Yesterday, MPTR purchased Gourmet’s August issue to lay grubby hands on the new DFW essay “Consider The Lobster” and published a definitive prelim assessment of its contents, which you should go read (if you haven’t already) as it lays out the basic trajectory of the essay.

I followed suit last night, grubby hands and all.

A few disclaimers, before my reaction:

- I was exhausted.

- Before hitting the bookstore, I pretty much bullied Mr. Tingle into taking me to Chile’s for some fajita action and the comfort of its voluminous booths. Once there, became overridingly depressed by mall Americana — the obese bleached belles in too-tight baby-doll Tees and studded belts and low hip-riders; the teenage waitstaff who were all freaked out because “that guy who was doing body shots at the bar jumped Brian outside” when Brian cut him off, an incident followed by the arrival of a policeman with a hurly-burly stride and a potato-shaped head, and more worried yet exultant discussion among the teenage waitstaff about who would take Brian’s section as “he wasn’t going to be working anymore tonight”, all conducted at the volume they might use to shout from their lockers to one another; the obscene size of the vehicles in the parking lot, viewable through the window; and tipped off by a woman in a next booth who prefaced every stage of her order with the phrase “I need”: I need a Coke, I need Southwestern Eggrolls, I need a Cheeseburger with Bacon, I need some Babyback Ribs, I need a Chocolate Fetish Dessert.

Believe me, as I lounged there in my tangerine muummuu (I still had it on from Ed’s) I was aware I’m no prize either. In my unhappiness and indecision over my job I’ve put on a lot of weight and lately look in the muumuu awfully late-years Brando. Still I felt repelled and snotty and alienated — enough so that Mr. Tingle offered first to switch places in the booth (a sign that he was sick of hearing reports from my field of vision), and then later the American-ness of the scene overwhelmed him too, and, as we rode to the bookstore, he offered to emigrate to Canada: We just think it’s gotta be better up there. (We are trying to decide between the beautiful scenery of B.C., and Nova Scotia, where Aulenback is and where I’d have a fairly good chance of seeing Maud yearly and Sarah W. might be willing to pop over. I should state the obvious here: I have only the dimmest sense of Canadian geography. )

- Then at the bookstore, I strolled to the new fiction section and the first book I saw was Pamela Anderson’s new novel, with the silicon breasts and lips on the cover. (Link via TEV.)

- So you’d think this state of mind — alienated, repelled, snotty and depressed — would be ideal for tackling a DFW essay, as it pretty much captures the emotional key of swathes of “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (the cruise ship one) and “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” (the state fair one). Yet it wasn’t.

I’m going to re-tackle the essay this weekend, when I’ve regained my humanity, but my initial impression is that it represents a molting phase in DFW’s writing. The essay was unevenly split into two halves: The reportial first half, where he does the thing of harnessing all kinds of facts and observations about what he’s seeing at the Lobster Festival (similar to the essays mentioned above, part. “Getting Away” as the Rake has already pegged) — yet this section felt phoned-in somehow, the footnotes felt distracting and like a crutch, the observations cootish. It read to me as if Wallace was rehearsing a style from his youth that doesn’t fit him anymore. And this was underscored when the essay took a weird deeper turn in the second half into a long philosophical meditation about the competing feelings one has about eating animals — which seemed to me more like where DFW is headed in his writing.

So overall the essay is composed of two halves that don’t go together: The first a half-hearted reprisal of young DFW, the second perhaps a precursor of what’s to come. The whole thing soldered together with easy segues and riffs, like the author was riding his DFW genius fumes. If I were his editor I would have asked him to throw away the first half (as interesting as it is) and build again.

Will report back on Monday if this analysis still seems fair. In the meantime, has anyone else read it? What did you think?