“The Pale King is basically a non fiction memoir with additional elements of reconstructive journalism, organisational psychology, elementary civics and tax theory, & c.”
The Pale King is the novel David Foster Wallace was working on when he committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46. It runs to almost 550 pages but is still far from complete although this should not put off prospective readers. After all, Wallace ended his first novel, The Broom of the System mid-sentence and his epic Infinite Jest didn’t so much have a cohesive plot as a sequence of connected ideas and themes – loneliness, addiction, entertainment. Real life, when all’s said and done, doesn’t come in neat, tidy packages.
A manuscript was left on his desk with the obvious intention it would be found after his death and that something would be published posthumously. Editor Michael Pietsch writes that “working on it was the best act of remembrance I was capable of”. It involved the mammoth task of wading through around 3,000 pages of material and Pietsch does not pretend that the published result in any way resembles how the novel might have ended up had Wallace lived.
My impression is that, had Wallace finished it, it would probably have been double the length but by no means any easier to follow.
There is no central character and little you could properly describe as a plot. DFW spoke of the feel he was going for as being “tornadic”, something coming at the reader in a “high speed whirl”. This perhaps fits with his description of Mid-Western life as being “informed and deformed by wind”.
In one of the notes he left with the manuscript, Wallace states that the “Central deal” (i.e, the key themes and objectives) of the novel were : “Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens”. It was once said that Waiting For Godot was a play in which nothing happens, twice. But Beckett’s play has the advantage for the audience of being short, concise and with a minimalist use of language. Bonnie Nadell, Wallace’s long-term literary agent, was correct to describe his writing a ‘maximalist’ and in The Pale King nothing happens continually and at great length. The grinding boredom connected to this inactivity is the ‘central deal’.
Wallace was not someone who believed that big ideas could usefully be summarised or simplified. It was important to mull over the “agglomeration of facts” that makes up society but also to get behind these facts to understand what they signify. The impression I get when reading his work is that his brain is working on so many different levels at once that he finds it impossible to ever be satisfied to one idea. Or rather, he never seems satisfied that what he has written captures exactly what he wants to say. He nags away at what seem like small details as if to find a needle of truth in a huge haystack.
In one extended section of The Pale King, the narrator peppers his description with comments like “I’m not sure I’m explaining this very well”. This constant state of doubt over saying what you mean and meaning what you say is so highly developed in Wallace’s logic-driven mindset that it is little wonder that he suffered from depression.
He writes that “living people do not speak much of the dull” but “sometimes what’s important is dull”. In examining the dullness of existence, his role as a novelist is not so far removed from the work of accountants of the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) who are the protagonists (if that isn’t too dynamic a word) in The Pale King.
The perfect accountant is one with “the ability to maintain concentration under conditions of extreme tedium, complication and absence of comprehensive info” and it is not hard to imagine that this was also Wallace’s assessment of a novelist’s life. Ultimately, if there’s a moral to the convoluted story it is that only certain information is good but that honing the filter that enables us to filter the good from the bad or the truth from the lies is a painful, and often “massively, spectacularly dull”.
I should stress that The Pale King is not a boring novel but it is a novel about this intense level of boredom. Sifting through the mountains of tax returns and information overload is what the tax inspectors do for a living. For Wallace the tax system is a microcosm for society, providing a workable metaphor for coming to terms with the way we live under a deluge of information and operating in a system founded on “greed, politics, power, goodness [and] charity”.
Following the complicated strands of his writing a major challenge. If Wallace is writing about dead, bureaucratic language, the reader is forced to plod through writing in this style. What motivates the reader to stay focused is the sure knowledge that pearls of wisdom, humour and astonishing observational detail lie within.
Related link:
The Howling Fantods! (David Foster Wallace data)
From the age of 17 onwards I have been fascinated by Franz Kafka’s world – both in his fiction and his life as an insurance clerk in Prague. When I first read his novels and short stories I was a frustrated clerk myself, working for the Inland Revenue in London and imagining myself as a struggling writer in my free time.
I’ve never seen 
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