It took a month after the anniversary of David Foster Wallace's suicide passed for me to remember another promise I'd failed to fulfill. Just as many of us mark the beginning of the calendar year with promises to greet next year's beginning with goals met and changes made, I tend to mark the deaths of literary lions with affirmations that I will get to know them better before they've been in the ground a year. I don't think this has ever worked. I'm lazy.
There was no shortage of opportunity this last year to get acquainted or reacquainted with
Wallace. In addition to some outstanding obituaries, the New Yorker printed an excellent article on his career as well as a long excerpt from the novel he was still working on before he hung himself. Fansites and fanblogs went up almost instantly, and while most fell by the wayside, it's still easy to find active discussions. On Twitter, of all things, there was a directed reading and directed discussion of his most famous work, Infinite Jest, in which users had to meet reading assignments and tweet reactions over the course of months.
I excuse my inactivity by taking shelter in the argument that I don't think Wallace's fiction was nearly as good as his non-fiction, an argument that probably puts me in the camp of people who think the only thing good about Nabokov was his lectures, Joyce his letters and Tolstoy his late pedantic works largely about his Christian rebirth. This is such an unpopular view that for the most part I couldn't find much to talk about with people memorializing Wallace by re-reading him. At best, people would troll me online.
This is not to say they're wrong: at this point, I just assume that I'm wrong. But perhaps my obstinance is instructive as to establishing a gateway for reading David Foster Wallace.
My favorite Wallace work, and the one I recommend to everyone, is a collection of essays and reviews for magazines and newspapers called
Consider the Lobster. The eponymous story features Wallace going to the Maine Lobster Festival. It questions the sensory capacity of lobsters and the ethical choices we make in boiling a creature alive in order to make it taste good. Questions naturally abound about whether this a humane act, or even anything to celebrate, but perhaps what makes it most provocative is that it was originally written for the magazine Gourmet. It is, I suppose, like writing an article about cardiac arrest for Police Taser Monthly.
That (excuse the pun) delicious detail is secondary, however, to the force of thought Wallace brings to the issue. What many celebrate about his novels is his almost infinite capacity for observation of incidental issues and then his capacity to relate those incidentals with intense focus that then requires endless involution. For instance, his book Infinite Jest comes with footnotes that themselves have footnotes, followed by interpolations, followed by the resumption of the footnotes. This powerful ability to burrow into any slight phenomenon with almost comprehensive scrutiny can be overwhelming. For those who adore Infinite Jest, it's a constant reward: it's a rich book that enriches itself and seemingly ever-enriches the reader. For me it's like dipping into a powerful mind that unfocuses constantly. This dichotomy is where I become the Wallace apostate. To me, such a capacious mind extracts so much data so endlessly as to lose the thread of narrative in fiction. But in essays, in things like Consider the Lobster, that human- and idea-mining ability shines wonderfully.
Wallace asks about lobsters in such a way as to exult in existential pondering at the same moment that we might chide ourselves for epicurean delight. In "Host," his footnoting and interpolation seem to be driven to extremes, but his doing so captures the many threads of hints, irony, playfulness and emotion that come from a daily political radio broadcast. In "Authority and American Usage" (which I first read in Harper's as "Tense Present), he breaks down the war between descriptivist and prescriptivist usage dictionaries in a way that makes grammar pretty engrossing. (It also contains some big errors that probably drive fellow blogger Ellen Scordato crazy but that don't detract from the fun of his language.) Also, in "Big Red Son," he attends the Adult Video News Awards. Can you even imagine one of the finest writers of his generation filing a long first-person report from the Academy Awards of pornography? (Amazingly, the pun-to-word ratio is miniscule.) If I hadn't already seen the article, I would have bought the book on that premise alone.
Indeed, I'd already read most of the articles in Consider the Lobster before the collection was issued, but I wanted to have them in more permanent form than folded old magazines. Wallace's non-fiction is so delightful because it has boundaries. He must return to this point or that topic, and thus the alternate worlds and pesky questions must be extracted enough to consider before inevitably being forced back into the thrust of the point. Bound by a pre-established narrative obligation, I think he did his best work. Unbound, as he was in his novels, the dimensions of his thoughts and the specificity of his attentiveness to an issue could be lost in amorphous possibility. Knowing that A and Z existed in his magazine pieces, he extrapolated things the reader might never entertain, then reintegrated them in a narrative that allowed the reader to touch on a multitude of thoughts without abandoning the idea that such thoughts were rooted in action and consequence.
My desire for roots in a narrative might make me a bit boorish among the Wallace acolytes, but I think it also suggests a very accessible book — almost a gateway book. As essays themselves, those in Consider the Lobster should be among the most entertaining you've ever read. Though the topics might seem quotidian, the approach to them uncorks data and ideas you probably will have not anticipated. As a stepping-stone to Wallace in general, they might be indispensable. Here is a first-rate mind and a first-rate author directing the scope of his thought and his enviable facility with language to things like porn stars, radio hosts and ocean cockroaches. If you love how he wrote here, you might have found a first step to propel you into an even deeper fictive world.
Sooner or later, on one of these anniversaries, I'll try again. Maybe then I'll join you.
