The Pale King

I am writing a review primarily to encourage anyone interested in Wallace but feeling intimidated by the prospect of this "unfinished" work to take the leap and read it. I came to it after Infinite Jest, many of the short stories and journalism, and also after reading the D.T. Max biography of Wallace. I was not interested in the book standing alone. I was interested in how it fit with Wallace's other writing, his life, and his death. The book is unfinished, but if read more like short stories with a common thread, I found it rewarding. Some of the pieces are fantastic, and I found myself fascinated by many of the characters -- Claude Sylvanshine, Chris Fogle, Drinion, Meredith Rand, and also the semi-fictitious David Wallace. While some of the chapters require some work on the part of the reader, I think most of the book is pretty accessible compared to some of Wallace's writing. It certainly helps if you've read about him and even some about Pale King. The story in the New Yorker after he died -- The Unfinished -- is worth reading first, or even the entire D.T. Max biography. I finished Pale King feeling rewarded, but also deeply sad about Wallace ending his life and never finishing what might have been an amazing novel. His writing has been very significant to me, and I wanted to see it through to the end. I closed Pale King and said "thank you" to whatever ghost abides.

The Pale King is David Foster Wallace’s third and final novel. He was a lifelong severe depressive, and tried just about everything to improve his condition short of lobotomy. Countless different medications, talk therapy, even electro-shock treatments (which, according to my psychiatrist mother, can be extremely beneficial in extreme circumstances despite its terrible reputation). In 2008 he was working as a creative writing professor at Pomona College in Southern California. Finally his pain became too unbearable, and he hung himself. A tragically sad end to a life far too brief. He was only 46 years old. I am 100 percent sure he had so much more to give. American literature suffered a tremendous loss with Wallace’s death.
For the last near-decade or so of his life, he was working on a follow-up novel to his iconic masterpiece, Infinite Jest—which in my opinion is one of the greatest, funniest books written in the 20th century. He typically referred to his novel-in-progress as The Big Thing. The reason became clear after his death: his wife collected thousands of pages of notes, scenes, fragments, and completed or partially completed chapters. She gathered all of this together in several boxes and sent them to his longtime editor, Michael Pietsch. He was the perfect man for the job. Pietsch helped Wallace pare down Infinite Jest—it was originally about TWICE its still-massive, nearly 1,000-page published version. Pietsch took thousands of pages of material and organized it into The Pale King, An Unfinished Novel. Yet there is strong evidence that the end product didn’t suffer tremendously from being incomplete; Wallace was clear that this novel would (naturally) be a strange one, that the plot would seem to be “leading to something happening, but nothing ever really happens” (D.T. Max, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story—a fabulous biography on David Foster Wallace).
In the end, we have in TPK what we have. It is still a wonderful read, sparkling with Wallace’s distinct voice, with his stunning and complex analyses, with his trademark black humor and cleverness, with his distinct descriptions, all of which are sui generis. Nobody has ever written quite like David Foster Wallace. Nobody ever will. Anyone who tries to will only come off as a wannabe, a failed facsimile, and nobody should even try.
This is true for all great writers and their admirers. Don’t try to copy them. Find your own voice, and if you love certain elements of a writer’s style, let them be an inspiration—incorporate elements of their style (as every writer does; no author ever in the history of literature becomes great or even good without having read many hundreds of other books), but MAKE THEM YOUR OWN. There are few things worse than a copycat-writer, and anyone who does it is destined to fail miserably.
The Pale King has its flaws, to be sure. But it’s still a marvelous read, just like ANYTHING by Wallace. Unfortunately, we only have three novels from him. I’d say in terms of quality this one falls somewhere between his terrific (but more flawed) first novel, The Broom of the System, and his inimitable 1996 magnum opus, Infinite Jest. I believe if Wallace had lived long enough to bring TPK to full fruition, complete with his obsessive perfectionism, it could’ve been a legitimate masterpiece in its own right. He was one of the very best writers of the last century. The fact that a book as entertaining, meaningful, fascinating, and funny as TPK could be culled from thousands of pages of fragments and pieces is only further testament to his greatness.

Like all unfinished books, "The Pale King" poses unique challenges--are we rating the author on what they accomplished, or on the book we imagine they would have completed? Plenty of books have become classics without being complete--Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian Wars," Kafka's "The Castle," Gogol's "Dead Souls," and Hasek's "The Good Soldier Švejk," to name a few--and while some feel full, others are fairly incomplete, less than half of what the author apparently intended.

Such is the case with David Foster Wallace's last manuscript. (After reading it, I hesitate to call it a book--it ends abruptly, with single-sentence notes sketching out possible ideas, much the way my manuscripts do when I'm not done polishing them.) It's like a broken mosaic, half-completed and then dropped along with some pieces that were not yet set in place; the pieces all look great, but they don't all fit together, and no amount of editorial glue can make them whole. The author's skills are manifest in the completed parts, so each episode is a very satisfying read--often incredibly so. And judging by the somewhat fragmentary nature of "Infinite Jest," it's hard to say if a "finished" work would have been tremendously more satisfying. Still, while he introduces each character with enough care and detail to get a good sense of who they are and (usually) where they've come from, there aren't enough plot points to get a sense of where they're going. At the risk of using too many similes in a paragraph, it's like a problem in particle physics--if you get too much information (or too precise of a measurement) on where one is in a particular point in time, you lose any sense of how fast they're going, or what direction.

In some ways, it doesn't matter, because he's an idea author anyway--worth reading not because of overall character or plot arcs, but because all of his writings contain at least a few quotable passages and memorable ideas that stand very well on their own. Indeed, he's one of those authors that can change the way you think--as for instance here, where he talks about the IRS almost as an anti-CIA, a government agency that relies not on stealth and secrecy, but on boringness and over-publicity of a host of mundane information. They aren't hiding anything--they're getting it all out there, in the fine print, and it doesn't make a difference because you won't have the patience to sort through it all and see what it actually means. And just as "Infinite Jest" seemed somewhat prescient (spectacularly wrong in places, but still very much anticipatory of Netflix and the store and streaming video and perpetual entertainment-on-demand), this, too, seems not just about its time, but about ours--the endless assortment of software and website licensing and use agreements that we all click on with scarcely a read-through, the deluge of information that comes at us so rapidly that we barely even have a chance to absorb a necessary percentage of it all. He's writing about the mid-80s, where there's at least a theoretical chance for someone to (as one character plans to) take a year off and watch everything that aired on television in a single month; nowadays, when 72 hours of footage uploaded to YouTube every minute, we're clearly in the midst of an information overload far greater than was the case for any mid-80s bureaucrat. But he provides some great observations for us on dealing with the glut of contending stimuli, and handling the mundane necessities of life in the midst of such abundance. "It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish," he says near the end, and it feels like a revelation worthy of the lengthy read to get to it.

Still, the most unsatisfying thing about an unfinished book is

xxx--How to complete review--discussions of snarky Brett Easton Ellis comments? DFW suicide? Fairness of releasing unfinished works?

Probably everyone reading this review is aware that the author, David Foster Wallace, took his own life in 2008, and that "The Pale King" is an unfinished work. It was impossible for me as a reader to keep thoughts of Wallace's suicide far from my mind. There's something inexpressibly sad about someone with such gifts suffering so much mental anguish that death somehow became preferable to life. But, as trite as it may sound, no-one can every truly know or understand what is going on inside another person's mind, and in that sense we are all of us alone.

However, enough of the philosophizing. Is "The Pale King" worth reading? If you have read and enjoyed Wallace's work in the past, the answer is "yes." "The Pale King" has memorable characters, laugh-out-loud moments, wonderful phrasing, and situations portrayed with such truth you can't help but nod your head in recognition. This is a book about boredom, however, so be prepared for some (intentionally) mind-numbingly dull passages. The reader must keep in mind also that it is an unfinished work and it is impossible to know just what changes Wallace would have made to the final manuscript. The ending is quite abrupt, and, as might be expected, is not really an ending in the accepted sense at all. However, the editor does include a selection of Wallace's notes detailing his thoughts on characters and events, which I found really interesting. So, if you are a Wallace fan already, dig in. Hopefully you will find it as rewarding as I did. If you are new to Wallace, I would recommend starting with his short stories or essays. David Foster Wallace was a unique writer, and his voice will be missed.

