Shades of Gray Curled Up On The Couch With A Good Book: Consider the Lobster

Consider it indeed.

This isn't going to be a book review per se, other than to say here that you all (including you, Dad) should read Consider the Lobster, as well as David Foster Wallace's other stuff, including Infinite Jest which I swear to God I'm going to get through one of these days. There's a certain irony in my not being able to finish Infinite Jest, given the function of the movie of that title in the book, but anyway.

Consider the Lobster is a compilation of Wallace's journalism and literary criticism, and it's all excellent, from the opening essay about the 1998 Annual Adult Video News Awards (it appears to be Pornography Week here at Shades of Gray) through the title story about the 2003 Maine Lobster Festival up to the piece I want to focus on, "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart," an (unfavourable) review of an autobiography of the aforementioned Tracy Austin, a teenaged tennis prodigy of the 1970s.

Again, it's not so much a review of the review that I want to do here. There's a section of the review, though, where Wallace talks about why these almost uniformly terrible memoirs (Ball Four is the only exception I can think of) sell so well, and, in my view, why we ask athletes the same questions after every event and get the same, prepackaged answers:

So we want to know them, these gifted, driven physical achievers. We too, as audience, are driven: watching the performance is not enough. We want to get intimate with all that profundity. We want inside them; we want the Story...And of course, too, we want to know how it feels, inside, to be both beautiful and best ("How did it feel to win the big one?")...Are these athletes real people? Are they even remotely like us? Is their Agony of Defeat anything like our little agonies of daily frustration?...

I remember meditating, with all the intensity a fifteen-year-old can summon, on the differences that kept this girl and me on our respective sides of the TV screen. She was a genius and I was not. How must it have felt? I had some serious questions to ask her. I wanted, very much, her side of it.

There must be a word, probably in German, for the feeling of identifying with a writer while envying them intensely. I remember the precise moment when I realized consciously that my soccer career had gone about as far as it could go. I was sitting in the King's varsity bus en route to an invitational tournament in Presque Isle, Maine, and it hit me that I was nailed to the very end of the bench of the team that was going to finish last at this low-level college tournament in a country that still doesn't take soccer terribly seriously, and that I should therefore stop waiting for the Canadian national team to call. Which was fine, because I think most of us who aren't preternaturally gifted in the first place unconsciously realize this sort of thing anyway. It's mildly galling that a guy who can't help his six-year-old with his math homework is an all-world superstar, but that's how it goes, and my memories of sprawling across a goal-mouth, flailing at a shot from the eighteen-yard box, are just as sweet having come at Wickwire Field as they would be if they'd come at Wembley Stadium. Or they would have been, if Wickwire didn't use Astroturf.

Of course, for me, reading David Foster Wallace reflect in sorrow about being a tennis-playing Salieri is mildly irksome. I'd give my soul to be able to write with the soaring, discursive flow that Wallace manages as a matter of course. The thing is that I think any time you actually manage one of these interrogations with genius, of the type Wallace seeks from Austin, the answers generally turn out to be either of the maddeningly bland variety (see: every hockey player interview, ever) or of the soul-crushing type that confirms that your heroes really are working on another level from you-the best example being Louis Armstrong on what jazz was: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know."

All of which is to say that it's really quite something to read an author capable of limning, in real time, the sort of aspirational envy he evokes in at least one member of his audience. So go read David Foster Wallace! Right now, Dad!

Or, you can hang around here and I'm sure I'll find something we can talk about.