The Pale King – Ellie Detrich

David Foster Wallace. New York, NY: Little, 2011. 548 pp.

David Foster Wallace’s final novel, The Pale King, is an unfinished work, editorially pieced together after Wallace’s suicide in late 2008. Though it cannot be known just how far from finished the work is from what Wallace would have produced, or how much would have been added and excised in from the lengthy novel, the work deserves to be read. David Foster Wallace was known to push experimentation in his writing to the limits. When it comes to reading the work of the late literary genius, you can never project with complete certainty what you are getting yourself into. Known for his trademark use of lengthy, and thereby often comedic footnotes, Wallace constantly convolutes the classic ideas of the rules a piece of writing must conform to. Through his short stories, essays, and novels, Wallace offers the world the presentation of thought in ways that are entirely vanguard, causing outbursts of laughter from the reader in doing so. His experimentation is without explanation, apology, or closure, and—surprisingly—without narcissism. Never afraid to try, David Foster Wallace broke new literary ground throughout his whole life. Though The Pale King will not likely be favored over his previous novel, Infinite Jest, the work falls right in line with Wallace’s other fantastic works. As D.T. Max of The New Yorker notes, “[Wallace] realized that fiction could order experience as well as philosophy could, and also provide some of the same comfort.” Though comfort is not what this work offers, it does cause us to challenge our own thinking, and that, if nothing else, seems like an accomplishment that Wallace was always trying tried to achieve. The book is set primarily in the Midwestern city of Peoria, Illinois, at the droning workplace of several characters: the IRS Regional Examination Center. The novel is intended to function, at least in part, as, “a portrait of a bureaucracy…at a time of enormous internal struggle and soul-searching, the birth-pains of what’s come to be known as the New IRS” (70). If you’re wondering if a novel about the IRS could possibly be entertaining, you’re in for a paradoxical treat. The chapters vary in length and form, some only a short page or so in length, and some causing the reader to wonder what that their contents had to do with the chapter before. Just as the reader adapts to reading an already-peculiar form of one chapter, the following chapter requires a stepping back or reading readjustment to appropriately switch to the next. An example is the extensive stream-of-consciousness narration of the mind of Claude Sylvanshine, a primary character who is a nervous employee of the IRS who constantly and harshly compares himself to a superior colleague. The reader is made to feel that a transcript is being read of literally all incoming information from the man’s limbic system, complete with tedious—and even strenuous—observations to the most minute degree, like those of

the illustrations of an aircraft safety card. Then suddenly, the character’s mind will jump to another observation, followed by a random fact dramatically cut into the text—one that the common reader will have no knowledge or comprehension of, but which Sylvanshine is reviewing in his mind for the nerve-racking CPA exam– and it all reads hilariously. The subsequent chapter might then be nothing more than a list of side effects associated with Examinations postings, from chronic paraplegia to hemorrhoids (87). The novel’s characters, whose oddities are described in comical detail, appear in and out, some never to be heard from again, while most never really do much of, well, anything. This may in fact be the point. The book is a long account of much of the monotony that is, by definition, American life, and thereby results in largely boring passages. Just as the reader begins to allow the eye to glide through the monotonously-long sentences with increasing speed, s/he begins to realize that the text is functioning like what it is describing, by actually having the reader experience the boredom that makes up the whole of many people’s characters’ lives. The dry tedium of everyday life effectively drowns out what could be significant or important in the text, just as the boredom of all that is tax-returns and depreciation schedules drowns out what may be happening with the trillions of dollars acquired annually by the Internal Revenue Service. It’s not a matter of the information being withheld (because the Office of Public Record is accessible by any citizen), but rather that the information is buried in the boring. The Pale King not only causes you to ask yourself why you haven’t much considered the goings on in the IRS, but interrogates the amount of information that is lost or simply unable to be communicated to the larger part of society purely because the subject is boring. Some of the monotonous passages are actually direct quotes from videotaped responses of IRS personnel acquired from their Office of Public Information, information Wallace discloses in an “Author’s Forward” that appears nine chapters into the text (72). The novel is worth the read for this chapter, alone. Here, the narrator introduces himself: “Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona…David Wallace, age forty, SS no. 975-04-2012” (66). Himself a former employee of the Service, in this chapter Wallace reveals much about the reasons behind and intentions for writing the book, where he says that, “What follows is substantially true and accurate… a record of what I saw and heard and did” (69) and that, “The Pale King is basically a nonfiction memoir, with additional elements of reconstructive journalism” (69, 73). Wallace completely undoes what is traditionally “permitted” in a work of fiction, and does so with the wit and intellect, hilarity and sorrow, suave and ambition that defines all of his work. The Pale King is one last go-around with a literary genius who we wish was still with us.

Max, D.T. “David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass Infinite Jest.” The New Yorker, 9 Mar. 2009. Web. 05 Jan. 2012.