After eighteen months of anticipation, I found Consider the Lobster to be entirely anti-climatic, if not exactly a disappointment. It's just that these essays are old. They were old in 2005 when the book came out and they're old now—and the book's still not out in paperback for another month. John McCain's 2000 primary bid? A book review of Updike's Towards the End of Time from 1997? Was anyone anywhere crying out for this material to be anthologized?

If you like David Foster Wallace, as I do,¹ these aren't bad essays—they're really not—but frankly at this point the 1990s are a half-remembered dream. Doesn't DFW have anything relevant to say about George Bush's America, or about anything that's happened since 2001?

For the sake of a link, though, here's the original version of "Authority and American Usage" from Harper's, a long treatise on language (even longer in the book) that's a pretty good read, if often quite wrong. For instance:

It probably isn't the whole explanation, but, as with the voguish hypocrisy of PCE [Politically Correct English], the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer's own resume. In other words, it is when a scholar's vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own status as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonasm and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer's erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level of obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak ("revenue enhancement," "downsizing," pre-owned," "proactive resource-allocation restructuring") that it's tempting to think AE's real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.

This is plainly true of some (okay, potentially many) academics writers, but not of the genre as a whole—and not true (say) of Duke's own Fredric Jameson, whom DFW singles out by name for attack in the book version.

And, needless to say, even Wallace must know that he of all writers really can't get away with criticizing obscurantist language.

Or take this:

Childhood is full of such situations. This is one reason why SNOOTlets tend to have a very hard social time of it in school. A SNOOTlet is a little kid who's wildly, precociously fluent in SWE (he is often, recall, the offspring of SNOOTs). Just about every class has a SNOOTlet, so I know you've seen them — these are the sorts of six- to twelve-year-olds who use whom correctly and whose response to striking out in T-ball is to cry out "How incalculably dreadful!" etc. The elementary-school SNOOTlet is one of the earliest identifiable species of academic Geekoid and is duly despised by his peers and praised by his teachers. These teachers usually don't see the incredible amounts of punishment the SNOOTlet is receiving from his classmates, or if they do see it they blame the classmates and shake their heads sadly at the vicious and arbitrary cruelty of which children are capable.

But the other children's punishment of the SNOOTIet is not arbitrary at all. There are important things at stake. Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. [35] They're learning about Discourse Communities. Kids learn this stuff not in English or Social Studies but on the playground and at lunch and on the bus. When his peers are giving the SNOOTlet monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on ... for everyone except the little SNOOT, who in fact is being punished for precisely his failure to learn. What neither he nor his teacher realizes is that the SNOOTlet is deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for "peer rapport," which is just a fancy Elementary-Ed term for being accepted by the most important Group in the little kid's life.

There's something to this, too, of course—yes, sometimes social misfits bring their ostracization upon themselves!—but this gleeful valorization of bullies from a onetime victim strikes me as actually deeply sad. And once I noticed it I found echoes of it everywhere in Consider the Lobster: the tagalong wails of the geek still desperately trying to prove that he fits in, that he really is cool after all.

This was a much more harsh-sounding review than I intended to write. Really, the book is okay, even good—it just feels much very out of its time, and suffers for it. The Adult Video News essay that starts off the book in particular is notably good, and used to be online, though it unfortunately seems to have been taken off. The title essay, on the other hand, is still up, and is also good, if lobsters are indeed something you feel like considering.

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¹ Sometimes.

I spent most of last night and this morning shunning the Things I Ought to Be Doing and instead read The Braindead Megaphone, George's Saunders's excellent new collection of essays. It occurs to me that often when I read Saunders I'm never quite sure afterwards if I liked what I read—but I've lately decided that this is a good thing. Saunders's writing gets under your skin, even (especially?) when the words he writes aren't necessarily the words you might have wished that he would write.

I mean this "not necessarily" in at least two senses: sometimes I find Saunders a bit naive, his prose too easy, and other times I think he's tried too hard to make a simple issue complicated and multi-perspectival. And sometimes, of course, he manages to peel back my skin, twist open my skull, and expose my very own grey matter to the world at large, saying it (whatever it is) exactly how it is.

But no matter which Saunders I wind up with, I'm never, ever sorry to have read him.

