A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is the DFW book of essays I’d unhesitatingly recommend to a friend; Consider The Lobster is for the more entrenched fan, because the pieces aren’t as interesting, basically. The opening bit about the AVN porn awards in Las Vegas is boring, with flashes of horror about the rotted state of the American soul, but not really worth reading. The title essay derails and crashes into a discussion of the intelligability of non-human minds, which…here’s the unpleasant subtext of the book: lobsters, who can’t speak but might feel, don’t deserve to be boiled and eaten. The plight of young porn stars, who we can understand perfectly, warrents no digression about how, perhaps, they’re being taken advantage of, or might, you know, deserve some degree of protection from their own intemperate hell: a gigantic predatory industry that doesn’t care if they wind up dead* or addicted to drugs. Bleh.

*Wallace tosses off a role call of dead porn stars, just for atmospherics.