A few days back, my wife was ordering something from Amazon.com and needed
to bump the total up a few dollars to qualify for free shipping. So she
checked out my
wish list and added David Foster Wallace’s
Consider the Lobster. I had heard a lot about Wallace, but, prior to this,
I had read only two thigns by him, both essays which appear (as all the others,
in modified form) in this volume. I had read “Consider the Lobster” from the
reprint in
Best American Essays, 2005. And I had stumbled across “Tense Present:
Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage,” originally from Harper’s, which
is here reprinted as “Authority and American Usage.” Both of those were great,
and I look forward to seeing how they turn out now that Wallace has free reign
over them.

I (re)read a lot of things for class, but it’s fairly rare, lately, that I
read something purely for pleasure and not for some purpose or other (even
such a vague purpose as “reading important books”). Wallace’s essays are
fun–witty, pointy-headed, over-educated, thought-provoking, experimental,
discursive fun. They’re far too experimental and the vocabulary is too
elevated (and, at the same time, too slangy) to serve my students as models
of how to write an essay. But they’d probably serve as a fine reminder of
just how fluid that genre–from the French essai, meaning “attempt”–is,
or, rather, can be in the hands of someone with Wallace’s talent.

I’m two essays in. The first, “Big Red Son,” is a hysterical and fairly
disturbing review of Wallace’s reportage of an anual adult film awards show
held in Vegas, which happens to coincide with the anual Consumer Electronics
Show. He gets in tight with various producers and directors, scraping bits
of significant dialog from the most casual of encounters. The second,
“Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to
Think” is a scathing review of John Updike’s
Toward the End of Time

It seems a quick and fun read so far. I’m looking forward to the rest of it.

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