Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Pale King by David Foster Wallace The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 660c20298e259716 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace – review. B ureaucracy isn't an unfamiliar theme for readers of modern literature. Faceless indifference, the crushing boredom of standing in queues or waiting to be called, and the brutalities of efficiency seen as an end in itself – bureaucracy is often deployed as a synonym for the very worst gifts of modernity, and serves as the aggregate antagonist of the heroes of, among many others, Kafka and Orwell. But the fact that David Foster Wallace's posthumous unfinished novel The Pale King , which is set primarily in a backwater regional office of the American Internal Revenue Service, is at heart (if not without significant qualifications) a celebration of bureaucracy is the first of many things that make it such a provocative work. Foster Wallace killed himself in 2008, 12 years after the publication of his previous novel, the celebrated Infinite Jest . During the last years of his life, he would refer to "something long" or "the long thing" that he was working on. This turned out to be 250 pages of neatly stacked manuscript that he had left on his office desk, as well as other materials scattered among computer files, notebooks, handwritten drafts and the like. With the encouragement of his wife, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell, Michael Pietsch, the author's editor and friend, undertook the assembly of The Pale King out of these disparate materials. What Pietsch has produced is a stunning if clearly incomplete novel, as thematically daring as anything that Foster Wallace attempted. A summary of the episodic and digressive plot doesn't begin to do it justice. We follow a series of characters bound together by their employment at the IRS's Midwest regional examination centre in Peoria, Illinois, during the mid-1980s. For the most part we stick with the recruits destined to become "wigglers", the institutional slang for low-level examiners of returns. The novel is punctuated by moments of baroque tragedy drawn from the characters' back stories, a bit of postmodern play as "David Wallace" periodically appears in the text, as well as a strand of soft magical realism. Many of the characters have what can only be called utterly banal superpowers, sometimes born of childhood trauma, such as the ability to levitate while concentrating particularly hard or the capacity to intuit useless facts about those around them. But for the most part Foster Wallace sticks to the practicalities of the work that the wigglers and their bosses perform. Unlike what we usually think of as "office drama", The Pale King attends as much to the tax forms themselves as water-cooler intrigues or cubicle romances. As one character says: "Almost anything that you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting." Wallace's fascination with the details of work, rendered through his compulsively vivid prose, becomes our own as we read the novel. Subtle indications within the narrative, as well as hints given in the set of Foster Wallace's "Notes and Asides" included by Pietsch, suggest that the finished work would have played out on the one hand as an institutional drama involving the replacement of the human tax investigators with computer systems, on the other as the transformation of the IRS as a whole, from a law-enforcement agency to a quasi-corporation, focused more on profit than justice. As Foster Wallace writes in his notes: "Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one." This link between the prosaic everydayness that Foster Wallace confronts and the broader issue of the vital if unsexy service provided by institutions such as the IRS lies at the centre of The Pale King . At one point the text's literary and thematic issues come together in a lecture delivered by a Jesuit accounting professor, accidentally attended by one of the characters during a listless spell at university: "Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is… The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valour. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience… Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire… actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested." In a deep sense, the priest here comes very close to enunciating the sentiment behind both the technical feat that Wallace was attempting in this book as well as its implicit thematic argument. To my mind, The Pale King isn't really a novel about the Reagan-era tax cuts, as some have claimed, but rather about another more abstract yet pervasively significant political trend that came into its own during that era. Since Reagan's presidency (like Thatcher's reign in the UK, as well as their ideological descendents around the world), government, and in particular its bureaucratic face, has been a target for politicians of nearly every stripe. Streamlining, downsizing, outsourcing, rationalising – these have come to be seen as the only answers to that dreaded thing, state bureaucracy. Against the grain of our times, The Pale King stands as a sustained and incredibly convincing advertisement on behalf of government itself – at least its inner workings, the back office types tasked with ensuring fairness, justice and the distribution of vital services. To a large extent, Foster Wallace allows the novel's form to be dictated by its function. More than any of its predecessors, The Pale King is a novel of ideas, and the ironically lyrical, often hysterical voice of works such as Infinite Jest has been substantially toned down. One of Foster Wallace's earliest calling cards as a writer was his explicit rejection of Carveresque minimalism – fashionable in the 80s – in favour of an almost incontinent proliferation of irrelevant detail, meandering interior monologue and, in general, language delivered in bulk. While the prose in The Pale King can hardly be called sparse, the dominant tone is a departure from what has come before. According to Pietsch, Foster Wallace's notebooks were marked intermittently in the margins with the phrase "no voice", seemingly a signal that he was attempting to break away from his accustomed form. Perhaps the novel's most emblematic stylistic moment is a section, cast in a form borrowed from double-entry bookkeeping, describing the actions of a group of wigglers as they sit at their desks reviewing forms: This passage, which goes on more or less without a break for three full pages, marks the limits of Wallace's attempts to adapt his prose to the rhythms of the world he is describing. Readers of The Pale King can't help but wonder: is this a novel Foster Wallace could actually have finished? Even if his personal circumstances had been different, would there ever have been a way to sustain such detail without completely breaking the attention spans of readers? Tragically, we will never know the answer to this question. Instead, we are left with a heroic effort, possibly doomed from the start, to instil in readers alternate modes of fascination, radically out of step with our attention-deficient and ever "rationalising" culture. Michael Sayeau is an English lecturer at University College London. Quotes from The Pale King. “The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Every love story is a ghost story.