Consider the Lobster

Essays That Begin in One Place and End Somewhere Else

David Foster Wallace published two collections of essays. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997) contained the pieces that established his reputation as a journalist. Consider the Lobster (2005) is the more mature and more formally varied collection — the one where the methods he had developed in the earlier volume are deployed with the confidence of a writer who has learned exactly what he can do. Both collections share the same essential technique: Wallace begins with a specific occasion — a cruise, a state fair, a film festival, a tennis tournament — and uses it as a point of entry into a larger argument that the occasion turns out to be the most efficient way of making. The pieces move outward from their premises in directions that feel inevitable once you have followed them, and that would have been impossible to predict at the start.

The title essay, ‘Consider the Lobster,’ was commissioned by Gourmet magazine to cover the Maine Lobster Festival and published there in 2004. It is ostensibly a travel piece. It is actually a philosophical inquiry into the ethics of boiling animals alive for food, conducted in a voice of such relentless, footnoted good faith that it is impossible to dismiss. Wallace does not arrive at a conclusion — he arrives at a question that he cannot answer and is honest about not being able to answer: whether the convention of not taking lobster pain seriously is a genuine ethical judgment or simply a convenience that the culture has decided to maintain because the alternative is inconvenient. The essay was uncomfortable for the magazine’s readership and remains uncomfortable now, which is precisely what it was designed to be.

The Grammar Essay as Philosophical Argument

‘Authority and American Usage’ — nominally a review of Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage — is sixty pages long and is one of the most sustained and entertaining pieces of literary-critical argumentation produced in the United States since the 1990s. Wallace uses Garner’s dictionary as a point of entry into the politics of prescriptivism and descriptivism in language — the battle between those who believe grammar has correct rules that should be enforced and those who believe grammar is simply a record of what speakers actually do.

His argument is characteristically unexpected. Wallace takes a position — he is a prescriptivist — while fully acknowledging that the prescriptivist position has historically been used to enforce class and racial hierarchies, that the ‘correct’ English whose defense he is mounting is the English of educated white Americans. He does not resolve this contradiction. He argues instead that the political misuse of grammar rules does not make grammar rules wrong, that a speaker who wants to be heard in certain contexts has genuine practical reasons to learn the language of those contexts, and that teaching this while being honest about its politics is more useful than pretending that all variants are equal in all situations. The essay is as much about honesty in intellectual argument as it is about language.

Federer, McCain, and the Range of the Form

‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience,’ published in the New York Times in 2006, is the essay in which Wallace’s sports writing reaches its fullest expression. He attends the 2006 Wimbledon final and tries to account for what it actually feels like to watch Federer play — not the tactics, not the statistics, but the phenomenological experience of witnessing a human being do something that appears physically impossible and then do it again. Wallace’s argument is that athletes at the very highest level produce a specific kind of aesthetic experience that has no secular equivalent, that watching Federer’s backhand down the line is a form of apprehension of human possibility, and that the failure of most sports writing to register this is a failure of honesty about what sports is actually for.

‘Up, Simba,’ the collection’s longest piece, follows John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign bus for a week during the South Carolina primary. It is the most formally ambitious piece of political journalism Wallace produced — and also, twenty-five years later, one of the most prescient accounts of what political charisma does to the media that covers it. Wallace’s central observation is that the press corps following McCain was genuinely uncertain whether his appeal was the real thing — actual sincerity — or a very sophisticated performance of sincerity, and that this uncertainty was itself the most interesting political fact of the campaign. The essay does not resolve the question. It argues that the impossibility of resolving it is what makes contemporary politics what it is.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — The most technically demanding journalism of its generation, and the collection in which Wallace most fully demonstrates that the essay, at its best, is not a lesser form of literary intelligence but the form that literary intelligence sometimes requires.