One of Us is Going to Win the War.” I just finished reading We Are Not Civilized: An Unsparing Portrait of American Society and Its Discontents, by David Foster Wallace. Wallace came out of the same general culture that produced Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson and he spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it meant. Wallace, like many artists, was plagued by self doubt. He was never sure that he was making anything of value. If the reader didn’t think so too, well, too bad. After all, Wallace knew better. At least that’s what he thought. A lot of people thought Wallace’s books were all talk and no action. Wallace struggled with the same issues as the rest of us: how to do the right thing, how to tell the truth, how to find the right audience for your work, how to be a good person, how to navigate the gray areas of life and deal with ambiguities. We Are Not Civilized, which Wallace called a “portrait of the society we want and deserve,” started as a book project for a book series called The Humanist Tendency in Publishing. He was asked to do some interviews on his philosophy of writing. At first the project morphed into something larger. The essays found their way into the collection that made up The Pale King, which remains one of my favorite Wallace books. By the time the project got to be published in The New Yorker as Consider the Lobster, he and his editor, Michael Pietsch, had worked together for a long time. The title came about naturally. After all, to Wallace, a lobster is an animal and a human being, and as such both are inscrutable and ultimately just a little bit out of control. Wallace was a liberal, but he wasn’t nearly as sentimental about liberalism as many of us are. He worried about the fact that we’ve made so much progress in our history, but that most people don’t appreciate it. He was a guy who was happy to criticize contemporary liberals for doing too much to accommodate the unenlightened and the greedy. For Wallace, the goal of equality was only partially achieved, not completely. He wasn’t out there with some idyllic vision of a perfect world where everyone would be treated equally. He believed in a lot of stuff, and not always in exactly the same way. But Wallace, who was interested in ethics and philosophy and was constantly worried about what would happen when his ideas conflicted with his actions, had no problem questioning what the other people on the planet were up to. He didn’t know exactly what he was trying to achieve. He thought he might have been writing about art, which is a very hard thing to do because art is so personal and everyone’s idea of what constitutes art is different. He didn’t know how to balance the role of an artist with the practical demands of a professional. In fact, Wallace made some pretty great arguments about the relationship between art and commerce, and those arguments still resonate with me, more than twenty years after reading him. Wallace was interested in the way the world works. I think he would be very interested to learn how America’s wars work. He had the capacity to be really tough on himself, and I found it hard to find any place in his work where he was willing to be self-satisfied. Sometimes I think he didn’t write about his experiences at all, but rather what he was afraid of—what happens when you realize you’re wrong? How do you deal with it? How do you adjust? He thought a lot about how a writer makes a living, or the lack thereof. He got interested in what happens when you can’t get paid at all. He believed that the role of the writer was in essence a sacred calling, but that it should never stop people from getting paid. He said the job was never supposed to be about the money, but he knew it’s what would get people to buy his books. He knew, better than most, that the writer’s sacred status could be leveraged. I have to admit that when I first read Consider the Lobster and thought it was an indictment of the state of publishing, I rolled my eyes. Only after reading his entire body of work did it become clear to me that Wallace was talking about a writer who can’t make a living at his craft, but who has somehow allowed himself to think he can. Wallace had very strong ideas about what happened to American culture after everything, when the country no longer took an interest in its own history or tried to build anything better. Wallace was one of us. Wallace was trying to do something difficult and he didn’t always succeed, but that’s the way it goes. Sometimes I think we need artists because we’re not as good as we think we are. Even at our worst, we still believe that we can create a better world. Some of us are a little more optimistic about it than others. In the Wallace universe, people were complicated, but sometimes they were good at their work. It’s up to us to try to figure out who and what we are, and what we want and where we’re going. In a lot of ways, We Are Not Civilized is what it sounds like. It’s a pretty harsh portrait of American society as we’re living it right now, but it’s also a hopeful, or at least optimistic, book. I don’t think Wallace would have used the word hopeful, but what he’s talking about is a kind of self-confidence and pride that would be built on self-awareness, something that isn’t always a natural part of American life. He says that it’s important for us to know our past and where we came from, but that we can’t be slaves to it. He was interested in those people who are able to stand back and take a view of their lives and say, “This isn’t me. This isn’t what I want,” even though most of us want things that we really don’t have. Wallace was all about the human spirit. He believed in it more than he believed in humanity, and that got him in a lot of trouble. *** There are a lot of books that I thought were important but that didn’t get the attention they deserved. Sometimes books take a long time to be recognized. Some books are ignored because they don’t hit the Zeitgeist. Maybe we don’t think we’re going to like them or they remind us of something unpleasant. Maybe they’re too weird or too complicated, or maybe there are simply too many good books to choose from. Some books are ignored because we were convinced that we already knew everything that needed to be said about the subject. Those aren’t reasons to give up. I read about politics, religion, art, and music because I’m curious about what is happening to us. Sometimes the questions are easy to answer and sometimes they’re harder to figure out. I wish Wallace was still around so I could ask him about this and that. A lot of times, if we don’t see things coming, it’s because we don’t look at the right place. Every year, American publishing produces thousands of new books that people will never hear about. Every year, a book takes off and takes everyone by surprise, leaving the world feeling a little bit smarter or at least knowing a little more. It’s amazing to me how many people have read this book and how many of them have moved the world around them, whether they realized it or not. As Wallace said so clearly, there are a lot of us on this planet and it’s up to us to keep making a difference. In fact, that’s what we’re supposed to do—that’s why we were put here.