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand?Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Maybe it’s not metaphysics. Maybe it’s existential. I’m talking about the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than “die,” “pass away,” the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’ ‘And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, contribute, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering. “But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man ever really learns anything important, the real skill that is required to succeed in a bureaucracy. I mean really succeed: do good, make a difference, serve. I discovered the key. This key is not efficiency, or probity, or insight, or wisdom. It is not political cunning, interpersonal skills, raw IQ, loyalty, vision, or any of the qualities that the bureaucratic world calls virtues, and tests for. The key is a certain capacity that underlies all these qualities, rather the way that an ability to breathe and pump blood underlies all thought and action. “The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. “The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. “It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “The assumption that you everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we're all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine. ” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Do you suppose it's so much easier to make conversation with someone you already know well than with someone you don't know at all primarily because of all the previously exchanged information and shared experiences between two people who know each other well, or because maybe it's only with people we already know well and know know us well that we don't go through the awkward mental process of subjecting everything we think of saying or bringing up as a topic of light conversation to a self-conscious critical analysis and evaluation that manages to make anything we think of proposing to say the other person seem dull or stupid or banal or on the other hand maybe overly intimate or tension-producing?” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie? . Something has happened where we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “There are secrets within secrets, though--always.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly. but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airports' gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. The terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “That what appears to be egoism so often isn't.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it. This is the way of people. Suddenly ask what’s wrong and whether they open up and spill their guts or deny it and pretend you’re off, they’ll think you’re perceptive and understanding. They’ll either be grateful, or they’ll be frightened and avoid you from then on. Both reactions have their uses, as we’ll get to. You can play it either way. This works over 90 percent of the time.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle- the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, they could not hear each other's speech as even words or read anything from what their faces looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Like so many other nerdy, disaffected young people of that time, I dreamed of becoming an 'artist', i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “. Like having to be able to say to yourself, ‘I am pretending to sit here reading Albert Camus’s The Fall for the Literature of Alienation midterm, but actually I’m really concentrating on listening to Steve try to impress this girl over the phone, and I am feeling embarrassment and contempt for him, and am thinking he’s a poser, and at the same time I am also uncomfortably aware of times that I’ve also tried to project the idea of myself as hip and cynical so as to impress someone, meaning that not only do I sort of dislike Steve, which in all honesty I do, but part of the reason I dislike him is that when I listen to him on the phone it makes me see similarities and realize things about myself that embarrass me, but I don’t know how to quit doing them—like, if I quit trying to seem nihilistic, even just to myself, then what would happen, what would I be like?” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers. Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality—there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth—actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn't allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he'd have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he'd really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. “This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood--that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.” ― David Foster Wallace, quote from The Pale King. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Click on jacket to view larger. The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions—questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society—through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time. Listen to an excerpt from The Pale King. " The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying and rousing.” — Salon. “a potent memoir for how we’re able to withstand the crushing tedium of modern life and still derive meaning from it.” — Washington Post. “ The Pale King represents Wallace’s effort, through humor, digression and old-fashioned character study, to represent IRS agents…as not merely souled, but complexly so. He succeeds, profoundly, and the rest of the book’s intellectual content is gravy. Yes, parts are difficult, but ‘boring’ never comes into it. And it’s very, very funny.” — Newsday “the most anticipated posthumous American novel of the last century … [Wallace was] America’s most-gifted writer…American literature will rarely, if