Review by New York Times Review
It seems to me there are two ways of understanding the document assembled from a jumble of boxes, disks and printed or handwritten papers that, at the time of David Foster Wallace's suicide in 2008, ran into the high hundreds of pages - a document that, conscientiously and intelligently whittled down by Wallace's editor Michael Pietsch to 500-odd pages, is now being published under the title "The Pale King," and, just as significantly, the subtitle "An Unfinished Novel." The first is as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale: a grand parable of postindustrial culture or "late capitalism," and an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual who finds himself caught in this system's mesh. The setting that Wallace has chosen as his background (and foreground, and pretty much everything in between) could not be more systematic: the innards of the Internal Revenue Service - the sheer, overwhelming heft of its protocols and procedures. If, as one of Wallace's characters asserts, "the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy," then the I.R.S., "a system composed of many systems," not only represents that world but also furnishes the ultimate stage on which its moral dramas are enacted. In the words of Midwest Regional Examination Center Director DeWitt Glendenning Jr., one of the more shadowy (or pale) presences in this multicharactered and multivoiced book, "The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity." To its own agents and enforcers, the I.R.S. even offers a role and status akin to that of the lone, righteous gunslinger in the Wild West or the caped crusader in Gotham. "Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is," accounting students are informed with evangelical zeal by their instructor. "To retain care and scrupulosity about each detail from within the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency which constitutes real-world accounting - this is heroism." The proposition is comic (one of the novel's would-be heroes practices saying "Freeze! Treasury! " in front of his mirror) but sincere as well: the instructor is a Jesuit priest, and the scene is redacted with a genuinely epiphanic air. In a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true ones out into the light and holding them up for inspection, clear and remainder-less, really is a sacred one. "Gentlemen," the instructor rounds off his sermon by saying, "you are called to account." The problem, as I.R.S. recruits soon discover, is that neither moral nor heroic codes hold true anymore. The bulk of "The Pale King" takes place in the mid-1980s, as the Spademan Initiative is being implemented. Pure invention (as far as I can tell) on Wallace's part, the initiative nonetheless describes an all too recognizable shift in administrative culture, with the supplanting of a public service ethos (tax enforcement is an affirmation of all citizens' duties toward others) by a free-market one: the I.R.S. is a revenue-generating business and, as such, should audit only those returns that promise the highest yield-to-man-hour-spentinvestigating ratio. Post-Spackman, the tax agency is a godless space whose commandments are simply those of the profit motive, and whose driving logic is being automated at an alarming pace thanks to emerging software. "It was frightening," writes David Wallace (a character who shares his name not only with the author but also with another David Wallace at the I.R.S., causing yet further blurring of identities and voices), "like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human." Machines will never feel, of course; nor do they allow for human agency and its offshoots (free will, ethics, compassion, love) to unfold and blossom in their arid data fields. By the time the software's up and running, those high up in the I.R.S. are questioning the very need for humans to administer its programs at all. Thus, by backtracking to the "Flintstonianly remote" era of mainframe computers, tape-and-card-based data storage and so on, Wallace identifies a watershed moment, a kind of base layer in the archaeology of the present - rather like Thomas Pynchon tracing the origins of the 1970s to 1945 in "Gravity's Rainbow." There's a lot of Pynchon in "The Pale King," in fact: the I.R.S.'s deployment of agents gifted with psychic powers, its harnessing of the occult for political ends, surely owe something to the White Visitation research facility in "Gravity's Rainbow." That ghosts roam the audit booths surprises none of Wallace's characters; they even sit through lectures on the etymology of the word "boredom" given by spirits whose voices slip into and out of audibility against the Examination Center's monotonous background hum. Like Wallace's breakthrough novel, "Infinite Jest," "The Pale King" is pervaded by an air of melancholia, an acute sense of loss. Nostalgic images of childhood lakes and ponds, since algaed or cemented over, crop up repeatedly. There's a dead father, who, like James Incandenza in "Infinite Jest," met a baroque end before the novel's outset (dragged to his death along a subway platform through a jumble of Christmas shopping bags, the clutter and paraphernalia of consumerism). There's lingering teenage depression everywhere. Wallace could be called an "adolescent" writer: one whose characters, like the worlds they inhabit, find themselves in states of transition, prone to all the awkwardness this entails. David Wallace (the character) is cursed with awful acne; another figure has a propensity to sweat profusely. I don't use the term pejoratively here - far from it: adolescence is about being trapped in bodies, in between, half-formed. It's Gregor Samsa's state. And then, perhaps, there's a MacGuffin, peeping through this networked novel like James Incandenza's lethally seductive film through "Infinite Jest." Agent Chris Fogle, it is rumored, has concocted an algorithm that bequeaths to those who intone it a state of pure, impenetrable concentration - and the I.R.S.'s chiefs, for obvious reasons, want to prize this from him. But the