Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
CONSIDER THE LOBSTER AND OTHER ESSAYS David Foster WallaceOne starLittle, Brown, $25.95
A decade ago, just after heroin chic, there was a brief lull referred to as geek chic. And part of that passing vogue involved the writer David Foster Wallace because he was shy, had long hair, wore a bandana and used a lot of footnotes.
It makes sense then, that the majority of this book is culled from magazine assignments he received when his brand of bells-and-whistles trickery was fashionably unfashionable.
Wallace doesn't bother to contextualize (or even to introduce) the book beyond allowing for 10 peevish lines on the copyright page, where he expresses his dismay at a magazine industry that has the audacity to pay him and then edit him into some semblance of readability.
He does get his big-boy claps for two recent pieces - there's the title story, a musing on the fate of lobsters that appeared in a food magazine last year, and the closing piece about a radio talk-show host, which appeared in the Atlantic last April.
Otherwise, he leads off with a 7-year-old piece about a pornography awards show, a subject covered with far more authority and wit by Martin Amis in Talk magazine that same year.
The longest piece, an interminable 79 pages on John McCain (including a few pages about the assignment itself) ran in some form in Rolling Stone in 2000.
The novella's worth of inanities and generic observations ("Try to imagine it," he repeats about McCain's torture; meanwhile, "JFK had that special leader type magic") reminds us that magazine editing can occasionally be less than glamorous and exciting.
The material is so dated and so without updates, that the author even refers to himself as being an "under 40," while clumsily attempting to take on John Updike. How sweet for the 43-year-old, aging himself like a Vogue staffer. But again, in fairness, he was something like 39 and 11/12ths when he typed his disapproval of an Updike protagonist.
One marvels, over and over in this collection, at the generosity of Wallace's magazine editors. He is so scattered, so imprecise and lacking in immediacy, that he appears to have been the recipient of more pity assignments than Kurt Andersen.
And yet, in the face of such charity, he doesn't allow for much graciousness for the professionals who were kind enough to render him readable.
Then again, he does dedicate the book to his agent. And he's still adorably hairy.
Copyright 2004 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