Most of the essays in The Braindead Megaphone, like the title essay discussed a few days ago, revolve around the uses and misuses of language, roughly half concerned with media criticism and the vacuity of political discourse in contemporary America and the other with short readings of what Sauders sees as seminal literary texts in his development as a writer and thinker: Johnny Tremain, Slaughterhouse-Five, Donald Barthelme's "The School," and Huck Finn, with that essay being perhaps my favorite in the book.

Huck and Tom represent two viable models of the American Character. They exist side by side in every American and every American action. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn’t do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don’t come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privelege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs.

The few deviations from this strong organizing principle make the book on the whole slightly worse, in my opinion, even though several of these are quite good and one (his article about immigration and the Minuteman from GQ) is another strong contender for my favorite essay in the book:

If this isn't the essential American story, I don't know what is: Guy hews a life out of nothing, by working every waking moment, with no education, no government help, no external advantages whatsoever, and no ulterior motive. What did he want? A place where his kids could grow up, with less fear and more material comforts.

Did he get it?

Yes, he did, God bless him.

Likewise, the pieces on the six-month-fasting Buddha Boy, Dubai, and "Ask the Optimist!" are certainly interesting pieces in their own rights (the former two considerably moreso than the last) but don't seem to fit quite right in this book. I much prefer the pieces on language itself and the assumptions (political and otherwise) it directs us to make, as in, for instance, "Thought Experiment," a rumination on essentialism and the genetic lottery and the way we think and talk about each other, or "A Brief Study of the British," which despite being still another travelogue has a lot to say about English as well as the English.

This fixation on collection-unity may, in all fairness, be entirely my hangup, but as you may recall from my thoughts about Consider the Lobster I've gotten to a point where I need my collections to have something to say beyond "This is a new book by ______!" The Braindead Megaphone, in the main, definitely has something to say, and that something is important, and I sincerely hope the book finds market penetration into areas outside the already vibrant Saunders Nation. (Oprah, are you listening?) This is precisely the sort of conversation the country needs to be having right now: about language, about politics, about recognition and ethics and empathy and what it means, really, to be good. I hope we're finally ready.

I'll admit, I'm still a little shaken up over the news of David Foster Wallace's suicide, and it's caused me to go back through my archives looking at the last few years of DFW posts.

* An early post looking forward to Oblivion, followed by my review of it, which was more dedicated to the whole parody-footnotes routine than I've ever been, before or since¹.

* My review of Everything and More, his brief history of infinity, which Cosmic Variance points out contains some evocative footnotes in light of his death.

* My review of Consider the Lobster, a review I'd now characterize as "frustrated with the slow pace of his writing." Another barb at the lack-of-timeliness of his McCain book. And I wasn't especially happy with the introduction to his Best American Essays collection, either, nor of the last story of his I read, from the New Yorker.

It's hard to think of another writer that I liked so much by whom I was so often disappointed. I don't quite know what to make of this fact yet. And understanding his suicide as a literary act—the only register in which I have access to it, having never met him—it's hard not to think of it as the final disappointment, the final shutting of the door, the final, declarative proof that I will never get the work from him I thought I wanted.

* David Foster Wallace vs. Proust.

* David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, and some other guy met on the Isle of Capri to talk about language and identity.

* David Foster Wallace on a desert island.

* Interview with The Office's John Krasinki about the film he's made of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

* n+1 wonders to what extent a follow-up to Infinite Jest is was would have even possible.

* When DFW tried to read one of his books aloud for the audiobook.

* Just an interview. But a good one.

* 'Federer as Religion Experience.' Say what you will, the man loved tennis.

* David Foster Wallace Visits the Adult Video News Awards.

* The Kenyon College speech I linked to yesterday.

* True story. As an undergraduate, my friend took a creative writing course from David Foster Wallace at Illinois State University. On the first assignment he turned in, Wallace wrote, “I swear to God if you ever turn in a piece of shit like this to me again I will flunk your ass. I shit you not.” The meaning of this anecdote is open to interpretation, but to me it suggests several things about Wallace's way of relating to others.

* And I've had this Kottke post bookmarked forever for my long-planned second trip through Infinite Jest. Having lost my way through it the first time, I'll still reread it—but not, I'm afraid, as the reader I was the first time.

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¹ or likely ever will be again