Last week, I registered some dismay over DFW’s Gourmet essay, “Consider the Lobster” — which I read after an unexpectedly harrowing trip to Chile’s.

I re-read the essay over the weekend and liked it far better the second go-round. Don’t get me wrong. I still think it’s structurally messy, with the buoyant front half, where Wallace genially takes in the Maine Lobster Festival, followed by the meditative back half, which is devoted to questions of whether lobsters feel pain, is it right to eat something that feels pain?, when the lobster bangs the inside of a pot full of boiling water, is he just nerve-firing or trying to indicate a wish to get the fuck out of there? etc. It’s like the essay’s all Hawaiian shirt on top and monk robes down below.

But it turns out that when I’m not all alienated from Chile’s, the fact that David Foster Wallace might have written an unsymmetrical essay doesn’t seem so, um, dire.

As Ed points out, the essay’s pretty hysterical in bits. I forget sometimes how much I like it when old DFW gets to observing the people around him. Here he is on a cab ride shared with a wealthy political consultant:

The consultant and cabdriver are responding to informal journalistic probes about how people who live in the midcoast region actually view the MLF, as in is the Festival just a big-dollar tourist thing or is it something local residents look forward to attending, take genuine civic pride in, etc. The cabdriver—who’s in his seventies, one of apparently a whole platoon of retirees the cab company puts on to help with the summer rush, and wears a U.S.-flag lapel pin, and drives in what can only be called a very deliberate way—assures us that locals do endorse and enjoy the MLF, although he himself hasn’t gone in years, and now come to think of it no one he and his wife know has, either. However, the demilocal consultant’s been to recent Festivals a couple times (one gets the impression it was at his wife’s behest), of which his most vivid impression was that “you have to line up for an ungodly long time ot get your lobsters, and meanwhile there are all these ex-flower children coming up and down along the line handing out pamphlets that say the lobsters die in terrible pain and you shouldn’t eat them.”

In a footnote, this same cabdriver who drives in the deliberate way is described as having “a distinctive speaking style” that’s “maniacally laconic.”

The long & short of it: Go read the essay. Just don’t eat at Chile’s first. Also, check out the recipe for Espresso and Mascarpone Icebox Cake on page 113.