Lobster tale lands writer in hot water

Imagine that you are the editor of Gourmet magazine and you nail down the allusive and sometimes incomprehensible David Foster Wallace ("probably the most important novelist of his generation" -- The Boston Globe) to write an article for you. The two of you bat around a few ideas and you settle on … the Maine Lobster Festival.

Wallace attended last year's festival with his girlfriend and his parents, one of whom hails from Maine's potato country. His 6,000-word dispatch, now available in Gourmet's August issue, ranks as one of the most extraordinary New England-themed magazine articles of all time. It is alternately jarring, disjointed, contrapuntal, maddeningly long, and enviably brilliant. Wallace kisses off the festival -- "cheesy"; "boring"; "full of irksome little downers" -- and devotes two-thirds of the article to a physiological and philosophical meditation on the bioethics of lobster boiling.

"I wasn't quite prepared for this," admits Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl. "I was blown away. I never in a million years thought this particular issue" -- lobster-cide -- "would come up." In her note at the front of the magazine, she describes the article as "hilarious, thought-provoking, very uncomfortable."

Lobster death does come up, again and again, in now-classic DFW fashion, with footnotes within footnotes, parentheses within parentheses, and a look-at-me lexicon that will propel readers to the dictionary, or to the magazine's more easily digestible fare. (Will the Mailer family be sending DFW a note? He misuses Norman's famous coinage, "factoid.") Here is the soft, meaty claw of Wallace's inquisition: "Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?"

The lobster industry wants us to believe that the hardy crustaceans feel no pain. A festival handout notes that "the lobster has no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain." Wallace debunks this notion pretty thoroughly, advancing biological arguments that "lobsters are maybe even more vulnerable to pain" since they lack the pain-damping opioids shared by mammals.

On the anecdotal front, he notes that lobsters work hard to escape the 212-degree water, hooking their claws over the sides of kitchen pots and thrashing around, audibly, during the 30 seconds or so it takes them to die. "The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water," he writes. "If you permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest."

In his article, Wallace refers to the "elaborate editorial compromise" required to publish some of his thoughts. Reichl allowed that "there were a lot of discussions about various things," but that "talking to [Wallace] was a delight."

"Is that what she said?" Wallace asks, chuckling. "The article was going to get yanked three or four times because they wanted stuff taken out. I was pleasantly surprised that they ran it, because I thought for a while their strategy was to demand so many changes that I would take it back."

Editor and writer tangled over a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals video called "Meet Your Meat," which Wallace was not allowed to name in the article. "That was a line I wouldn't cross," says Reichl.

"My impression was that Ruth absolutely loathed PETA, and some of their advertisers do, too," Wallace says. "It was just an exercise in my weird self-destructiveness that I would submit the article I did. I thought the treatment of the lobsters was far and away the most interesting thing about the festival."

Uncomfortable truths or overheated rhetoric? The festival is going on right now, and staffer Chuck Kruger took a moment to decry Wallace's "crank zoology" and "many inaccuracies." "I can tell you honestly that this festival is big fun if you eat lobster or if you don't," Kruger says. "All the heavy moral questions are for each individual to answer."

Kruger's colleague Dot O'Donnell mentions that Gourmet has been trying to sell her color reprints of Wallace's article: "That's pretty [gutsy]," she says, in a tone teetering between admiration and disgust.

Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.