I have to say, despite it being less-than-complete, Wallace was still at the absolute top of his game with this book. His sharp wit and incredible ability to observe and accurately portray the minutest details of human interaction shines through clearer than in any previous work. A painstaking perfectionist, Wallace has mentioned in interviews that 'nothing is in his books by accident.' Michael Pietsch (Chief Editor at Little, Brown, and same guy who edited Infinite Jest) mentions in the foreword that about 200 pages 'ready for publisher' were laid out on David's desk at the time of his death. These pages make up the bulk of the novel, and are as high-gloss polished as anything I've ever read by Wallace; they contain snippets of characters that are more honed-in, honest, broken, and personal even than in Infinite Jest.

As a whole, this novel is made up of many small (or some very long) snippets; vignettes or bits of a montage where often the reader is dipped into the middle of a conversation or situation, then carried seamlessly back out and on to the next thing, often without the previous scene being necessarily resolved. Wallace described it as being (paraphrasing here), 'a novel where lots of things build up as if they're going to happen... and then nothing happens.' This method used partially to portray the extreme monotony and dullness of a job within the Service (the IRS, that is). Dullness and boredom is another definite theme, and if you've listened to any interviews with Wallace, it is clear that this is a subject that fascinated him throughout his adult life, and in this novel he investigates, sometimes under the radar, just why our culture is so often 'bored.'

You can see right off the bat that in the premise of this novel, Wallace was faced with quite a challenge: How do you write a book (a very long book) about an incredibly boring, technical, mindless job and still make it actually fun for the reader? How many readers would willingly pick up a book centered around employment within the IRS, other than hardcore Wallace fans who would read anything he ever put out? Well, Wallace was intensely aware of this; he occupied a brain that would blow us all out of the water on genius and yet he cared about his readers and wanted to make his (albeit difficult) writing worth the extra effort. And this one is very worth the effort, and is generally much easier to absorb than Infinite Jest.

There is definitely some technical tax material within The Pale King, but it's all there for a reason and often with the purpose of explaining how things work within the IRS that will be relevant to some character's experience later. While parts of it were over my head, it did not drag on and on and I didn't find it overbearing. Wallace pokes his actual voice in from time to time (for example with the Author's Foreword, which he intentionally stuck in 100 pages into the novel) to talk about his personal experience in the Service, and he himself is also a character whose part involves (I think) both truth and fiction. Wallace explains (in what I think is an intentionally convoluted manner) in his foreword that the novel both is and is not a memoir; much of it is based upon what he actually saw and experienced there, but for other (somewhat unclear) legal reasons he could not talk about other elements and had to fictionalize or leave out other things altogether.

Apart from this, the bulk of the novel is made up of these snippets that are downright delightful. Many of the chapters don't even reveal which character is being talked about, although I think Wallace leaves hints along the way that perhaps upon a second read one might be able to determine. There are many, many funny moments throughout the book, as the characters are just absurdly quirky, and some rather infuriating in their habits, but there were multiple times when I was laughing out loud as I read. Alongside the humor are very real, personal, sad moments, or sometimes very sweet ones, and occasionally some philosophical conversation. All around, Wallace's characters are just as human as ever.

Despite the fact that it is unfinished, there is still much joy to be had between these pages. It isn't the sort of book that leaves you desperate to know what happens, because honestly not much happens plot-wise and the pleasure of the book is experienced in these little human moments. I did get the sense that Wallace had plans to develop some of the characters much further than he did, and bits of 'what might have been' is explained in some of Wallace's notes included in the back of the book. Pietsch says these published notes are derived from literally hundreds of hand-written ideas, character profiles, false starts, scenes, and plot-arcs found with Wallace's plethora of material for the book. From one of these notes in particular, I think it's very possible Wallace was only about halfway done with this book (which is already nearly 600 pages), and I think had he finished it it could have been equal to or longer than Infinite Jest. But we are truly fortunate to get to experience even a portion of this manuscript and enjoy one last taste of Wallace's creative and often touching mastery.

The Pale King is a book to read, as with Infinite Jest, with pen or highlighter in hand and with a dictionary nearby. You'll learn a few new words (Wallace always was one with a vast vocabulary and seems to get kicks out of using some of the most obscure words in the English language), but you also might want to underline the many moments of pure genius you will encounter.

'The Pale King' is a tough one, it's hard to read it without constantly being aware that this is a very unfinished work, and to feel the loss of this amazing writer and think of what the end result would have been if he'd been able to finish it. Yet even unfinished, this is some of the most powerful fiction that you'll ever read. DFW was a genius, and parts of this book are so incredibly well written it's almost hard to comprehend. But it is a very difficult read, and parts of it are clearly drafts and don't always seem to be in any coherent order. Definitely not for a casual reader, this is for DFW fans and fans of serious, serious literary fiction. If you are a fan, then this is an absolute must read. If you are looking for an easy summer novel, this is probably not for you. And even if you are looking to become a David Foster Wallace fan, i'd suggest his short stories first, one really does need to ease into this man's writing. Final verdict, genius. He'll be sorely missed...

In 2008 the world lost one of its most highly-manicured, neurotic and completely immersive fiction writers. David Foster Wallace has, in death, done something to revive an ailing literary world, taking on a righteous cult fascination in a landscape where very few people adamantly study literature anymore. His first posthumous novel, The Pale King, may not win him any new fans, yet it is a complex, intricate portrait of boredom, drugs, mental tics and fissures anchored to the weight of the IRS, which is referred to at one point as more or less the beating heart of the United States government. The story, such as it is, follows the experiences of the author, David Wallace, through his first day or so at the IRS, where he receives star treatment (including some extra attention from a Middle Eastern woman) because of a hellacious internal error. Snaking in and around Wallace's experience there are snippets, anecdotes and summaries of the lives of many other people tangentially related to the IRS, but most of them don't see themselves as related to one another, illustrating one character's quip that "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" (136). Wallace's main objective then, is a dour one, as he seeks to inform us that, in our compartmentalized society, "our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we 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..." (143) The Pale King is an unfinished hunt for that understanding and while quite a cliffhanger, it succeeds for the most part.
That is not to say that the book doesn't revel in its own journey. It is, in many respects, a dark comedy. Wallace peppers many chapters with witty observations such as "...traffic jams often bring out the most aggressive, me-first elements of the human makeup and cause behavior that itself, perversely, exacerbates the traffic jam" (272) and impressive character descriptions such as "Mrs. SLoper...wore a lavenderish pantsuit against which the abundant rouge and kohl were even more ghastly [giving her the aspect of] an embalmed clown, the stuff of nightmares" (300) or the description of a man so furiously intent on inspecting mirrors for flaws that "toward the end he evidently moved his body in the complex inspectorial systems of squares and butterfly shapes even when he was off-duty and there were no mirrors around" (316). These little sections of amusement are supported by incredibly strong descriptions of the natural and industrial world, the former of which draws comparisons to Cormac McCarthy. For instance, "At night from the trailer's park the hills possessed of a dirty orange glow and the sounds of living trees exploding in the fires' heat did carry, and the noise of planes plowing the undulant air above and dropping thick tongues of talc" (54). These vivid moments create a real world for the reader, even if the book remains unfinished.
There are other moments that strike a serious societal chord as when one character remarks that "...entropy was a measure of a certain type of information that there was no point in knowing" (12) or when the author takes time to illustrate one boy's quest for self-assessment with some very far-out examples including, "The eighteenth century holy woman Giovanna Solimani permitted pilgrims to insert special keys into her hands' wounds to turn them, reportedly facilitating those clients' own recovery from rationalist despair" (399). Here again, the eccentricity of the world shines through the darkness. Wallace, this time around, seems politer to the reader than he was in Infinite Jest-- he doesn't allow the book to wallow in extreme detail--perhaps this was the editor wishing for a larger, more commercial audience. Not to say this is a particularly bad thing. There are still many in-depth explanations of head-scratching, `soul-murdering' IRS practices, a very apt description of As the World Turns, discussions of an unnamed abortion that mimic Hemingway, as well as one particularly violent but oddly life-affirming description of a severed thumb that rivals Gately defending the Halfway House in Infinite Jest as far as a `character coming into his own' moment. Very intense.
Far and away, the novel is heavily characterization driven without much in the way of rising action. It is Wallace's world, however, in a shorter form. Never one for cohesion, this is still pretty evidently unfinished. Make no mistake, you will be left wanting more. But what you get is still plenty exciting, if you can wade through the IRS jargon. Just remember, as one character so eloquently states, "If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you can't accomplish" (438). The Pale King may bore you, but if it does, you simply aren't focusing hard enough.