formula, rather than accelerating the system's ends, might instead allow the semi-enslaved worker to slip his shackles even as he dons them, to achieve a kind of mystical, if beleaguered, enlightenment. The novel's final image sends us back to a 19th-century factory, in which a woman counting loops of twine is shown enjoying Zen-like immersion in her task. A transcendent ergonomics of the assembly line is, perhaps, the best that we can hope for, Wallace seems to conclude. I say "perhaps" and "seems" because a good portion of this framework comes in the final "Notes and Asides" section tacked onto the main, patently partial manuscript. Which brings me to the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward - properly and rigorously forward - in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents "the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world's constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info." He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also "called to account." It's hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer - nor, given Wallace's untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide. Lost childhood pools, by this reading, would constitute a kind of pastoral mode cached (or trashed) within the postmodern "systems" novel - which, in turn, is what the systems-within-systems I.R.S. really stands for. The issues of emotion and agency remain central, but are incorporated into a larger argument about the possibility or otherwise of these things within contemporary fiction. The datapsychic character Sylvanshine can glean trivia about anyone simply by looking at him, but is "weak or defective in the area of will." Nor, due to endless digressions, can he complete anything. No one can; in "The Pale King," nothing ever fully happens. That this is to a large extent a metaphor (for the novel in general, or this novel in particular) becomes glaringly obvious when we hear one unnamed character describe the play he's writing, in which a character sits at a desk, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something - what that "something" is, though, the play's author hasn't worked out yet. WALLACE'S own father was - and is - very much alive. He's a professor of philosophy, the discipline that almost became Wallace's own (a breakdown shortly after embarking on his graduate career at Harvard led to the son's pursuing fiction instead). Where James Wallace wrote about Kant and Plato, David found himself drawn to analytical philosophy, once chuckling in an interview about his father's dismissal of mathematical logic and semantics as "gibberish." Now, as a kind of tie-in to "The Pale King," Columbia University Press has published the younger Wallace's undergraduate thesis on Richard Taylor.'a semantician par excellence. I have to say, I'm with Dad here: the world of analytical philosophy appears to me as so much bean-counting - or, rather, enumeration of the ways in which beans might be counted. Literary types tend to be drawn more to the poetic visions of a Heidegger or a Blanchot than to the logical conundrums of a Russell or an Ayer. What is interesting, though, is to see what Wallace does with (or to) this clinical arena. Taylor caused some consternation in the 1960s when he published his essay "Fatalism," in which he asserts that a naval captain, faced with the option of engaging or not engaging in a sea battle, cannot actually choose to do other than he will have done tomorrow, given that a state of affairs already exists whereby tomorrow it will be incontrovertibly true that yesterday he - you get the picture. That the assertion is ridiculous isn't the issue: what troubled Taylor's peers was that its logic is sound - a logic that, as Wallace writes, "does violence to some of our most basic intuitions about human freedom." The precocious future novelist sets about dismantling that logic by showing that Taylor has assumed a single-lined, inevitable flow from past to future - whereas, even considered logically, each point in this progression in fact splits, along the lines of possibility, into divergent strands. He draws them; and Io and behold, we have a web, a network - yet, crucially, one that allows for human agency again. It is, as James Ryerson, an editor at The New York Times, points out in his introduction, "a moral victory." Elsewhere in his essay, Ryerson characterizes Wallace as having resisted a "theoretical paradigm" of modernism. In fact, Wallace's writing is haunted by modernism's (very plural) legacy. One of the nicknames for the David Wallace character in "The Pale King" is "the young man carbuncular," a moniker straight from Eliot's "Waste Land." Kafka's "Castle" is explicitly invoked; and so, implicitly by the unfinished clerk-at-desk play, is the entirety of Beckett's drama. But there's an older ghost haunting "The Pale King" even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville's Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying - or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.'s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America's greatest writer, the author of "Moby-Dick," spent his final 19 years as a customs officer - that is, a tax inspector. To research "The Pale King," Wallace trained in accounting. We're moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad - and the battle is the right one to engage in. In the I.R.S., a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true ones out into the light really is a sacred one. Tom McCarthy's most recent novel, "C," was published last year.