ever, give us another mind like Wallace’s…ferociously written…richly imagined…a deep panoply of lives and the post-modern awareness of how this all was constructed, both the work and the vortex of current life.” — Boston Globe “One can see THE PALE KING as a postmodern, even Wallace-ite, way of serving up a novel.” — Wall Street Journal. “whole enough, fully imagined, often exquisitely fleshed-out…a series of bravura literary performances— soliloquies; dialogues; video interview fragments; short stories with the sweep and feel of novellas…” — Slate. “Piecing Together Wallace’s Posthumous Novel”, in the New York Times. “' The Pale King ': David Foster Wallace's Editor on the Book's Path to Print”, in the Atlantic. "A work that, as expected, only further proves David Foster Wallace's genius….The notion that this book is 'unfinished’ should not be given too much weight. It is in many ways, quite complete: its core characters are fully drawn, each with a defining tic, trait, or backstory…The experience to be had from reading THE PALE KING feels far more weighty and affecting than a nicely wrapped story. Its reach is broad, and its characters stay with you." —NPR. " The Pale King is , for great swaths, an astonishment… Watching[Foster Wallace] loosed one last time upon the fields of language, we’re apt to feel the way he felt at the end of his celebrated essay on Federer at Wimbledon: called to attention, called out of ourselves. Jesus, just look at him out there." — New York Magazine. " The Pale King is, for an unfinished book, surprisingly wonderful and finished-seeming. Big chunks of it are full-on Infinite Jest -level great … Reading it is strangely intimate: you adore what’s good and (knowing that it might have been fixed) forgive what’s less good." — New York Times Magazine. "Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist … The Pale King is imperfect, but it feels more like the work of a human being than Infinite Jest does." — Time (cover article) "Deeply sad, deeply philosophical…By turns breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull – funny, maddening and elegiac – The Pale King will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace's oeuvre and his life. But it may also snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window…into this immensely gifted writer's vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of America…his most emotionally immediate work…It was in trying to capture the hectic, chaotic reality—and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters—that Wallace's synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes…because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including The Pale King , he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life." — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times. " The Pale King is different. Wallace left us this book—the people closest to him agree that he wanted us to see it. This is not, in other words, a classic case of the Posthumous Great Novel, where scholars have gone into an estate and unearthed a manuscript the author would probably never want read…To read The Pale King is in part to feel how much Wallace had changed as a writer, compressed and deepened himself…It's easy to make the book sound heavy, but it's often very funny, and not politely funny, either…Contains what's sure to be some of the finest fiction of the year." — GQ. "The last work of fiction by the greatest American writer of my generation is an incomplete and weirdly fractured pseudo memoir about the United States tax code and several employees of the Internal Revenue Service… The Pale King, an unfinished manuscript that will be published this month by Little, Brown, is one of the saddest and most lovely books I've ever read. " — Esquire Magazine , April 2011. "[ The Pale King is]… feverishly encompassing, sharply comedic, and haunting ," and "a commanding and ingenious inquiry into monumental boredom, sorrow, the deception of appearances, and the redeeming if elusive truth that any endeavor, however tedious, however impossible, can become a conduit to enlightenment." — ALA Booklist , starred review. "… one hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace, being, as it is, a transfixing and hyper-literate descent into relentless, inescapable despair and soul-negating boredom." — Publishers Weekly. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace – review. D avid Foster Wallace's suicide in 2008 was a shock that will go on reverberating for as long as people remain interested in the novel. Even if you had mixed feelings about his work, there was no doubting his colossal talent and no mistaking his centrality to his generation of American writers. If anyone was going to become the Melville of the corporatised society, the post-natural environment, the pharmacologically altered human landscape we all now inhabit, he was the one. His big novel, Infinite Jest , was one of those densely summarising works that seem to reverse the chain of cause and effect around them. If the record didn't indicate otherwise, you might think that Pynchon, Gaddis, Burroughs et al had all been greatly influenced by it, so thoroughly does it metabolise their methods and sensibilities into its fantastical tale of rehab, tennis prodigies, wheelchair-using Canadian terrorists, and the quest for a piece of film footage so entertaining it reduces watchers to catatonic wrecks. At his death, Wallace left behind an unfinished novel entitled The Pale King . Twelve chapters had been neatly printed out, and there were copious drafts of further chapters, along with memos concerning the overall intentions of the project. Out of these materials his editor, Michael Pietsch, has assembled a text which, if necessarily speculative, seems a plausible rendering of the work in progress. The subject matter is as narrowly focused as that of Infinite Jest was richly profuse. It is, in a word, boredom. Boredom and its various effects on the spirit, ranging from suicidal despair (suicide was a constant motif in Wallace's work) to a transcendent power of concentration. The latter is periodically held up as the nearest thing to heroism left in a world where there are no more frontiers to push back, and all that remains to challenge the aspiring hero is the drudgery of organising data. "Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space," one character remarks, "is what real courage is . . . " The principal setting in which this austere and yet perversely thrilling theme is explored is a regional tax-processing centre on the outskirts of Peoria, Illinois. The year is 1985: "a critical year for American taxation and for the Internal