I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today,” he once said, “of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.

As someone who has attempted to delve into Infinite Jest on three separate occasions, I initially struggled to understand the widespread acclaim for David Foster Wallace. However, upon encountering his commencement speech and various interviews, I was captivated by his profound self-awareness and relentless pursuit of truth. So, with a sense of surrender (for now) to Infinite Jest, I turned to Wallace’s nonfiction works for inspiration. In this review, I will explore his collection of short essays, Consider the Lobster, by the late David Foster Wallace.

David’s prose stands in stark opposition to that of Joan Didion, with a flair and maximalist style that few can emulate. His vocabulary is impressively vast, and he unabashedly showcases it, which some may perceive as pretentious. I’m grateful that I read this on my Kindle, where I could look things up quickly, or else this review might have taken much longer to get to. My perception of his writing shifted as I came to see his style as both emotional and intellectual, a means for him to express his hypersensitive soul.

To me, DFW emerges as a world-class observer. While this quality might have been somewhat obscured in a novel like Infinite Jest, it becomes impossible not to appreciate in this collection. The first essay delves into the porn industry, with DFW highlighting its absurdity through the lens of the yearly AVN awards. In another, he endeavors to elucidate why Kafka is a humorous writer, attributing his surrealism as a form of humor rather than something bleak. In Up, Simba, he delves into the gritty election campaign of presidential candidate John McCain, offering insights into the behind-the-scenes machinations required to win over both the media and the U.S. voters. In the titular essay, Consider the Lobster, he ponders the ethical considerations surrounding lobster consumption, drawing from his observations at a yearly Maine festival, where the plight of these crustacean creatures is starkly evident in their demise. While these are just a few of the standout moments that remain vivid in my memory, each essay is meticulously crafted, convincing me that this consistency is a testament to Wallace’s skill.

The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in . . . whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some books to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.

In any event, at the MLF, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings . . . and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in?

While DFW’s tendency to overuse footnotes sometimes left me feeling fatigued, his authenticity and humor shine through on every page of every essay. He effortlessly draws readers in with his rapid flow, delivering powerful insights amidst his elegant observations. Though his style occasionally tested my patience, I cannot claim that there was a single bad sentence across the 360 pages of this book.

Rest in peace.

Overall Rating: 9/10

My favorite DFW quote that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently:

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism — The perfectionism is very dangerous, because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in … It’s actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is.