The Pale King's central theme is boredom, and what better way to illustrate that theme than to base a novel on the lives of various IRS agents working in Peoria, Illinois? This is an interesting read, and well worth the purchase for several brilliant chapters. The problem comes in that because this book was never finished, parts of it are so boring as to make the novel at times a difficult read. The real question I had was whether or not DFW did this purposely to drive home his point that most of life is comprised of the very boring. That most of what a day comprises for anybody is not exciting or eventful for very long, and that it's the mundane that will make up most of our day. Those who learn to embrace this fact and tolerate the boredom, thrive in the boredom are those who have life figured out. This seemed to be a main point he wanted to make with the novel, and I'm certain that some or even most of the chapters that were a slog were purposefully meant to be such. However, because he wasn't around to tighten up the novel, and because we'll never know just what he meant to do with it, I'll always wonder if he wouldn't have rendered the final project much more readable.

I believe that had he lived to finish the work, he likely would have won the Pulitzer in 2012 (No prize was awarded that year). I think he was likely very close to winning it with this version of his final work, but that it was just too raw in this posthumously edited form.

Yes, it's very apparent that David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King is unfinished. And, yes, even so, it's still very good. But it's not until the end -- editor Michael Pietsch includes eight pages of notes Wallace had written to himself about further character development and plot ideas -- that we understand just how unfinished The Pale King really is, and also how good it would have been.

Reading the 550 pages we do have, though, is, for the most part, very satisfying. Knowing full well you're not reading a complete story -- and even if Wallace had finished, how "complete" the story would've been is debatable -- you concentrate only on enjoying Wallace on a section-by-section, page-by-page basis. You read in the moment, and if you can do that, you'll be treated to some of Wallace's finest writing ever.

The Pale King explores the stories and back-stories of IRS "wigglers" at a Regional Examination Center (REC) in Peoria, Ill., in the mid-1980s. This setting allows Wallace to explore the themes of concentration, awareness, and most significantly, boredom. Wallace explains in a short snippet of a chapter near the end (though it was Pietsch who actually arranged the order, since Wallace left no hints about how the material should be arranged): "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."

The characters here are vintage Wallace. There's a man who's so generous, he's actually selfish because "...other people, too, want to feel nice and do favors...that he'd been massively selfish about generosity." There's a man named David Cusk who is plagued by a sweating problem (hyperhydrosis), and only intense concentration on a single external focal point will prevent a sweating attack.* A fellow named Chris Fogle, whose drug use increases his awareness, likens his calling to work for the IRS to a religious awakening (more on this in a minute).** A character we meet at the end literally levitates as he concentrates on an incredibly boring story an attractive woman is telling him. And a David F. Wallace appears as a character. David F. Wallace also happens to be our narrator, explaining how he came to write the book we're holding. His sections are fantastic examples of Wallace's (the novelist, not the character) unique gift to make it seem as though he is talking directly to the reader; that reading is actually a dialogue, not a one-way information download.

One particular 60-plus-page chunk of Wallace (the character, not the novelist) chronicles his trip to the REC from the airport. Only a writer as imaginative and eloquent as David Foster Wallace could render a traffic jam in such a way that it reads like a thriller. This was one my favorite sections.

But back to Fogle, whose 100-page "memoir" is the highlight of the novel. It's probably the most polished, complete part and it's the one section where the themes of boredom, concentration and awareness all come together. Fogle tells us about his college-hopping and drifting, and his father's death after getting his arm caught in an El train in Chicago -- which is one the better-written, most riveting scenes I've ever read in a novel. Fogle takes a drug called Obetrol which increases his awareness and concentration.*** The idea here is that by concentrating, one becomes more aware (enlightened?) and thus can deal with boredom. Or, is it that the more aware one becomes, the better able s/he is to concentrate, even on dull tasks, and thus not be bored by them. These circular puzzles, are of course, another Wallace signature -- and one of the many things that make reading him so much damn fun.

As Fogle's story continues, the point he (and Wallace) is making is that dealing with boredom through some combination of awareness and concentration is a gift. "The fact is that there is probably just certain kinds of people who are drawn to a career in the IRS," Fogle tells us. But not only is dealing with boredom a gift, it's also heroic.**** Fogle, as a student at DePaul, accidentally wanders into a graduate level accounting class right before a final. The instructor gives his students a pep talk about their future careers in accounting, and Fogle is mesmerized to the point of being converted.

But these bigger chunks only make up a few of the 50 chapters of The Pale King. Much like in Infinite Jest -- which, as other reviewers have pointed out, The Pale King is sort of a companion to; IJ dealt with entertainment, TPK deals with boredom -- Wallace throws out a lot of pieces of stories in different forms and lenghths, and assumes you'll trust him to reveal eventually how they're related, thematically or by plot. But since Wallace didn't live to arrange these how he'd have liked, the connection to the whole isn't always clear. Some of these are fantastic. Some are as dull as Wallace hopes you'll believe an IRS examiner's job to be. For these smaller pieces, you really do have to read in the moment -- enjoying Wallace for Wallace. If you like him, you'll also like most of this. I really, really did.*****

*"As Cusk discovered the year after his grades had jumped in high school, his chances of an attack could be minimized if he paid very close and sustained attention to whatever was going on outside of him."
**(This quote doesn't so much illustrate the point above as it is just tangentially related or is a set-up for the "religious" experience Fogle has later. I include it here because it's awesome and made me laugh and nod my head in agreement.) "Fervent Christians are always remembering themselves as -- and thus, by extension, judging everyone else outside their sect to be -- lost and hopeless and just barely clinging to any kind of interior sense of value or reason to go on living before they were 'saved.'"
***It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it's a choice. I'm not the smartest person, but even during that whole pathetic, directionless period, I think that deep down, I knew that there was more to my life and myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me."
****"Gentlemen, here is a truth: Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism."
*****Of course, the alternate meaning of "reading in the moment" here is that I never wanted this book to end -- not because it's the best novel I've ever read or because I was super attached to a character or for any reason at all having to do with the book itself. I read in the moment but because I knew as soon as I finished, I'd never read another new word from my favorite writer. That's just an impossibly sad idea to try to comprehend.

As I began my review of David Foster Wallace's THE PALE KING, I was struck by an ominous thought. Perhaps this assignment has caused me to bite off far more than I can chew. My concern comes from repeated articles, comments and reviews of the book appearing in national publications and major web pages. Almost all of the writing comes from authors who are best described as Wallace fanatics, a term I use with its best meaning in mind. This group can tell you everything about Wallace and his writing. In comparison, before THE PALE KING, my only exposure to this fellow central Illinoisan was reading his short story "Ticket to the Fair," a selection read because the piece was recommended as a classic portrayal of the Illinois State Fair. I was not disappointed by it, but I never seemed to find reading time for any of his other works.

Wallace has been called one of the most innovative and influential contemporary American writers. Time magazine included his 1995 novel, INFINITE JEST, in its list of 100 greatest novels of the late 20th century. Wallace's father, James, was a Philosophy professor at the University of Illinois, and his mother, Sally, an English professor at Parkland Community College. As a graduate student he won numerous writing awards and saw his student thesis published as a first novel. But his genius came at a cost. In 2008, at the age of 46, Wallace committed suicide. After his death, his father revealed that for 20 years he had taken medication for depression.

At the time of his death, Wallace was completing THE PALE KING. His wife and agent found the manuscript that would be edited by Michael Pietsch. Wallace also left notes to the novel that suggest there would be no traditional ending or plot to his final work. The book takes place during the 1980s and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Its setting is Peoria, Illinois, and the Internal Revenue Service Regional Center in that community. While the narrator identifies himself as David Foster Wallace, he is difficult to pinpoint with any precision. The book consists of numerous episodes arranged by the editor from Wallace's notes. These individual pieces are more like short stories than a complete novel, but they are nonetheless beautiful portrayals of tedium and routine.

A novel that bases itself upon the IRS and how taxes are determined and collected is obviously quite unique. Wallace often observed how pop culture influenced American life. THE PALE KING examines life from the other end of the microscope --- how details and pointless rules overwhelm individuality.