Revenue Service's enforcement of the US tax code", as one of many passages of rather wickedly dulled-down prose puts it. At issue (and one gathers this as much from Wallace's notes, appended to the text, as from the narrative itself) is an intra-service fight over increasing automation, and the question of whether the IRS should be an organisation in which morally competent human beings enforce civic virtue, or just a money-making business in which machines process paperwork for maximum revenue. That question in turn becomes a way of thinking about relations between individuals and the state: among other things, The Pale King seems to have been intended as a rather serious novel of ideas. Even at its robust 560 pages, it consists largely of beginnings – topics stated, settings described (superbly; Wallace had a detailed understanding of the physical textures of the American landscape), backstories laid down. The drama, as it stands, consists of one extended first act. An executive at the tax centre has been recruiting new accountants – most of them prodigies or freaks of one kind or another – in preparation for what seems to be an impending showdown between man and machine. The 50 monologues, skits and sketches that comprise the text as we have it introduce these oddballs and savants as they converge on IRS Post 047 in Peoria, and begin to interact. That's about it, but the lack of development matters less than you might expect. For all his baroque plotting, Wallace was generally more interesting at the level of the part than the whole. You go to him for the self-contained, usually comic, often staggeringly grotesque riffs and routines at which he excelled, rather than some sustained Jamesian evolution of story out of character. The provisional nature of The Pale King adds to this montage- like effect. You move through it as if through some mildly phantasmagorical gallery, making your own connections as you wander along. Here is a tax-examiner who compulsively counts words as he converses. Here is another whose "immersive" powers are such that while working he will sometimes levitate. Here is a "fact psychic" whose mind streams with superfluous data about everything he encounters: "Tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person's weight, shoe size, bowling average . . . " Here is a young contortionist dedicating himself to the goal of being "able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body" (this excerpt, published in the New Yorker, has already won the book some notoriety). There are two ghosts in the building, and the bland offices are further intruded on by periodic, tedium-induced hallucinations. Some of these notions work better than others. There's a wonderful 100-page monologue in the middle of the book describing a man's quasi- religious awakening from slacker "wastoid" to the high calling of accountancy, after an accidental encounter with a Jesuit teacher. There's a stunning passage about men on a work break: they're just standing outside talking about nothing in particular, but the few pages nail a condition of bleak office-life vacancy with definitive accuracy. On the other hand there's some fairly run-of-the-mill metafictional business about the book not being a novel at all but a "non-fiction memoir" of the author's experience as a tax examiner in the 80s, which include a wearisome farce about being confused with another David Wallace. This side of Wallace – the rather leadenly playful postmodernist – always struck me as mystifying. Why the need for this kind of pseudo-sophistication when you are as genuinely sophisticated as he was? Then too, the female characters are pretty crudely handled. One is made up "like an embalmed clown"; another gives "woodpeckerishly intensive" fellatio. There's a fat lady in a muumuu who looks like "several women all cohabiting in just one garment". And so on. It's not that the men are any less broadly satirised, but they tend to have other dimensions than the purely physical, whereas very few of the women do. You notice it. But the book more than survives its flaws. In fact, as it wrestles with its own intuitions about dullness and repetition, it rises intermittently to something like greatness. The surprise (to me) is that it does so more in the prose itself than the many clever inventions comprising the story. Wallace's style often seemed to me bludgeoningly over-explanatory. It could hit the odd Pynchonesque note of forensic rhapsody as some highly complex process was articulated in minute detail, but mostly it sounded like a slangy technical manual; serviceable, but short on charm, and exhausting. The Pale King doesn't go in for understatement either (or charm for that matter). But in linking its exploration of tedium to the rarefied world of taxes, it opens itself to a very particular set of linguistic possibilities, exploiting them to create a verbal music of striking originality. Snatches of tax code drift through characters' minds, arcane fiscal questions erupt into conversations, or take over the text altogether for short stretches. They don't bear quoting out of context (just imagine the most mind-parching piece of legalese you've ever tried to read), but they are used judiciously and they become curiously mesmerising. You experience them less as words than pulsations; periodic incursions of some ambient deathly force into the characters' lives, that must be reckoned with even if it destroys them. At a certain point it becomes impossible to resist the thought that under all the high talk about the place of boredom in modern life, what Wallace was really writing about was depression. There is a section in double entry columns that consists of little more than a roomful of examiners silently turning the pages of tax returns – "Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page . . . " On it goes, column after column – "Ken Wax turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Lane Dean Jr rounds his lips and breathes deeply in and out like that and bends to a new file. Ken Wax turns a page . . . " It is one of the strangest, saddest, most haunting things I've ever read. In an interview once, Wallace rather surprisingly named Larkin and Auden as two of his favourite writers. Larkin's squatting "toad work" seems present somewhere in The Pale King , as does Auden's "Fall of Rome" with its tax-defaulters and "unimportant clerk" writing "I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK". But in relation to Wallace's own indefatigable engagement with his world, it's the lines from Auden that seem most apt: "coming out of me living is always thinking,/Thinking changing and changing living." He was such a figure himself.