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David Foster Wallace's clever insights abound in "Consider the Lobster."

Date published: 3/5/2006

By ASHLEY GAUTHIER

For THE FREE LANCE-STAR

David Foster Wallace's newest collection of essays, "Consider the Lobster," is smart writing for those who are dismayed by our increasingly dumbed-down public discourse. While it's certainly not light reading--Wallace will casually throw out terms like "dysphemism" (the opposite of euphemism; using a more offensive term rather than a less offensive one), it is entertaining, sharp, and often amusing.

Wallace takes on all kinds of topics, from whether it is ethical to boil live lobsters, to why professional athletes tend to be terrible memoirists, to the ridiculousness of the porn industry. But his essays share a common theme, the notion that being an intelligent, complete human requires thinking about things you could easily choose not to think about, even if you don't have any answers.

For example, the title essay, "Consider the Lobster," was written for Gourmet magazine in 2004. It was intended to be about attending the Maine Lobster Festival. But in Wallace's hands, it turns into a sociological-philosophical piece about what it was like "to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster," which inevitably becomes an essay about how lobsters respond to boiling water. The most striking thing about the essay is his brutal honesty. Although he can point out all the reasons why logic tells him that the lobster suffers when boiled, he justifies his lobster-eating with the belief that "animals are less morally important than human beings." But what makes Wallace unique is his willingness to struggle with the complexity of the issue. He has the decency to acknowledge that "I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient."

Consider the Lobster By David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, 352 pages, $25.95)

Date published: 3/5/2006