In addition to the ersatz Wallace, the story is told through the eyes of the clerks at the IRS center. Chris Acquistipace, Dave Cusk, Boris Kratz, Anand Singh and Latrice Theakston are some of the bureaucrats who are slaves to the tedium of government minutia. The story cannot be told through the eyes of one person because it is only through the tedium of many that the hell of boredom becomes apparent. It is the life that most lead no matter what their job. Most readers will recognize their lives in Wallace's portrayals.

THE PALE KING is not a book for those unfamiliar with David Foster Wallace. It is not a finished product, and his writing legacy contains far better works. It is appropriate to leave this unfinished novel and its deeper analysis to those far better versed in his legacy. Indeed, the book, like a fine wine, may require many years on the shelf to reach its maturity. But the enthralling glimpses of a brilliant writer are there on the pages to be savored for years to come, and to remind us that Wallace's death deprived contemporary literature of a shining star.

--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman

I really tried with this book. I loved the premise and thought the emphasis on how to cope with excessive boredom had great potential.

Unfortunately, this book is a mess. There is no consistency in the prose except the author frequently starts a sentence with “Anyways” or “The point is”. If you have to explain the point of what you’re writing, it shouldn’t be written, leave it to the reader to figure out.

I finished the book, but took no pleasure in it. This was my first exposure to David Foster Wallace and to say I was left unimpressed is a gross understatement.

As many of the other negative reviews have said,some shining moments of pure brilliance exist but they are buried under excessive self-indulgence. I know the author unfortunately passed away writing this book and left it unfinished.

The blame cannot be entirely placed on the departed author, whoever edited this book needs a serious career re-evaluation.

Labeling a book “post-modern” does not excuse it from having horrible consistency in the tone, prose and writing style.

I did not like this book.

I greatly enjoyed large sections of The Pale King, but I would never suggest that someone begin his experience of David Foster Wallace with it. The book is very obviously a cobbled together collection of bits and pieces of the project Wallace was working on when he died, and however admirable the job his editor may have done with the materials he had to work with, one should not make the mistake of imagining that the product is a reasonably coherent novel with a few holes or an abrupt ending.

I hesitate to characterize it as a novel at all, and think it might have been at least as effective had the editor simply presented the best pieces for what they were, without even trying to assemble them into something more like a finished work; the reader then might not experience the frustration of trying to follow something that really can't be followed, or supposing that a plot will eventually emerge. It never does.

That being said, there's plenty in The Pale King to fully justify the adoration Wallace's fans--myself among them--feel for him and his work. There are sections revealing psychology, such as the extended dialogue between the stunning woman and her nebbishy coworker, that are riveting and brilliant. There are sections (like the opening) of gorgeous poetic description. There's a chapter that imitates wonderfully the style of Cormac McCarthy, whom Wallace admired. And there are many meditations on the workings of the mind, and specifically, the role of attention, that illustrate Wallace's preoccupations during his last years. Wallace's extraordinary powers of observation and command of the language, as well as his irony and humor, are all here in full force.

I therefore recommend the book highly to anyone who already knows he enjoys the way Wallace writes and thinks, but suggest almost any of his other works for those unfamiliar with him. Sure, Infinite Jest is very long and somewhat less mature than The Pale King in several ways (and has its own problems with plot and completion), but it's arguably a better example of the author's fiction.

In spite of it being cobbled together by someone else and being 'incomplete' (a label that technically also applies to his two other novels) the Pale King is my favorite of Wallace's novels. Gone are the delirious, syntactical pyrotechnics which made Broom of the System and Infinite Jest such vertiginous, linguistical tidal waves, which is not to say that the prose in The Pale King is a cake walk, but that it feels more disciplined, and better tailored to what the book is about. Namely, boredom. Especially boredom as it's filtered through an institution as monolithically boring as the IRS. What Wallace did for recreational drugs, AA and video art in Infinite Jest he does equally well for tax auditors, accountants and 1099 forms; he throws you into their wonkish little world of technical minutia and not only manages to make it almost comprehensible (and at times, somehow compelling) but also shows what such a staid, endlessly bland institution really says about being a modern human, about our deep need to create meaning, maybe even a sort of beauty, out of years of thankless, numbing repetition. He creates a sort of metaphysics of bureaucratic boredom the same way that Thomas Pynchon creates a metaphysics of paranoia, by pulling back the lid on something we tend to ignore and loathe (come on, whether you feel morally obligated or not, who really enjoys paying taxes?) and treating it with a dignity and respect that few people would ever think for a nano-second it actually deserves. It's far less sexy and hip than the world of psychotropic drugs and video art he conjures up so richly in Infinite Jest. It's also far more real (whose never been bored?), and, arguably, far more important. Also, the Pale King contains what has to be one of if not the single funniest 'author forwards' ever written. It kills. I mean it literally kills. It's nine chapters in, naturally.

"An Unfinished Novel," reads the subscript. I've read more or less the complete Wallace canon, his interviews, his books' reviews--One of which reviews gave such a novel the highest praise. And it does deserve accolade, but not for a novel's typical reasons. To begin, the fragmented structure is immediately apparent. What's primarily disorienting about it is that Wallace's finished work often had the same fragmented form, such that the reader may be falsely impressed with the notion that the work is more finished than it truly is. Because surely there is much worthy of publication in this book, the real Wallace on display in all his glorious verbosity and obsessive eye for detail. It has in many ways the depth of his opus "Infinite Jest," which--please note--was qualified by DFW himself as primarily a character study. This is the immense, intimidating strength of all his work. It is establishment of character by accretion of detail, it is coloring the reader's perception, at which he is astonishingly adept.

The problem, though, is that there is little thrust beyond the characters and thoughts themselves. The modifier "unfinished" starts to throw its weight. There is despair, humor, there is passionate intelligence, but there is no impetus to push the reader along as in his previous two novels. Like "IJ" it is a staggering Jenga tower of ideas and impressions. Unlike "IJ", it is always just short of coherence.

I posit that the label of a novel is in this case even slightly misleading. Read as a series of stories, this is an immensely fulfilling and thought-provoking book at times. The problem is that there's too much structure for simply a series of shorts, and not enough for a coherent novel. Whether there was ever meant to be a plot is rather a different question.

In all of his writing Wallace sought communication with the reader, and one can spot certain author-mouthpiece characters in each of his works. Communication, relation, the exchange of ideas, this was his primary goal. There are certain things, about boredom and the human condition and the relation of each to the other, he was indisputably getting across to the reader, however disjointed, and in this respect the work is a success.

THE RUB:

Do not expect this novel to be a novel. Expect an amorphous romp through the mind of a solitary man. It will raise your awareness of things you'd never imagined. Enjoy the writing for what it is. Extract what you can. Think about it, and think about yourself thinking about it. The book after all is meant to be a reflection of humanity.

This is a book worth reading. But because it is not a completed work (and the editor is very upfront about this) it does not make as much of an impact as Mr. Wallace's other works. The writing is funny and descriptive. As is to be expected from Mr. Wallace. There were several themes going on at the same time, the modernization/computerization of the IRS versus the giant rows of human drones checking returns, the staffing of on IRS center with a collection of weirdos and mutants at the direction of an IRS wizard, the human mind dealing with rote work, just to name a few.

In my reading of the book only the author's major theme dealing with an explaination of boredom fully comes to frutition. The rest were still being flushed out when the material was collected. I still had fun reading the book, and the author is a tremendous writer that has the ability to write on just about any subject well.

Not bad in spots, but the novel is unfinished. One can look at the novel as a reflection of Wallace's bipolar disorder when one notices the variation of the length of the chapter (from one page to 100 pages).

I just finished reading The Pale King. And although it has nuggets of Wallace's genius scattered throughout its 538 pages, it will disappoint fans expecting another Infinite Jest.

The book is obviously incomplete and overwrought with tedious and wholly uninteresting sections that usually go absolutely no where.

There is much that's left up to the reader to figure out and piece together; and when you do, it's usually of little consequence. Nonetheless, I enjoyed some of the extraneous bits of information, so it wasn't that bad. At times, however, the only thing that kept me engaged was the hope that all the tedium would lead somewhere (like it did in Jest), but it usually didn't.

When I reached the last few chapters of the book and realized nothing was really going to "happen" of great circumstance, I was pissed a little but finished the book anyway, hoping to be proven wrong - didn't happen.

I checked this one out from the library; I suggest you do the same.

