Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace Read Free Book Online Page A

various shots and scenes have mirrored the plots of everything from Die Hard I-III to Air Force One . Nobody’s near hip enough to lodge the sick and obvious po-mo complaint: We’ve Seen This Before. Instead, what they do is all sit together and feel really bad, and pray. No one in Mrs. Thompson’s crew would ever be so nauseous as to try to get everybody to pray aloud or form a prayer circle, but you can still tell what they’re all doing.
    Make no mistake, this is mostly a good thing. It forces you to think and do things you most likely wouldn’t alone, like for instance while watching the address and eyes to pray, silently and fervently, that you’re wrong about the president, that your view of him is maybe distorted and he’s actually far smarter and more substantial than you believe, not just some soulless golem or nexus of corporate interests dressed up in a suit but a statesman of courage and probity and … and it’s good, this is good to pray this way. It’s just a bit lonely to have to. Truly decent, innocent people can be taxing to be around. I’m not for a moment trying to suggest that everyone I know in Bloomington is like Mrs. Thompson (e.g., her son F—- isn’t, though he’s an outstanding person). I’m trying, rather, to explain how some part of the horror of the Horror was knowing, deep in my heart, that whatever America the men in those planes hated so much was far more my America, and F—-’s, and poor old loathsome Duane’s, than it was these ladies’.
    2001

HOW TRACY AUSTIN BROKE MY HEART
    BECAUSE I AM a long-time rabid fan of tennis in general and Tracy Austin in particular, I’ve rarely looked forward to reading a sports memoir the way I looked forward to Ms. Austin’s Beyond Center Court: My Story, ghosted by Christine Brennan and published by Morrow. This is a type of mass-market book—the sports-star-“with”-somebody autobiography—that I seem to have bought and read an awful lot of, with all sorts of ups and downs and ambivalence and embarrassment, usually putting these books under something more highbrow when I get to the register. I think Austin’s memoir has maybe finally broken my jones for the genre, though.
    Here’s Beyond Center Court’ s Austin on the first set of her final against Chris Evert at the 1979 US Open: “At 2-3, I broke Chris, then she broke me, and I broke her again, so we were at 4-4.”
    And on her epiphany after winning that final: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled.”
    Tracy Austin on the psychic rigors of pro competition: “Every professional athlete has to be so fine-tuned mentally.”
    Tracy Austin on her parents: “My mother and father never, ever pushed me.”
    Tracy Austin on Martina Navratilova: “She is a wonderful person, very sensitive and caring.”
    On Billie Jean King: “She also is incredibly charming and accommodating.”
    On Brooke Shields: “She was so sweet and bright and easy to talk to right away.”
    Tracy Austin meditating on excellence: “There is that little bit extra that some of us are willing to give and some of us aren’t. Why is that? I think it’s the challenge to be the best.”
    You get the idea. On the upside, though, this breathtakingly insipid autobiography can maybe help us understand both the seduction and the disappointment that seem to be built into the mass-market sports memoir. Almost uniformly poor as books, these athletic “My Story”s sell incredibly well; that’s why there are so many of them. And they sell so well because athletes’ stories seem to promise something more than the regular old name-dropping celebrity autobiography.
    Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere—fast est, strong est —and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best