Mind over matter

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.

Wallace’s reputation, of course, precedes him. He is the brainiest and most prolific of our young masters. Over the last two decades, he has published three story collections and two novels, including the aptly titled “Infinite Jest,” whose 1,088 pages would be tough to summarize without the benefit of a flow chart. He is the rightful owner of a large and cultish fan base.

And yet the singular curiosity of his career is that readers -- often to their own chagrin -- tend to enjoy Wallace’s nonfiction more than his fiction. I have yet to meet a single person who didn’t adore his 1997 collection, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” The real world has a way of grounding Wallace, of keeping his intellect from veering into indulgence. His magnificent new book of essays, “Consider the Lobster,” is only going to make matters worse.

Here, for instance, are just a few of the observations he offers from the front lines of pornworld:

“Some of the starlets are so heavily made up they looked embalmed.”

“Ms. St. Claire is being escorted ... by two large men whose expressions are describable only as mug-shottish.”

“It is difficult to describe how it feels to gaze at living human beings whom you’ve seen perform in hard-core porn. To shake the hand of a man whose precise erectile size, angle, and vasculature are known to you. That strange I-think-we’ve-met-before sensation one feels upon seeing any celebrity in the flesh is here both intensified and twisted.”

Who can resist such prose?

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.

Dispatched by Rolling Stone to cover the doomed 2000 presidential campaign of Arizona Sen. John McCain, Wallace conveys a genuine disillusionment at the sham of the whole arrangement: the endless political posturing, the robotic news coverage. He figures out pretty quickly that the buzz around McCain emanates mostly from the campaign media, who celebrate his “piss-and-vinegar candor” while failing to note “the sometimes extremely scary right-wing stuff this candor drives him to say.”

At the same time, Wallace recognizes McCain’s essential magnetism. The candidate is, at least potentially, “a real leader ... somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.... “ McCain, of course, was eventually defeated by George W. Bush, whose flagging campaign responded to his opponent’s charisma by going negative. Wallace reports all of this with a kind of dutiful sorrow. Nearly six years on, the piece feels something like a requiem.

Wallace is actually writing about something more fundamental here, “a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief ... that there’s nothing left anywhere but sales and salesman.”

“Lobster” contains a number of heady pieces, including a lengthy discourse on American usage. But Wallace’s dazzling versatility derives from his willingness to locate meaning within settings often dismissed as unserious. In “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” he investigates how the autobiography of the former teen tennis star could prove so lifeless, given the tragic arc of Austin’s career. His eventual (and reluctant) conclusion is among the most profound observations ever offered about sports stars: “Those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it -- and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.”

Wallace generally steers clear of polemics -- he’s more inclined toward fevered self-examination. But his essay on Dostoevsky is a notable exception. In paying homage to the Russian master, he laments the “congenital skepticism” of modern artistic culture and the moral impoverishment of today’s novels.

“For me,” he writes, “the really striking, inspiring thing about Dostoevsky isn’t just that he was a genius; he was also brave.... He never stopped promulgating the unfashionable stuff in which he believed. And he did this not by ignoring (now a.k.a. ‘transcending’ or ‘subverting’) the unfriendly cultural circumstances in which he was writing, but by confronting them, engaging them, specifically and by name.”

There is more than a hint of the same defiance in the title essay, written for Gourmet magazine, which uses the occasion of the Maine Lobster Festival to contemplate the morality of a carnivorous lifestyle. The question that dogs Wallace is whether lobsters feel pain. “For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and -presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.,” he wonders, “do you think much about the (possible) moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands.... ?”

That clang you hear is the sound of a million or so Gourmet readers dropping their lobster forks.

There is one final matter to be dealt with when it comes to Wallace. I refer (of course) to his use of the footnote, a habit that reaches its unfortunate apotheosis in a profile of KFI-AM radio host John Ziegler. I can certainly understand Wallace’s affection for the device. Footnotes allow him to indulge in digressions and, to some extent, they reflect the fractured nature of modern thought. But the Ziegler profile is simply a chore to read.

Wallace does best here when he shoots straight. Lucidity isn’t a gift to his readers, after all, but their due. Besides, we know he’s a brilliant guy. What makes him an exceptional writer isn’t his big old brain, but the fact that his brain does the bidding of an even larger heart. *

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From Big Red Son in Consider the Lobster

EVERYONE without exception is sweating. At all but a few of the booths, contract starlets treat the fans with the same absent, rigid-faced courtesy that flight attendants and restaurant hostesses tend to use. You can tell how bored the performers are by the way their faces light up when they see someone they know. Well over half of the industry’s current superstars are in this huge room.... T.T. Boy is here, standing alone with his trademark glower, the Boy who is rumored to bring a semiautomatic pistol with him to the set.... Here is the ageless Randy West, who looks just the way a surfer would look if that surfer were also a Mob enforcer, with his perennial tan and hair like frozen surf.