Ever struggle with tedium? Who hasn't? Did you know the word "boring" did not exist in the English language until the advent of the Machine Age? I did not, until this fact was revealed in the course of experiencing David Foster Wallace's final epic, The Pale King. This labor of love, painstakingly brought to life by the author's long-time editor Michael Pietsch when the work was left unfinished after Wallace's suicide in 2008, reveals the infinity underneath boredom. Wallace removes the lid from the gaping void that is always right there for those who dare to look. Clearly, he spent a lot of time looking down that hole, for better or for worse.

Wallace has the gift of being able to stop time. He dives deep down in a headfirst rush into a single moment, peeling back the layers of thought, memory, feeling, experience, sensation, and circumstance that overlay every simple act, until they all stand exposed and elucidated. Then, just as quickly, he yanks you back up to the surface, back to the mundane and ordinary, back to the normal, back to the squeak of the wheel in the document collector's cart in the IRS processing center where much of the "action" in the Pale King takes place. Sometimes you feel like a fish gasping for water in the naked sunlight. Sometimes you feel as though you've been given some tremendous gift, a gem of insight that will sustain you and nourish you for years.

The IRS? As subject matter for a novel? I cannot imagine anyone else who could pull this off. While the book is understandably ragged in many ways, Pietsch has made it hold together so that the undeniable voice of David Foster Wallace comes through loud and clear. The audiobook's narration is handled masterfully by Robert Petkoff. He lives inside the 200-word sentences, the parenthetical asides, the footnotes, and the flights of language that are Wallace's trademarks, making them real, accessible, and meaningful.

David Foster Wallace lives.

The Pale King

I never thought I'd finish a hefty novel about the IRS in three sittings. Unfinished as it is, I enjoyed most of this and closed it disappointed by its unfulfilled promise. I've read (and reviewed on the store years ago) his essay collection "Consider the Lobster," and like "A Supposedly...." his essays were my way into Wallace's formidable work. However, unlike most readers of this last novel, I haven't navigated the depths, annotated and intricate, of his fiction. So, I came to this story curiously, to see if it'd sustain itself in its recovered and necessarily incomplete state.

With no knowledge of accounting and little of taxes, I learned a lot about both. Wallace includes plenty of expository detail in a deft manner, difficult when it's discussed (as is mentioned in a telling footnote) by characters who deal with its minutiae every boring day. The parking lot at the Peoria center, the confusion of the two David Wallaces in the bureaucratic snafu, and the Midwestern sunrise that comes like a light switched on with ten degrees increase at once: such scenes enliven the plot.

Two characters stand out, signs of how the novel if completed might have succeeded if they had been allowed to develop more. Toni Ware's coming of age in a trailer-park hell, told in a faintly archaic, British style of prose, sears. Likewise, Leonard Stecyk's cringeworthy do-goodism early on segues into a dramatic voc-ed scene which the author handles masterfully to enrich this difficult character. Wallace does not flinch from the challenges of constructing the novel, and his notes let us in on the process in a less-preening, more informative manner than post-modern authors often assume.

I transcribe a few passages that reveal the potential novel of ideas that underlies the storyline of many characters and different perspectives. The story is surprisingly coherent in its assemblage, and the brief notes Wallace left about the shape of its foreshortened arc shows the control he had over it.

Chapter 19 is masterful as it maps out, with Glendenning as the titular figure involved in a three-way conversation about the transition of the IRS from an ethical purpose--to run the country fairly by requiring all to contribute their fair share--to a profitable entity which seeks to maximize revenue by monitoring with newfangled (as of circa 1984) technology designed to minimize human and maximize computer scrutiny of "noncompliant" returns from those audited who will pay more in penalties to please a Reagan-era shift in tax laws and loopholes and income and power-shifting.

"'Sometimes what's important is dull. Sometimes it's work. Sometimes the important things aren't works of art for your entertainment.'" (138) This speaks for the novel's serious intentions.

A few pages later, in a prescient passage worthy of far more quoting, this key chapter predicts what not only Bush-Reagan represents for our current state of the nation no matter who's in charge. For, we elect "a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless humanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We'll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very 'election' depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter [b---s---]. A rule of image, which because it's so empty it makes one terrified--they're small and going to die, after all--'" (149)

Further on, "Wallace" wonders whether "real memory is fragmentary; I think it's also that overall relevance and meaning are conceptual, while the experiential bits that get locked down and are easiest, years later, to retrieve tend to be sensory. We live in bodies, after all." (289) Wallace evokes the predicament of entrapment in an office, a job, a routine that snags many of us, and his own vision darkens, as does that of a nation as it shifts, mid-1980s, from producing to consuming things. What comforts or torments some, as in Toni and Leonard and the narrative Wallace's cases, are memories.

While being "immune to boredom" is an essential condition for one's success in a bureaucracy (and the happy hour conversation between Meredith Bond and Shane Drinion wears on me as it did on them), and while a bureaucracy famously represents a daily challenge in representing these states of mind and body and spirit for many of us "TPs," Wallace keeps the humanity in the dialogue and monologue. He means to plunge into reality at (near-)modern work, and few novels dare to do this well. He does not opt for mockery, but a more nuanced, reflective humor that leavens the serious message. Immersion in the moment, suspended like the massive clock's hand, symbolizes our response to our choice or our fate.

(P.S. One persistent if minor mistake if I may mention it, given the draft state: Jesuits do not staff the Catholic university of DePaul, which by its name derives from St. Vincent, and it was founded by Vincentian priests.)

All night passionate, sweaty, profound in moments, and then anxious in others, and then overwhelming again, and then boring for a bit. But you keep keep keep going because you're already so involved and the night isn't over, and you're in (capital L) love.

And when the morning (mourning) finally comes, there's a feeling that stays with you, lingers there, like the way you felt as a child after playing in the ocean all day.

I can almost hear David Foster Wallace's laughter from the afterlife when he learns that his unfinished novel, The Pale King, turned out to be his most accessible and popular work when it was edited and published posthumously. This almost six-hundred-page novel makes boredom funny. Set at an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois, the characters made me laugh out loud and their boring work and lives becomes fodder for Wallace's careful choice of words and presentation of life in all its richness. Readers who can tolerate odd structure will be rewarded with a rich reading experience and lots of laughter.

Rating: Three-star (Recommended)

Wallace has been a biggest between the actual authors in Usa and in the world. He represents here the society of employe, with an hard routine and a strong stress. But so the employe doesn't be more an hero of our life, but he lives his functions in a Luhmanian context, avoiding the questions about the sense of his work. The descriptions of Wallace have something of scientiphic, but also particularly of mathematics. It's strong as Wallace find in the mathematics not only the arguments, but also the style, for sustaining his propositions. It's probably a cold way for describing the actual society, but it's truly efficient.

My personal adoration for David Foster Wallace is great, as in very large. Reading his voice and hearing his thoughts was like beholding a message from beyond the grave, as my title suggests. His genious was a terrible thing for this world to loose. I love the fact that his editor included his notes regarding his ideas for this piece of work. Although it may have been unfinished, it is never-the-less quite loaded with the stuff many of us love him for. My favorite parts are in this order: the part where he addresses the reader directly was especially wonderful. It is from this portion in particular that I felt I was hearing his voice from beyond the grave. It was as if he was there in the room, speaking to me. The other part I loved was the part where he describes a substitute teacher in a accounting class he has accidentally attended. The lecture imparted is profound and speaks directly to the world we now find ourselves in, filled as it is with cells phones, i-phones, video games, in-car TV as well as DVD players, etc...I believe that we as a people are loosing the development center of our creativity, the human imagination. Where else can boredom take us but there? I put my heart-felt thanks out to the universe for allowing DFW to live among us mortals for the time that he did. I also offer my sincere gratitude to his editor for publishing his final work posthumously, with her apologies to him for doing so. I believe he has forgiven us all. Beloved brilliant thinker and writer, he was indeed a "once-in-a-lifetime talent," and we may never know his like again. For this reason I am doubly grateful to have had the opportunity to read his final contribution to the literary canon. When I say "read this book," I mean run, don't walk, to get it in your hands!! Thanks for reading my review. Enjoy The Pale King.

This book reminds me of the story of the King's clothes, when he had
none. I tried to read this book (I'm an avid reader of all types
of literature) and quite frankly I didn't like it at all. It is very hard
to read. How books like this get the type of reviews this one got is beyond me.

I can see why there was no award this year for this type of literature.

Don't buy this book unless you like the lemmings approach to life. It has
no redeeming qualities.

