What Would David Foster Wallace Do?
A brief review of Consider the Lobster, expanded upon with some lessons this particular writer learnt from DFW’s approach to critical non-fiction.
The joy I experienced reading David Foster Wallace’s essay collection Consider the Lobster has been counter-balanced by the pain of trying to review it. The problem is two-fold. On the one hand, there is the issue of how different each of the ten essays is, and how my review ought therefore to be comprised of ten mini-reviews. That, though, would render the result nearly unreadable, or at least pointless compared to a reading of the original.
On the other hand there is the much greater problem: I fell in love with this book.
I could easily and very happily reread each and every one of DFW’s pieces. This is not always true with cultural essays — they are not universally well-written, and in many cases they age tremendously quickly. But in the case of Consider the Lobster, I find myself unable to offer a legitimate review simply because I cannot distance myself from the work. My heart has become involved.
Whilst I might not be able to offer a critical companion to the book, I can still render a service to somebody: the writing community. DFW’s writing is so good, and systematically so, that I think it is possible to pull from the text a number of general rules that can help us as we try to better ourselves as writers.
To that end, then, I present the lessons I as a writer have learned from reading Consider the Lobster.
Do your research but learn when and how to share it with your reader.
This might seem an obvious point, but it’s still one we ought all to bear in mind. I’ve been guilty of both over-sharing and under-sharing when it comes to the little details that I’ve discovered in the course of researching my essays; sometimes I’ve broken the balance of whole paragraphs because I thought I needed to tell my reader something, only to find that the whole essay worked better without that particular little snippet.
DFW was a master at weaving the unusual detail or the interesting fact into his greater narrative. Consider ‘Big Red Son’, his opening essay and one that spends fifty pages delving into the porn industry by way of the Adult Video News awards in Las Vegas. An enormous portion of the article is made up of directly-relayed information: names of the performers, aliases of the performers, names of the films, which awards are available, how long certain companies have operated for… there is so much information that you begin to feel really as though you were swimming in facts.
But this is not a case of too much, but rather, just enough: the information is the point of all this. It is not the anchor that weighs down the ship: the anchor is the story.
Let me illustrate my point. Imagine how much research must have gone into an article that could point out that, “Irresistible, a 1983 winner in several categories, has been spelled Irresistable in Adult Video News for fifteen straight years.” And clearly there’s a lot of fun to be had with commenting on the facts as well: “Last year’s Best-Sex-Scene-in-a-Film winner Vince Vouyer’s real name turns out to be John LaForme. Rhetorical Q: How, if one’s real name was John LaForme, could that person possibly feel the need for a nom de guerre?”
DFW’s sure handling of a massive quantity of data leads to many such riotously comedic moments in ‘Big Red Son’, but it is his equally restrained approach to the source material that lends ‘Authority and American Usage’ a certain quiet authority all its own. In what you might call an accretive approach, DFW builds up example after example of ‘incorrect’ or ‘improper’ English usage in his review of A Dictionary of Modern American Usage.
Early in his essay, DFW talks about the so-called Grammar Nazis. Talking about the kinds of people who are likely to buy a book on Usage, he suggests they are “that small percentage of American citizens who actually care about the current status of double modals and ergative verbs. The same sorts of people who watched The Story of English on PBS (twice) and read Safire’s column with their half-caff every Sunday. The sorts of people who feel that special blend of wincing despair and sneering superiority when they see EXPRESS LANE — 10 ITEMS OR LESS or hear dialogue used as a verb or realize that the founders of the Super 8 Motel chain must sure have been ignorant of the meaning of suppurate.”
Notice the minor genius in that passage: the way that, when the illustrations begin to come through (as they do throughout the review) DFW opens with an example of improper usage that many of us would recognise; he moves on to one that perhaps half as many will be concerned with; and then ends with one that may cause only a few eyebrows to be raised. That’s the entire point: DFW wants you to know just who you are, because this self-knowledge will be very important to how you perceive the rest of the article, where he lays out the wider context for the usage-wars and suggests ways of navigating the rocky waters of universal usage.
Dazzle your readers with your vocabulary but never leave them blinded.
I kept an open notebook by my side for the entirety of my journey through Consider the Lobster. I picked up a great many words that were unknown to me, such as lallate and pertussion and dysphemism. However, I never felt like I was being made to feel belittled by DFW’s use of these words, but rather that he had sought them out as the perfect words to use in every instance.
DFW’s introduction to his article on the works of John Updike sets the stage for what follows, but is also a prime example of how a writer can inject into his work something sublime just by the careful employment of the right words:
“I’m guessing that for the young educated adults of the sixties and seventies, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation, Updike’s evection of the libidinous self appeared refreshing and even heroic. But young adults of the nineties — many of whom are, of course, the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully, and who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation — today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without once having loved something more than yourself.”
The point is: this is terrific writing, and you’ll understand the direction DFW wants to take you in even if you don’t have time to reach for the dictionary (and it can’t be any pocket affair you reach for, either — words like evection and anomie I had to look up in my massive Collins that weighs more than my laptop).
