Consider the Lobster
by David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown

David Foster Wallace is a brainiac with a heart of gold.

In "Consider the Lobster," a collection of essays written for a variety of publications over the past six years, the author of "Infinite Jest" and last year's uneven short story collection "Oblivion" uses words like pleonastic, gonfalon, techne, physiognomic, torpid, and interpolative with sincerity — they are simply the only ones that will do. Reassuringly, you get the impression that Wallace actually knows what they mean. Better still, he makes you feel like you do, too.

Wallace brings his wide-ranging knowledge and command of language out to play on topics as far removed as the porn industry, Wittgenstein's theories of language, the ill-starred McCain campaign of 2000, the tendency for fiction to become a kind of self-conscious literary game between the reader and the writer, and "the enormous, pungent, and extremely well-marketed" Maine Lobster Festival of the title. Those uninitiated to the Wallace cult might be taken aback by the variety and anarchy of such widespread interests, but for Wallace fans, it's a customary stroll through the postmodern neighborhood.

This is Wallace's unique magic: To be totally erudite and obscenely well educated, use it to write, yet not let any of it become pompous or pretentious or arrogant in any way. Using cerebral lingo to deepen and clarify, not cloud, his message is part of the charm. Only a writer with Wallace's brand of virtuosic talent and humane sensibility could even be asked to write a review of a dictionary, let alone write about 60 pages worth and make it consistently appealing. Just make sure you have said article on hand when you're enthusiastically explaining the use and abuse of Proscriptivism and Descriptivism to your friends.

It's in his heartfelt disdain for the vapid, snobbish and shallow culture that tends to come with the territory that's so refreshing and endearing and human:

[Dostoevsky's work] prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep emotions 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.

Complex and difficult ironies, formal tricks, and other forms of rhetorical postmodern jujitsu get the better of him sometimes, it's true. On occasion, his footnotes take up half a page. But sometimes digressions are just that essential. Who among us hasn't made narrative leapfrogging an art form when the situation calls for it? Wallace seizes on the tongue-in-cheek quirk of this kind of speech, and uses it to fuel his delicate absurdism. His concern for the beating, human heart within the absurd swirl of everyday life is what makes, for example, an earnest investigation into the morality of being a carnivore (the topic of the title essay) in the pages of Gourmet magazine a superb and ticklish irony.

It's his humor that makes you come back for more. Wallace has a great deal of ease making you chuckle, stutter and guffaw, which is harder to accomplish in prose than it sounds. Wallace is generous with the comedy gift. His humor can have a wicked crack to it: "... some early American colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats." Or it can be laugh-out-loud bizarre: adults sit around the above-mentioned festival slapping mosquitoes, eating deep-fried Twinkies and watch "Professor Paddywhack, on six-foot stilts in a raincoat with plastic lobsters protruding from all directions on springs, terrify their children."

Besides the shrewd laughter at observations of our national dementia, Wallace retains something in his prose that is very corny and in short supply these days — hope. There's a moment in the piece on right-wing talk radio (cryptically entitled "Host") that finishes the collection that illustrates this. Wallace observes, in detail, page after page of a bellicose right wing radio personality in his natural habitat. The host's existential rage and lonely desperation are evident throughout, and Wallace remarks with a shudder: "Because one can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in — believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I'll take doubt." These words close the book.

In the end, what makes Wallace such a valuable resource is his ability to see the ghost in the machine, discern meaning and morality from the data chaos that engulfs the world, and, more important, make us see it too. What compliments this is his capacity to, well, consider the damn lobster: see the beautiful intricacy in the smallest and most seemingly confirmed of nouns. Recognizing the bizarre commonplace is one thing, but coming back up on the side of hope is quite another. One way to accomplish this is through fiction. Another is in the art of the essay. Why not start the year off with a master of both?

— Matt Hanson (junglegroove@gmail.com)