Consider the Lobster collects David Foster Wallace's magazine journalism from his peak years, and it's the rare anthology where the assignments matter far less than the mind working through them. Sent to cover a Maine lobster festival, Wallace ends up interrogating whether it is ethical to boil a creature alive for a tourist's dinner. Dispatched to a pornography-industry awards show, he produces something closer to a meditation on American loneliness and shame. The ostensible premise is always a doorway; the real subject lies somewhere past it.
What you are really buying, page to page, is the texture of Wallace's attention. He notices everything, then notices himself noticing, and the famous footnotes branch off into qualifications and counterarguments and second thoughts until each essay becomes a kind of live transcript of a hyperactive, scrupulous conscience. It's exhilarating when it works, which is most of the time, and the title essay alone is a small masterpiece of taking a topic that should be trivial and worrying it into a genuine moral puzzle that follows you out of the room.
The range across the collection is a large part of the pleasure. A loving, exacting, very long piece on English usage and the quiet politics of grammar sits beside reportage on a conservative talk-radio host and an ambivalent, searching appreciation of Dostoevsky. Wallace is funny, often very funny, but the comedy is nearly always in the service of an almost painful sincerity, a wish to be honest about difficult things in a culture that mostly rewards a protective irony.
A fair caveat: the prose can be genuinely demanding, and the footnote architecture is not for everyone. A reader who wants brisk, linear, conventionally shaped essays may find the digressions exhausting rather than electric, and the longest pieces test patience by design. But for those willing to follow him down the branching paths and trust that he knows where they lead, this is one of the great essay collections of its era, the work of a writer who treated paying attention as itself a moral act, and who could make you feel the stakes of it.
Why you should read
- Readers who love maximalist, digressive essays
- Fans of literary journalism with a moral streak
- Anyone curious about Wallace beyond his fiction
What to expect
- Ten wide-ranging essays
- Famous, branching footnotes
- Comedy in service of sincerity
- A standout title essay on ethics
What holds the disparate pieces together, beneath the jokes and the footnotes, is a single preoccupation: the difficulty and the moral weight of really seeing things as they are. Whether the ostensible subject is a crustacean's nervous system or the grammar wars or a candidate on a campaign bus, Wallace keeps circling back to the cost of inattention and the rarity of honesty. That underlying seriousness is what lifts the collection above its own cleverness, and it is why readers who finish it tend to return to individual essays for years, finding new turns in the branches each time.