Much has been written about The Pale King, the work-in-process David Foster Wallace left behind when he died, and all but a handful of critics have agreed that it was worth the editorial effort to shape the manuscript and let the unfinished novel stand on its own. Clearly there is something in it for everybody, regardless of one's literary allergy, for The Pale King shows DFW in rare form.

Wallace doesn't try the reader's patience quite so much as he did in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Infinite Jest. While the passages vary in length, I found the longer chapters to be the funniest and most enjoyable. Chapter 22, for example, is a near 100 pages of hilariously accurate depictions of what it felt like to live in the awkward era of Carter and Reagan, when the flared liberalism of the 60s gave way to the prim conservatism of the 80s.

The transition was weird, and Wallace nails it in Chapter 24 with a group of employees en route to their new office complex. A young David Wallace rides in a Gremlin. It's either yellow or orange, he can't remember, with a "high-powered whip antenna" and air conditioning too weak to cool its three backseat passengers. (That's three in back and two in front, making five men in a Gremlin.) The air inside the car is stifling and Wallace, wearing a 70s hallmark corduroy suit and vest, starts to cook. It doesn't help that he has a "very very bad" complexion and that the fellow next to him, Cusk, sweats so much he's soaked him half through. The short drive takes forever. There is interminable traffic, construction and confusion in this long, qualmish farewell to the 70s.

The Pale King may be short on plot, but it's long on characterization. Throughout the book we're given the pieces to a puzzle of "sheer podular confusion." They are the grotesque characters of a generation of (late) Baby Boom bureaucrats in the making. Sylvanshine, Stecyk, Cusk, Dean, Wallace and Wallace are among the peculiar men who venture downstate to gather in perhaps the most rigid environment known to Americans: the I.R.S. Its dry presentations, "disorientations" and rote work bring not only boredom and dread but two comical phantoms named Garrity and Blumquist. When Lane A Dean Jr. gets spooked: "Unbidden came ways to kill himself with Jell-O."

Credit Michael Pietsch for bringing it out, for the inventory of what became The Pale King consisted of raw materials (sketches and notes), work-in-process (drafts), and finished goods (chapters). It may read like a collection of related stories, but as a novel it's no more slapdash than the John Dos Passos U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money (Library of America). It demonstrates a similar technique, however fictional. Wallace uses stream of consciousness and makes chapters out of newspaper clippings (IRS worker dead four days), biography, autobiography (two David Wallaces), Q and A, and other odds and ends.

This is a classic.

Wallace established himself with his second novel, Infinite Jest, in 1996 before his death 12 years later. The Pale King was unfinished but had many notes in the margins about where it was going and how, so that the reader almost gets to see how the writing process works especially on the big issues: values and the meaning of life from the perspective of an IRS examiner.

. . . and so too may be this book, for some of you. It will not appeal even to all of David Foster Wallace's fans. You should give it a try, though.

I'm halfway through The Pale King as I write this, so keep that context in mind as you read (or not) what follows.

The three-star rating seems most appropriate to me: As Michael Pietsch's Introduction makes clear, what we have here is NOT Wallace's final intention for The Pale King, but Pietsch's version of that intention. That doesn't mean, though, that we shouldn't have this. While it may be unfinished in and of itself, I think that it clearly reflects Wallace's larger concerns in the latter years of his life--both life-affirming ones and, yes, darker ones as well.

(Something else you might want to keep in mind, by the way, is that I think it's a mistake to read The Pale King only or primarily as an indirect suicide note.)

The review proper is here: The version of The Pale King that we have takes us into a place most of us loathe, into the minds of the people who work there (whom most of us would probably regard as at least unpleasant), recreates (deliberately, through its prose style) the tedium of that place, and reveals its workers as, sure, flawed human beings (but who among us is not?) yet strangely drawn to (and more or less good at) the work that loathsome place requires of them. He locates their humanity, in other words. We may not want to hang out with some (most?) of them, but we end up acknowledging and maybe even respecting them as we say, yes, I'm glad it's not me, but someone has to do this work. But then again, that is the notion of Service in a nutshell. I'd argue that that's not just thought-provoking but ultimately life-affirming. At its best, literature should get us to really think about ourselves and others, to the point that, in Harold Bloom's formulation, it should make the world look strange. The Pale King is not a great novel, but I'd argue that it does that work, at least for me.

What follows is some commentary on how I think this fits with Wallace's prior work.

Systems (most of them) are not evil, but they ARE necessary, whether or not we like that fact (or them). The ones that really matter, such as the IRS (in The Pale King), or entertainment culture (see Infinite Jest) are meant to serve some need we have (and yes, amusement, in the case of entertainment, is a need). I think, early on, Wallace feared Systems, like all good, thoughtful young people (and postmodernists) do, as infringements on Freedom: Beneath the hysterically-funny surface of his 100-page essay on a week-long cruise, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (absolutely essential reading, by the way), there's a serious question lurking: Do we REALLY want to submit ourselves to a System whose sole purpose is make sure we have no needs (or desires, for that matter) unmet whatsoever, often without even asking or being asked whether we have needs? His meditation on the cruise's promotional material's recurring word "pamper" is a case in point--the only other time when all of us now alive had absolutely all our needs met automatically and without our thinking about it was when we were in the womb; and while being in utero is certainly a version of the human condition, is it, finally, the most fulfilling version we know or can imagine?

The usual postmodern move is to make the case that, if a System wrongs us, those who maintain that System are also monsters, and those of us who participate in it must be, ipso facto, unthinking dupes or sheep. But in his Kenyon College commencement address (also essential reading) and, I think, in The Pale King, Wallace proposes something subtler: these Systems exist, and work at their best, when they serve not just their maintainers but their participants--however imperfectly, all benefit when the System works. It's our responsibility to be just as attentive when the System works as it should as when it doesn't--or, in the case of the IRS, to think about our relation to it and about the people employed by it at times other than tax season. To deny or not actively consider other people's humanity in favor of our own is, for Wallace, at least a social sin, if not something more metaphysical.

In his close, thoughtful attention even (and especially) to the ordinary, mundane things and people of the world he comes into contact with and finding something special, even revelatory, in them, Wallace resembles no one so much as he does Thoreau in Walden. Like Thoreau in his call that we live deliberately before, at our death, realizing that we had not lived, Wallace at his best is the writer-as-public-servant, and I think that as he approached middle age he was finding his voice in that role. THAT is the loss I feel most deeply as I think about his death: in more ways than one, his work was unfinished.

Wallace is so observant about the holey bridge between what people want and what they do--or maybe between what they think they want and the corrections the body offers to that self-delusion--that it hardly matters if this is a complete novel or not. Impossible to tear yourself away. As usual he's capable of a vast array of styles, to go with the characters and the way they think: an almost Faulkneresque King Jamesian incantation for the unchangeable, a sort of Joyce on the prairie, then the thing he's best known for: the stiff, hyperdetailed anatomizing of a gesture, an impulse, an itch--you name it. I wish someone could explain to me this particular death by detail method. I feel there's something very rich about it--that it isn't just a ventriloquizing of the hopelessly emotionally repressed aspergeresque factoiding human that Wallace probably identified with in part. I think he's trying also to convey how all we have is this body of evidence: the closest we can come to our self is from the outside: these endless catalogues where the leading and the misleading are mixed up together. The IRS, the long detailed forms by which a life is held to account, is an apt analogy.

