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The lobster on the cover of this book must be a zombie. Its shell is red, which means that it has been cooked, and yet it still raises a claw to wave at us, or perhaps to clutch at us, crack our skulls, and eat our brains before we can crack and eat it.
David Foster Wallace has a big, juicy brain crammed with knowledge and questions. He is a wisdom-seeker who obsessively takes apart his subjects and examines their constituents in detail in search of answers. His topics might not be exactly startling: porn, and the people who make it, are weird; celebrity athlete memoirs can be bland and disappointing; political campaigns are divorced from reality; boiling lobsters alive raises troubling moral questions. The real pleasure is following Wallace's trains of thought as he considers the nooks and crannies of each topic. He famously does much of his thinking in footnotes, and in footnotes on the footnotes. (In the interest of disclosure, I've only read one other of Wallace's books, his earlier essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again, and that was about a decade ago, so I'm not going to be able to put this book in context with Wallace's work as a whole.) While things like footnotes or sidebars can generally be maddeningly distracting and interruptive of the flow of reading, with Wallace they are such an important part of the substance of the writing that this isn't an issue, with the exception of one instance where the notes are laid out diagrammatically with boxes and arrows; here the visual element is the distraction, rather than the substance of the notes.
The essays here fall into two categories. Half of them are journalistic, with Wallace going somewhere and observing something: the Adult Video News Awards; a neighbor's house on 9/11; the press caravan on John McCain's 2000 Presidential campaign; the Maine Lobster Festival; the studio of a talk-radio host. The other half are literary criticism, with Wallace tackling Kafka, Updike, translations of Dostoevsky, the aforementioned athlete memoir, and, in the heart of the book, a usage dictionary. This latter essay is the most interesting piece in the book, as Wallace approaches the dictionary in question as a stepping-off point to discuss academic "usage wars" in the context of larger issues of language and culture and his own autobiographical background in a family of grammar "snoots." It's a masterful example of form equalling content, using clear, accessible language to discuss the advantages of clear, accessible language. Despite his intellectual rigor, Wallace's style is conversational and wittily self-effacing. In the journalistic pieces he doesn't assert himself over his subjects, but lets them inform him. And he is still very much present in the action, even when he makes a coy play at journalistic tradition by disguising himself as "your correspondents" or "Rolling Stone." He's somewhat more opinionated in the critical pieces. Which I guess is what the difference between journalism and criticism is, but his handling of it is extremely deft. Wallace is a thinker's thinker, and if you are an intellectually curious person then you will relish following him on his own quests, diversions and all. (mike.05.06)
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