The Non-Fiction Bookshelf #3

Consider The Lobster - David Foster Wallace

Last September while indulging in my morbid and somewhat weird fascination with mortality, I was perusing the ‘Recent Deaths’ page of Wikipedia, which is basically a large obituary of formerly living entities of note. It seems like I always find someone that I knew of in the month of death that’s reported. September ’08 was no different, as I was surprised to see a writer that I admired had succumb to the almost clichéd artistic death of suicide. The Wikipedia entry was something like; David Foster Wallace, 46, American author and essayist, suicide by hanging. After being taken aback by my grim discovery, I decided to reread and read some recent stuff by this quirky, intelligent, and super funny writer.

First on the Wallace book list was the brilliant, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. A book of essays that were written for journals like, Harper’s and The New Yorker, with topics ranging from his adolescent dreams of becoming a pro tennis player, the Illinois State Fair, a vacation on a cruise ship (where the book gets its title), and 20th century French philosophy. In fact, I had so much fun rereading it, I decided to go out and buy his last book of essays entitled, Consider The Lobster. And I would say that this is his best non-fiction work that I’ve read, because it has all the hallmarks of Wallace’s style; slang and funny anecdotal cussing, knowledge and intelligence that some considered to be show-off like, enormous amounts of footnotes that sometimes take on a parallel life of their own outside the standard text, a cocky coolness that is embedded in the book that only an over educated long haired dude can communicate without rubbing the reader’s nose in it, and a penchant for using rare and exotic words that should be listed in a glossary because looking them up in a dictionary gets old and just reminds us lesser mortals how inferior we are to his vocabulary. But I swear, it’s a great read! These attributes only add to his originality and make for joyous reading – except for his detractors it’s probably like being lectured while getting a root canal or something.

Consider The Lobster’s essays span the spectrum from gross to sad to funny. Host documents a few days in the life of late night talk radio host, John Ziegler’s brand of living and philosophy, Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed is pretty self explanatory, Up, Simba follows John McCain on the 2000 republican primary route, Big Red Son explains the allure and banality of porn and its Oscar themed Vegas award show, The View From Mrs. Thompson’s is a poignant reflection of 9/11 from mid-western America, Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky is a portrait of a tireless Dostoevsky biographer mixed in with Wallace’s love for the 19th century author, Consider The Lobster finds Wallace at the Maine Lobster Festival writing an article for a gourmet food magazine weighing the pleasure of taste versus live boiling of crustaceans, Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think is about the lack of quality in John Updike’s recent fiction opposed to his great works, Authority and American Usage is Wallace’s love affair with dictionaries and American slang, and How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart finds him tracing various tennis stars’ retirements.

A first class book of essays from a now dead but still great artist. One that possessed talent, originality, curiosity, intelligence, and skill that manifested him into a modern day polymath. Despite being successful in his chosen field the burden of living overcame and swallowed him and deprived the world of his unique work.

From Up Simba:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

On Franz Kafka’s Funniness:

And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.* It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get – the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle.

* There are probably whole Johns Hopkins U. Press books to be written on the lallating function that humor serves in today’s US psyche. A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development – the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn – it’s not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is escape, i.e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc. Jokes are a kind of art, and because most of us Americans come to art now essentially to escape ourselves – to pretend for a while that we’re not mice and walls are parallel and the cat can be outrun – it’s understandable that most of us are going to view “A Little Fable” as not all that funny, or maybe even see it as a repulsive instance of the exact sort of downer-type death-and-taxes reality for which “real” humor serves as a respite.