books

Few contemporary essayists can make a book review feel like an ethical ambush, and fewer still can turn a puff piece for a food magazine into a 20-page inquiry into the consciousness of crustaceans. That Wallace does both in this 2005 collection, and makes the transitions feel not only organic but inevitable, is the strongest argument I can offer for his reputation as one of the finest nonfiction stylists of his generation.

The pieces gathered here span roughly a decade of magazine work for Rolling Stone, Harper's, Gourmet, The Atlantic, and The New York Observer, and the range alone is startling. Wallace embeds with John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign in "Up, Simba," wades into the Adult Video News Awards in "Big Red Son," picks apart a modern usage dictionary over 62 pages in "Authority and American Usage," performs a literary assassination on John Updike in "Certainly the End of Something or Other," and profiles a conservative talk-radio host in "Host." The title piece, still the collection's centre of gravity, begins as reportage on the Maine Lobster Festival and finishes as a quietly devastating meditation on whether it is defensible to boil a sentient creature alive for the sake of dinner.

What unifies these wildly different subjects is a method. Wallace is drawn to American spectacles, the bigger and more vulgar the better, and he uses them as frames for moral and linguistic inquiry he suspects most of us would rather avoid. The approach is tonally adventurous in the best sense - he can move from slapstick to philosophy in a single paragraph without seeming to strain - and the famous footnotes, arrows, and boxed asides feel less like affectation than like an honest attempt to render how a genuinely restless mind actually thinks.

The collection is not without faults, and they are the same faults that dog everything Wallace wrote at length. The piece on Updike is more vendetta than criticism. The usage-dictionary essay, brilliant in flashes, sprawls past the point of useful digression and occasionally overreaches into fields - quantum mechanics, for instance - where its confidence outpaces its grasp. "Host," with its labyrinth of coloured boxes and cross-page arrows, is an experiment I admire more than I enjoy; it demands the kind of page-flipping attention that actively resists the immersion most readers bring to a book. There are stretches where the voice tips from meticulous into merely busy, and a leaner editor might have served the material well.

Even so, the collection's high points are extraordinary. The lobster essay belongs on any short list of the best American magazine writing of its century, "Big Red Son" is funnier and more humane than its subject has any right to be, and "Up, Simba" captures something about political theatre that still reads accurately two decades on. This is a book to return to rather than finish, and one that rewards the second pass more generously than the first. For anyone who wants to understand what ambitious nonfiction can still do, it remains essential.