This past Friday, in my epic journey to read all Dostoyevsky, I bought Crime and Punishment at one store and ended up browsing at yet another bookstore where I chanced upon David Foster Wallace’s Consider The Lobster, which contains an essay on Joseph Frank’s then 4-volume biography of Dostoyevsky.  There are many reasons to read this essay, not least of which is the opening sentence, “Have a prolegomenous look at two quotations,” or that one of the two quotations is from Edward Dahlberg.

As with all of Wallace’s essays, sentences can simultaneously contain the most casual vernacular with the heaviest of multisyllabic words, a style at once knowingly erudite yet wry, a bit tired of its very knowingness.  This sense of ennui with post-modern prose by one of its best-known American innovators is on full display in this essay that contains an attempt at revealing the bits of our inner lives that echo the contradictions of the Underground Man.  Interspersed with longer prose paragraphs are short paragraphs offset by astericks and ask such poignant questions as the following (and I cannot help but be aware that all of Wallace’s writing will be unforgivingly cast in terms of his death):

But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain?  Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?

In spite of the hindsight of Wallace’s suicide, I can’t help but find the sentences funny as well in his intended circular logic, the solipsistic  voice.  Much of Dostoyevsky’s novels function in a similar manner: characters whose pain is self-imposed by an acute sensitivity.

Near the end of his essay, Wallace poses a challenge to American novelists to be as unabashedly sensitive, to care without ironic distance about politics and the milieu of our discourse:

…we, fiction writers — won’t (can’t) dare try to use serious art to advance ideologies.  The project would be like Menard’s Quixote.  People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this (and it is a given), who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction?  The culture, the laughers?  But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction.  But how to make it that?  How — for a writer today, even a talented writer today — to get up the guts to even try?  There are no formulas or guarantees.

Even though the Cold War seems fairly well over, there might never have been a time when being American felt close to being Russian, that sense of impending fate hanging over us while our politics descends into an absurd rhetoric that cynically draws attention away from any matters of genuine politics.