Wired Mesh

Lobster, Considered

I rarely get to dabble in book criticism, but The Pulse humored me this week with a lengthy review of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. It goes a little something like this:

David Foster Wallace simply can’t shut up. If he is the foremost current American practitioner of what Matthew Arnold called “the free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake” (and I submit that he is), brevity is not the soul of his wit. Wallace is known to even his most casual reader as an impresario of footnotes, and Consider the Lobster, his latest collection of essays, is relentlessly digressionary. (A piece on talk radio called “Host” experiments with a hypertext format – first published in The Atlantic with color-coordination – that footnotes the footnotes, and then footnotes the footnotes’ footnotes.) But in Wallace’s work such tangents are not a gimmick so much as a symptom, a mark of a mind roiling with minutiae and contradiction. “How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self?” Wallace wonders in “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” a review of sports memoirs. “How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act?” It does not require much presumption to imagine that Wallace’s internal Iago is silenced only by sleep, if at all.

You can read the rest here. Far better, though, that you pick up a copy of the book, which is a smashing good read. If you live nearby and ask me nicely, I'll even let you borrow my edition.