk about DFW often enough. In sum, give DFW any topic and he will conjure out of it the angst of the modern condition, link it with some fundamental disconnect and manage to be completely non-pretentious and genuine while doing that. He suspends your inner cynic. That is genius, whatever else you might say.