The most interesting character might not be who you think it is, or want it to be.
I mentioned earlier that many cultural essays wear themselves out on topics that society soon leaves behind. There is a real gift that some writers possess, DFW obviously among them, of taking something that could be stuck in the then-and-now of temporaneous writing, and lifting it somewhere higher so that even ten years after the fact it will feel fresh and relevant.
The word I’m looking for is transcendence, and for my example I will point to DFW’s ‘Up, Simba’, wherein the author follows the McCain campaign in 2000. I’m an Englishman; I don’t even live in England these days, but rather Poland, where my career as an English teacher has taken me; I don’t keep up with American politics to any large degree, and so you might think that I would prefer to skip an 80-page article on an also-ran in the 2000 electoral campaign in the States. You would be wrong. DFW takes the generic and makes it eternal in much the same way that Hunter S. Thompson could.
Part of his success lies in his choice of characters for this drama on the election trail. McCain himself is never more than a ghost at the periphery, but that’s as you might expect it to be. We learn a lot about McCain through DFW, but more than that, we learn about how election campaigns work, about the personalities involved, and how the future of politics might come to be shaped. The character we follow through all of this is DFW himself, and the choice is apposite.
DFW is such an outsider, a fish out of water you might say, that he can treat as fresh and unusual precisely those topics that an insider would not think to mention. This is not an article written for The Economist or the Wall Street Journal, but rather for Rolling Stone, and its readers might find it useful to learn of some of the nomenclature that DFW discovers: terms like B-film and Scrum and Soft-Money. Only DFW, of all the writers I know, would think to include a glossary near the start of his article, and it’s because of his choice of characters that he can do this.
He is not the only personality that we find it interesting to follow. Whilst a shorter article would have dealt exclusively with McCain — his history, his philosophy, his campaign promises, his reaction to the first negative ad in the campaign — DFW gives himself the space to breathe and take in the wider picture. His portrait of the other hacks on the media bus is a suitable cure for anyone who has deluded themselves into thinking that this line of business might be fun:
“Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes tour of everything that’s happening on BS1 [the media bus’s nickname] at 1330h. A few of the press are slumped over sleeping, open-mouthed and twitching, using their topcoats for pillows. The CBS and NBC techs are in their usual place on the couches way up front, their cameras and sticks and boom mikes and boxes of tapes and big Duracells piled around them, discussing obscure stand-up comedians of the early 70s and trading press badges from New Hampshire and Iowa and Delaware, which badges are laminated and worn around the neck on nylon cords and apparently have value for collectors.”
It goes on — but there is magic in these recollections that you will not find in a purely political report of the campaign. This is more like something taken from a Tom Wolfe novel.
The question prospective writers can ask themselves is this: who do I want the star of my story to be? If, in the example given above, it’s McCain, then very well, let it be him. But if you decide to make yourself the central element in the story, and expand outwards from this point, you might find yourself writing something with more appeal. Well, you might.
The most interesting topic might not be what you think it is.
Think about the stories that are currently dominating the zeitgeist; it’s the end of 2014, so we’d be talking about Garner and Ferguson and race relations in the US, maybe Putin once again in Europe, and perhaps immigration would be up there for the UK, now that the issue of Scotland’s secession from the Union has been settled for the next few years.
These would all be fine topics to explore, and it’s important that somebody does. But unless you are one of the finest writers in the country, working for one of the finest institutions or outlets, the chances are good that your opinions will never reach any further than a tweet that gets favourited a handful of times. It is particularly unlikely that you will be able to approach the subject from an original perspective.
Then why not write one of the best essays in all of human history on the subject of lobsters?
This is what DFW has done in his titular piece. I cannot begin to tell you, firstly, how much pleasure I sucked from this piece, as if it was smothered in butter and came with a side of cheese bread, and secondly, how much it has changed my opinions and perspectives as a result.
Let me, once again, turn to DFW to illustrate my point. Here he is introducing the main moral thrust behind his story:
“So then here is a question that is all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the US: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice?”
This is the story that encapsulates the first three points that I made in this review. DFW has done his research on lobsters, and he has done it well, looking at everything you might think of and much else besides. He relates the history of lobster-eating, from being something that prisoners in jail turned their noses up at, to a modern delicacy. He also talks at length about the difficulties of humanely killing the lobster before eating it — for example, since lobsters do not have the same form of nervous system as we possess, jabbing it through the eye or where we imagine the brain to be with a sharp knife would not suffice.
His language throughout sizzles and snaps like the air escaping from under the lobster’s shell as it is boiled; I love the little compounds he makes like ‘gustatory pleasure’. I cannot now think of any possible improvement on this, and I doubt I ever will.
And he chooses just the right character to follow: himself. His article describes his own visit to the Maine Lobster Festival, and the details, the people he meets and interviews, the experience of eating the lobster in one of those massively industrial marquees, all seem so close and real because we are seeing this world through his eyes.
So you can ask yourself, prospective writer, when you are working on your next article: What Would David Foster Wallace Do? The answer to that question might just guide you in a more interesting direction than you would have otherwise taken.
