A Moralist In Disguise

Pankaj Mishra reviews David Foster Wallace's applauded collection of essays, Consider The Lobster, and, interestingly enough, discovers that the author is "an old-fashioned moralist in postmodern disguise." This duality, according to the reviewer, is both a strength and a weakness:

"...few of his young peers have spoken as eloquently and feelingly as he has about the hard tasks of the moral imagination that contemporary American life imposes on them. Yet he often appears to belong too much to his own times — the endless postmodern present — to persuasively explain his quarrel with them."