Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2006
352 pp, hardcover, $25.95
“A deliberate collision, joyful and lucrative and loud.”
Ten essays comprise this newest collection of David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction musings, originally published in periodicals including Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly and Village Voice. This entertaining book might be one to pack for time on a beach or boat this summer.
When Wallace was dispatched to Rockland in August 2003 to cover the Maine Lobster Festival, the result was the story “Consider the Lobster” for Gourmet magazine. He begins his description of the noteworthy event by exclaiming how “enormous, pungent, and extremely well-marketed” the festival is. Describing tourism and lobster as the Midcoast region’s two main industries, he goes on to say the occasion “represents less an intersection of the industries than a deliberate collision, joyful and lucrative and loud.” He offers an overview of the festival’s attractions including its many lobster-themed comestibles and souvenirs. A short history recounts how, until sometime in the 1800s, lobster was low-class food. That it is now considered a delicacy is a reputation Wallace sees the Maine Lobster Promotion Council as seeking to dispel. “The Maine Lobster Festival’s democratization of lobster comes with all the massed inconvenience and aesthetic compromise of real democracy,” he writes. He gives as examples the “Disneyland-grade queue,” the tent’s trapped steam and smells, the noise level, Styrofoam containers, flat and iceless soft drinks, plastic ware, and not enough paper napkins or porta-potties. Toping those insults off are the cold beers one can only watch savvy diners imbibe from the coolers they have smuggled in. Wallace concludes that the festival is “full of irksome little downers like this.”
He saves his most scrutinizing analysis, however, for considering how lobster is cooked, framing this query by asking, “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” He offers as one response the protests of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). They have shown up at Lobster Festivals over the years, although Wallace noticed none in 2003. Portraying them as one extreme, he also takes issue with some of the promotional information assuaging qualms about lobsters experiencing pain, as explained in the Promotion Council’s “Test Your Lobster IQ Quiz.” For Wallace, it boils down to this: whereas cattle or chicken or other critters get slaughtered out of sight, lobster meets its fate by our own hands. He describes what the “preparation” can elicit from said crustaceans, including attempted escapes and dire rattling and clanking noises from inside the pot. “The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water…a blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain.” The next four pages consider a lobster’s pain perception and pain experience and those of the cook in tandem.
Wallace conveys this information with details and facts, but also with his signature wit and wry, nuanced skepticism; he’s smart and funny. There’s some commonality with Calvin Trillin, another humorous and erudite writer appreciative of offbeat topics in travel and cuisine. Wallace covers a wide range of interests in this book, including subjects like dictionary wars, a conservative L.A radio talk show, the writers Franz Kafka, John Updike and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and an award ceremony for categories of porn.
I’m glad this book’s lobster (a cooked one is pictured waving at the reader from the cover) caught my curiosity; after reading this volume I backtracked and read Wallace’s collection from 1997, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. (That particular essay recounts his misery and mishaps during a Caribbean cruise). Wallace’s writing gets at the essence of things as he experiences them; they are sharply personal observations. Occasionally some effort is necessary to tackle the text, including accommodating his tendency to overuse footnotes. But ultimately those are small complaints. Wallace’s insight and sense of humor, as well as edgy intellect, combine to make him a good read. Consider The Lobster for your summer reading list.
Tina Cohen writes from Massachusetts and Old Harbor, Vinalhaven.