'Lobster' tales are food for thought

Traver Kauffman, Special to the News

Published December 23, 2005 at midnight

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To be honest, David Foster Wallace's work in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays could spoil your dinner.

You see, Wallace - perhaps best known as the author of the mega-meta-novel Infinite Jest - is not the type of guy who's likely to emerge from an event like the Maine Lobster Festival full of seafood, drawn butter and glad tidings.

In "Consider the Lobster," the award-winning title essay, Wallace first focuses on the visceral, writing that "until sometime in the 1800s . . . lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some 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."

Historical oddities such as this are interesting as far as they go, but they are beside the point, as it turns out, when roughly halfway into the essay, Wallace's discourse shifts to the "animal-cruelty-and-eating issue" raised by the carefree gluttony of the festival.

His dispatch metamorphoses into a tour de force of worry and dissection, in which he discusses PETA, chicken debeaking, brain chemistry, Mary Tyler Moore, zoological minutiae relating to the lobster, Peter Singer and Animal Liberation, meat euphemisms for edible mammals ("beef," "pork"), the philosopher Rene Descartes, pain response, value theory, epistemology, metaphysics, Aztec sacrifices and his own personal confusion.

Ultimately, what began as a happy travel article turns into a meditation on the meaning of the adjective "good" in Gourmet Magazine's catchphrase "The Magazine of Good Living." Put simply: How is it possible to live a morally sound life - to be "good" - when other animals must suffer for your enjoyment?

If raw, difficult questions ruin your appetite, such ruminations are at least appealing food for thought, and in that sense Wallace's new collection of essays is a major buffet.

Wallace's voice is that of a hip polymath's, where slang and obscure jargon intermix and many, many self-conscious digressions take place in often-voluminous footnotes. This style is especially indebted to Nicholson Baker, who along with Wallace is a master of sifting through life's minutiae and picking out meaning.

Still, Wallace is funnier than Baker, and he has more range: Consider that Consider the Lobster includes essays on pornography and the Adult Video News Awards, John Updike, humor in Kafka, the "seamy underbelly" of U.S. lexicography, 9/11, former tennis star Tracy Austin, John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, the aforementioned Maine Lobster Festival, a five-book life of Dostoyevsky and the slough of contemporary talk radio.

The only thing that unites these seemingly disparate essays is Wallace's unique talent for delving past the obvious and reaching the profound, all the time remaining both entertaining and erudite.

Take, for example, "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," which is ostensibly a pan of Austin's ghostwritten autobiography, Beyond Center Court: My Story. Wallace, a former junior tennis star and "rabid fan of tennis in general and Tracy Austin in particular," is sorely disappointed by the "breaktakingly insipid" memoir, chock-full as it is of endless banalities and clichés.

This is all well and good; certainly most readers have slogged through a celebrity biography and found it not all it was cracked up to be. And who doesn't enjoy good snark in a book review?

But to his immense credit, Wallace goes beyond his knee-jerk reaction to explore why athletes and other world-class talents are often so inarticulate about exactly that thing that makes them so strange and interesting to the rest of us.

He asks: "How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as 'One ball at a time' or 'Gotta concentrate here,' and mean it and then do it? Maybe it's because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and that's all there is to it."

True, Wallace is not a hard-core philosopher or a sports psychologist. His conclusions are not always remarkable, and, as above, they're often provisional at best. What is remarkable, however, is Wallace's free-wheeling mind and that mind's ability to weave through the most far-reaching source material to get at the core questions that drive us but are also so easily forgotten or obscured: What is true? What does it mean to be "good"? Why are we here, anyway?

These 10 essays don't provide rock-solid answers, nor do they seek them. Nonetheless, for anyone who cares about such questions, Consider the Lobster is essential reading.

Traver Kauffman runs the literary weblog Rake's Progress (rakesprogress.typepad.com). He lives in Denver.

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