Thoughts?

while Infinite Jest i didn't feel reprised ideas from The Broom Of The System, this novel does seem to reprise ideas from both. it is mostly made up of characters individual backstories. the thread linking them is that they all work for the IRS. in light of his last fiction release Oblivion i am surprised at how much this book really does hearken back to his earliest work in The Broom Of the System (specicially Meredith Rand's narrative voice being almost exactly that of TBOTS's Lenore Beadsman) showing wallace at his most raymond carver, with the depressive catch 22 scenarios.
two sections of particular substance: the 'wastoid' who, after his father's death, puts more stock in his 'no nonsense' values and pursues a career in accounting (pg 154-252). meredith's narration of how she met her husband and wound up in her unhappy marriage, including ruminations of the catch 22 curse of prettiness already done in Infinite Jest, which doesn't touch on how she chose her career (pg 444-509).
the central 'conspiracy' plotline that loosely ties everything together (like that surrounding 'the entertainment' in Infinite Jest) seems like it might revolve around one of the district managers whose unit's throughput of examinations is suspiciously identical to the national average down to 2 decimal points. it seems like the machinations and rivalry of the higher ranking men was to become the 'plot' of the novel but Wallace hadn't decided what the ultimate matter of conflict was going to be.
other character backstories: the christian who wanted his gf to get an abortion, the guy with the sweating problem exaccerbated by his anxiety about sweating (the catch 22 thing again), the new recruit who explains the layout and logistics of the main building and parking lots in painstakingly repetitive detail, a part about a stoicly sinister talking baby which was pretty much like oh ok it's stewie from family guy?, a more established agent who gets psychic visions of mostly useless trivia about everyone he meets (a fact psychic, also known as a data mystic, and the syndrome itself as RFI, Random Fact Intuition) but doesn't do anything interesting with, a discussion about the value of civics, a section about the ghosts and phantoms that haunt the examination offices and the difference between the two.

from the endnotes:
"Embryonic outline:
2 broad arcs
1. Paying attention, boredom, ADD, Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs
2. Being individual vs. being part of larger things -- paying taxes, being "lone gun" in IRS vs team player."

- quotes from the rest of the book
"The ultimate point is the question whether humans or machines can do exams better, can maximize efficiency in spotting which returns might need auditing and will produce revenue."
-
"routine, reptition, 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."
-
"we would have to try to practically memorize the entire 82,617-word Procedural Rules manual... as a type of diagnostic tool for seeing who could sit there hour after hour and apply themselves to it versus who couldn't"
-
"Layne Dean summoned all his will and bore down and did three returns in a row, and began imagining different high places to jump off of. He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops"
-
"It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish"

i don't think everything he did was perfect but i do think he was the most creative and realistic fiction writer with the most incisive eye for detail of his generation. the most nicheless standalone writer in the contemporary landscape. driven in equal measure by the sometimes conflicting motives of brutal honesty and a fear of taking himself too seriously. i know no other writer who can so consistently kick my brain into a higher gear.

It may not be the embodiment of authorial intent, but "The Pale King" unmistakably conveys Wallace's unique voice and signature themes. Yes, it is incomplete. It is also a kick to read. Even though it tends to ramble on from time to time, there are plenty of great - even profound - vignettes.

My first experience with DFW was his collection of essays, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, and that was fantastic. This one was, well, perfect for what it was meant to be. Each chapter is almost a seperate entity, merging at times with other story lines, but more or less taking little snapshots of life. The setting at the IRS is interesting too, and I suppose that there is a brilliance underneath it all, but that brilliance is a little hard to see for much of the book. You can certainly tell that this book was grossly unfinished, and it causes a bit of distraction throughout. If you are new to DFW, I would maybe start with one of his earlier works.

The Pale King is, as you most likely have surmised already, an unfinished novel painstakingly pieced together by the indefatigable Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown & Co. In the foreward, Pietsch warns us that only the first 10 chapters were finished by DFW whereas the remainder was set in stacks of notes but, clearly, not finished. You can tell.
You can tell the way when paved road gives way to gravel when driving. It's clearly a different feel to the book -- not just the occasional strange repetition of unusual adjectives, or repetition of some paragraphs like a surrealist madlib. I expected unpolished and what I got was static.

I read the book on winter trip out to Nebraska eager to embrace the static monotone of an IRS processing center in Peoria, IL in the greyness of a Nebraska Winter. There is a certain beauty to the hyperintense focus on the same mundane details. The 'tornadic' storyline is well done and only intelligible at about 1/3rd of the way through (so keep reading if you're reading this in frustration after the first 200 pages). But the book doesn't fulfill. It feels void, dull, and meaningless in the annoying post-modern way that a lot of concept art feels. I especially disliked (spoiler?) the insertion of DFW cheekily inserting himself into the book -- arguing the book isn't really quite fiction. Other reviews have cited this as an element of 'intrigue'. I agree with DFW who notes he normally hates this type of element and, for me, the insertion of DFW into his own book was entertaining at the same time as feeling weak, empty, meaningless, dull, and void. Again.

The book aimed to give the appearance of coming to some culminating moment but fail to deliver, and it does that exactly. It fails to deliver.

No idea how to review a book like this. There's a temptation to talk intelligently as possible when doing such a thing, which I'll try refrain from. Should you read this? Most importantly, consider whether you're a fan of DFW, and if so, how much of one. I had read Infinite Jest in college (and understood maybe half of it), and enjoyed his essays in Consider the Lobster. This though, is the most I've understood and enjoyed anything he'd written. I can't get it out of my head. My sleep has been affected because of it. It's hilarious at points, eerily insightful at others, and beautiful all throughout. My favorite chapters: 19, 22, 33, 36, 39, 46 and 49. I won't be the same.

How many authors can write novels that get their readers so excited that they, the readers, can't even finish them, the novels, before being drawn to the store to write glowing reviews? Halfway through and I already know it's going to be one of my favorites. I've only felt this way about a handful of other books: Brideshead Revisited, Infinite Jest, Watership Down and maybe Beautiful Swimmers.

The Pale King may be plotless with structure issues and have sentences that Bret Easton Ellis would consider too long, but it's an absolute pleasure to read. David Foster Wallace was a genius. He will be sadly missed.

Astonishing, tedious, fascinating, frustrating,hilarious, and entirely life-like. What Melville did for the mid-nineteenth century whaling industry and the extremes of human existence, Wallace manages to do for the late-twentieth century IRS and its mundanity.

Obviously, this book could easily have 300+ more pages if DFW had not tragically ended his life, so that being said: of course it is unfinished.

To continue, I found that yes, some passages were not completed so you did not know what eventually happened to those characters; although, to what had been finished was well-rounded and beautiful. He captures boredom and sadness perfectly in the humdrum daily life that is the IRS. I especially liked the chapter of dialogue between Shane Drinion and Meredith Rand, it showed his depth of imagination as well as his craft at distantly showing you the setting.

DFW was charming. And so were his words.

Do yourself a favor and purchase this book.

This is a terrible novel by a vastly overrated writer. The Infinite Jest was bad enough and this is much worse. Much too long and never completed It reads like the ramblings of a creative writing graduate. Needless to say I never finished it. Complete waste of time. Extreme tedium.

DFW was obviously one of the most brilliant writers of the last century, or two. Parts of this book are boring (that's the point), but several of the narratives are so funny, and so true, that I've felt obligated to press The Pale King on every smart reader I know.

A Haiku here for David Foster Wallace:

Thirty pages in
it was put back on my shelf
with little regret

Sorry, DFW. I wanted to like it, but it was as if you were being deliberately boring. Or your editor post-mortum was horrific.

Although I admit only being 10% through this tome according to my Kindle, I have to say I appreciate the Pulitzer prize not being awarded, as opposed to that other very famous posthumously awarded prize, The Confederacy of Dunces. At times the book is brilliant, but also too often it drifts into endless and mindless meandering apparently bearing no relation to the thread of the story, the agonisingly tediousness of an IRS official - whether to claim what expenses, etc. and the colleague who had been dead for four days before anyone noticed. I appreciate the mammoth task of the editor, but I wonder how much of those scribbled notes Wallace would have distilled into something more focused into the completed novel, had he completed it. It is clearly a very acute but also disturbed mind that wrote it. I cannot appreciate sentences running into more than a page in length without meaningful punctuation, let alone purpose. But I will persist, and perhaps get back to this forum at the end of the book with an entirely different opinion.

If you strip away the veneer of the plot about the ennui that infests the world of IRS tax employees, you get, what I believe, is another story that Wallace was attempting, the boredom that writers must tolerate when putting one word after another to capture the right tone and rhythm of getting a character to move from a sofa to a door. Only a serious novelist knows how much effort goes into what takes five seconds to read. How else could Wallace have endured the mounds of notes and drafts piling up for almost a decade without finding a way to embrace his own ennui by writing about it? PK is a brilliant rendering of Sartre's 'nausea'. As is, the DFW clone ITCH: A Novel of Luck

ONE sentence was over 523 words; I lost count and didn't want to start over. This book has few redeeming qualities, and I seriously doubt that those praising it, even read the entire thing. Its more about wanting to be a fan than about a good quality book. It just shows that publishers and reviewers are not really looking for quality, they just want to jump on a bandwagon. It is nothing more than disconnected rambling. It has very little coherence and too tediously overdone to be humorous; ridiculous maybe, funny, not by a long shot. Sentences go on forever. Irrelevant thoughts are mixed together without making sense. And most of it is absolutely pointless to the story itself. It felt as if the author was just trying to put down anything that floated into his mind in one continuous, senseless, irrational stream, losing any sense of humor and making it so tiring to read that it becomes painful. It isn't a novel with a theme or plot, its a person's need to write about nothing. He must be laughing at the all the praise from the great beyond, realizing he duped a lot of people to part with their money for no good reason.

