"Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace

Steve Almond reviewed "Consider the Lobster" for the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 18, 2005. Here are some excerpts:<br>
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There is no writer alive to whom I would more happily entrust the task of covering the Adult Video News Awards (the porn industry's Oscars) than David Foster Wallace. There is no writer alive more incisive and hilarious, more ruthlessly tender, when it comes to documenting the perversities of modern American life.<br>
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As wittily as Wallace records the moral horrors on display, he never loses sight of the genre's essential pathos. The most fascinating subject he encounters at the Adult Video News Awards is an elderly police detective -- a gentle, soft-spoken grandfather -- who watches porn "for those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets drop their stylized ... sneer and become, suddenly, real people."<br>
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This is what makes Wallace so effective as a correspondent: his emotional curiosity about the world. For all his nimble phrasing and postmodern tomfoolery, he's something of an innocent.

( Wes Bausmith / Los Angeles Times )

Steve Almond reviewed "Consider the Lobster" for the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 18, 2005. Here are some excerpts:

There is no writer alive to whom I would more happily entrust the task of covering the Adult Video News Awards (the porn industry's Oscars) than David Foster Wallace. There is no writer alive more incisive and hilarious, more ruthlessly tender, when it comes to documenting the perversities of modern American life.

As wittily as Wallace records the moral horrors on display, he never loses sight of the genre's essential pathos. The most fascinating subject he encounters at the Adult Video News Awards is an elderly police detective -- a gentle, soft-spoken grandfather -- who watches porn "for those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets drop their stylized ... sneer and become, suddenly, real people."

This is what makes Wallace so effective as a correspondent: his emotional curiosity about the world. For all his nimble phrasing and postmodern tomfoolery, he's something of an innocent.

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