I read the front flap and thought, wow, what great subject to make a satirical story. But most of it just rambles off on meaningless, pointless tangents like someone seriously under the influence of drugs. Most the chapters are barely connected and the there is no comprehensive flow. That this book was published as is, makes me want to know why? If he wasn't a professor, with a bunch of degrees, and apparently a fan club, every publisher would have tossed it after the first chapter. I would really love for one of those singing its praises to give me a reason that this horrifying example of writing is good. Its a shame that good books get left behind so people can pretend to be trendy in the face of a ridiculous, poorly executed story. So before you buy it, remember the praise is because of who the writer was, not because the book is worth spending money on -- I for one regret it profoundly.

... of manuscripts that begged for good editing. But never got any.
I don't get the Cult of David Foster Wallace. Sure, the guy could write, but so what? Every interesting or insightful thing he ever had to say seemed to be sandwiched between thousands of words that screamed to be skimmed. Or, preferably, deleted. Which prompted my crack about editing.
As long as I'm at it, though, here's what else I don't get: post-modern this, or whatever-that, and the ongoing compulsion so many contemporary writers seem to have to reinvent writing.
I'd say that as a prerequisite to enrolling in a writer's workshop -- or being allowed to submit a manuscript for publication -- that every wannabe writer should be compelled to read the complete works of, say, Ian McEwan.
Simple, declarative sentences, one after another... judicious, restrained use of adjectives... no need to keep a dictionary at hand to look up seldom used, obscure words... little head scratching as to what writer he may be trying to pay homage to... and by the time one is finished reading one of his books, one goes, "Wow! Now that person can really write!"
Anything other than that, I contend, is just trying too hard to be clever or innovative. Which was, I'd say, too often the case with David Foster Wallace. Either that, or he thought that every word of his that hit paper was really something and worth a place between book covers (as, it seems, did his editor, Michael Pietsch).
In any case, I will also say this about Mr. Wallace: I forget which book it was in (maybe it was this one), but those few pages he wrote about the insufferable kid everyone wanted to strangle constituted about the funniest thing I ever read. So I do admit that he had a great gift. Unfortunately, though, a gift that was never brought into focus, and, sadly, wasted.

I'll start off by saying that I'm not really a fan of Wallace, though I think he was an interesting stylist and had an anti-commercial point of view that satisfied many. I simply can't bring myself around to reconciling with his many excesses.

But to the book...this can in no way be considered a novel. It is an assemblage of writings, some of which make sense in context and some stuff that just seems to be random. Take Chapter 20...a 100 page chapter full of extraneous material that should have been cut or severely edited. The also long Meredith Rand chapter is seriously as empty and banal as anything I have ever read and has no real reason to be. (My apologies to all you "cutters" out there) I would have assumed that this would have been edited extensively as well. There are just so many digressions and ruminations that fill this book that mean nothing at all. Inserting ones self as a major character...odd and a little unsettling. My favorite chapter is actually chapter one...the description of the meadow. The rest of of the book (I now refuse to call it a novel) is just plain dull in a random sort of way.

I understand that the man was having a hard time putting together a new piece of work, and I understand his mental condition (too well, perhaps) but even though I don't really dig him, this is a sad submission and one that I can only think he was probably personally unhappy with. To me it overall reads like someone being lost in ones mind, only rarely finding some path with a beam through the fog.

Sorry, I know many people are going to be disappointed with this, but this is my read. There are many other books out there.

Sorry, but this is one boring book. I read several chapters and then began skimming. There wasn't one character I cared about or any story that I wanted to follow. Yes, he has a way with words but so does a dictionary.

This book should never have been published. It was unfinished when the author died, and should at that point have been left alone. I can't say if Wallace had lived he would have been able to fix this monstrosity. Wallace had immense talent; he also had immense liabilities as a writer. His basic flaw is that he never knew when to shut up. Take Infinite Jest. How much better would it have been if it were 500 pages shorter? If some of the silly self-indulgences had been clipped?

The Pale King is awful. It's boring, empty, tedious in the way pain is tedious. Was it Wallace's idea to write a book about boredom that was boring? How clever is that? This novel is a colossal waste of time. Worse, I got the idea in reading it that the mind behind it was struggling, and not simply with issues related to producing this book. Publishing this book was a sin.

1) The language. DFW is a masterful stylist - agreed

2) The characters. eclectic Sure but love? no way
I dont love pathetic creatures or those that kill themselves after being given such a gift and food.

3) The humor. its there but Repetative.

4) The love of mind. A mind that was sloppy and a stream of consciousness .

I think the DID think he was superior and had to express it over and over.

I very much wanted to like this book and kept reading on and coming back to it in desperation though the run-on never ending sentences leave you exhausted as a reader. The author has a bit of ADD in describing the environment, it's overwhelming to the plot. Do not buy this book.

Perhaps is was Wallace's idea of a joke to write a book about boredom and make it boring to prove his point. This book sucked. It had parts that were very good, but they were few and far between. If I had to recommend readers about this book, I would say read something else of his rather than this book.

Just got me pre-order copy, and I'm extremely excited about the fact that we've got FOOTNOTES this time rather than ENDNOTES. Presentation is beautiful over all, I'll post more info. when I've read some more.

One wonders whether this is what DFW would have wanted; maybe it's exactly what he would have wanted, and maybe he decided this was it, this was the most he could do and wanted to be remembered for; how would I know? Then, I wonder, if it isn't the very act of detaching so much so that one becomes so detached that they realize they are unable to re-attach the soul that has been so much so detached and one wonders if there is any hope at all in finding something soulful after one has taken apart humanity in such a way that all the minute perishable and perfectly designed portions have been dissected and upon such act of dissecting how can one turn away from it all and detach from the detaching? Just a random passing thought.

After about the middle section, I had to put this book down for the time being and may or may not come back to it; because, it caused me such great sadness! and I related to far too much of it, and found myself wondering, how I personally would be able to detach from such a tremendous work of such great sadness.

*reading this book reminded me of why I never completed Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, Oblivion, and Infinite Jest(though in truth, I tried with this one but the constant mind numbing return again return again to the tennis player's pot smoking weekends, and his precision in preparing for one such weekend, when drugs, any and all substances are such a major turn off for me revolting actually, and then over and over again with the movie, and and I get it already, people are dying from watching television, but still I tried, because I admire the scope of writing, but I just couldn't and didn't want to), and then I made the mistake of turning to the picture on the back flap which just does what the actual book cannot do and that is to convey the terrible sadness that DFW must have, of course, he obviously was wrestling with and the sadness in the eyes is unmistakable and still, even then after a good bit of sadness over his death and dying and wondering how someone who had so much and was lauded in so many ways, love, success, mind blowing intelligence, still!, could not get help, and that fact in and of itself is truly earth shattering, but not so much, as one who has felt the intense loneliness and the alienation of being in a place and still, after years and years of trying to fit in; still, not fitting in!-- the utter frustration coupled with pain and yearning. And trying everything just to make thing work. And then the realization that no matter what, one may still always be shunned, one may always end up being completely alone, one may never feel as if they belong. These truly are sad thoughts, indeed.

Until suddenly, one day, it is the land, and only the land that reaches out to take ones hand in the only way that can speak to one such person who has been kicked down and pushed away, and circled and poked and prodded, the land will pull the reader in, just like The Pale King landscape did for this reader and sadly, while I feel a definite kinship with the blandness and the way that loneliness seeps into a soul and follows one down a long and well lit hallway, tax forms and all, the only thing worth turning toward in the end, the only thing that will save oneself is turning towards the land in such a way, that maybe nobody will truly every understand. and maybe that is the tricky, terrible, unsavory truth. I guess, I just don't know. This book made me exceedingly sad, and as I am already exceedingly sad, for sad people, I don't recommend reading it. I truly don't. Not that this doesn't mean DFW isn't one of the greatest writers of our time, because, most definitely and positively, He is! He verily and truly is.