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 24, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The overture to Wallace's unfinished last novel is a rhapsodic evocation of the subtle vibrancy of the midwestern landscape, a flat, wind-scoured place of potentially numbing sameness that is, instead, rife with complex drama. The Pale King is a feverishly encompassing, sharply comedic, and haunting work painstakingly assembled out of pieces rough and polished by Wallace's longtime editor, Michael Pietsch. Inevitably Wallace's long struggle with depression and 2008 suicide frame this churning tale of afflicted misfits who are drawn by some peculiar cosmic force to grimly regimented jobs at an Internal Revenue Service center in Peoria, Illinois. Yet this is not a novel of defeat but, rather, of oddly heroic persistence. Hypersensitive Claude Sylvanshine suffers from Random-Fact Intuition and fears that he's hard-wired for failure. Chris Fogle, who natters on in a stoner's stream of unnecessary detail, braves a record-breaking Chicago blizzard to get to an IRS recruitment office after witnessing his father's horrific death. Toni, who does not survive trailer-park violence unscathed, finds shelter in the rigidity of IRS work. Wallace fans won't be surprised when newbie David Wallace, carrying the stigmata of severe acne, not only becomes mired i. bureaucratic idioc. when he's mistaken for a senior examiner with the same name but also claims to be the author of thi. true and accurat. record. The real Wallace would have substantially revised this zealously researched, keenly internalized, tornadic novel. But the salvaged version is electrifying in its portrayal of individuals seeking unlikely refuge in a vast, absurd bureaucracy. In the spirit of Borges, Gaddis, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), Wallace conducts a commanding and ingenious inquiry into monumental boredom, sorrow, the deception of appearances, and the redeeming if elusive truth that any endeavor, however tedious, however impossible, can become a conduit to enlightenment, or at least a way station in a world wher. everything is on fire, slow fire. --Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A pile of sketches, minor developments, preludes to events that never happen (or only happen in passing, off the page), and get-to-know-your-characters background info that would have been condensed or chopped had Wallace lived to finish it, this isn't the era-defining monumental work we've all been waiting for since Infinite Jest altered the landscape of American fiction. (To be fair, how many of those sorts of books can one person be expected to write?) It is, however, one hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace, being, as it is, a transfixing and hyper-literate descent into relentless, inescapable despair and soul-negating boredom. --The story ostensibly follows several recruits as they arrive at an IRS processing center in Peoria, Ill., in May 1985. Among them is David Foster Wallace, 20 years old and suffering "severe/disfiguring" acne. Everyone he encounters at the Peoria REC (Regional Examination Center; Wallace elevates acronyms and bureaucratic triple-speak to an art) is a grotesque: socially maladjusted, fantasizing of death (a training officer keeps a gun in her purse and "has promised herself a bullet in the roof of her mouth after her 1,500th training presentation"), and possessors of traumatic backstories. One recruit watches his father's death by subway car; another survives an adolescence of sustained and varied sexual abuse only to witness her mother's murder; another sweats constantly and so heavily that he dampens those unfortunate enough to be near him. These are the recruits training to become "wigglers," low-level IRS drones who crank out rote tax return reviews at Tingle tables (no etymology given) in the regional IRS office, calculating return-on-investment for potential audits and resigning themselves to a lifetime of tedium in an office where time is ticked off in fiscal quarters. They are only slightly aware of one another and exist as cameos outside of their own chapters. Meanwhile, a nebulous and menacing bureaucratic intrigue is afoot with the arrival of "fact psychic" Claude Sylvanshine, who is in Peoria to do advance work and intelligence gathering for his boss, Merle Lehrl, "an administrator of administrators" and dark puppet-master figure.--That's the structure. Wedged in are snapshots, character sketches, and anecdotes. There's a bombing at another IRS office, a mass poisoning, the specter of culture shift in the form of the "Spackman Initiative," a messy bureaucratic hangover spurred by a backlog-induced meltdown at another IRS office.--Stretches of this are nothing short of sublime-the first two chapters are a real put-the-reader-on-notice charging bull blitz, and the David Foster Wallace sections (you'll not be surprised to hear that these are footnoted) are tiny masterpieces of that whole self-aware po-mo thing of his that's so heavily imitated. Then there are the one-offs-a deadening 50-page excursion to a wiggler happy hour, a former stoner's lengthy and tedious recollection of his stony past-but this is a novel of boredom we're talking about, and, so, yes, some of it is quite boring. And while it's hard not to wince at each of the many mentions of suicide, Wallace is often achingly funny; a passage that begins "I have only one real story about shit. But it's a doozy" and ends with a "prison-type gang-type sexual assault gone wrong" is pants-pissingly hilarious.--Of course, this is an unfinished novel. It's sloppy at times, inconsistent in others, baggy here, too-lean there, and you rarely feel that the narrative is taking you somewhere. Instead, it's like you're circling something vague, essential, and frustratingly elusive. Yet, even in its incomplete state-Michael Pietsch, who assembled this from the reams of material Wallace left behind, deserves a medal and a bottomless martini-the book is unmistakably a David Foster Wallace affair. You get the sense early on that he's trying to cram the whole world between two covers. As it turns out, that would actually be easier to do than what he was up to here, because then you could gloss over the flyover country that this novel fully inhabits, finding, among the wigglers, the essence of our fundamental human struggles. Reviewed by Jonathan Segura (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Unfinished at the time of Wallace's death, this novel was stitched together by his editor, Michael Pietsch, from notes and other material the author left behind. There's no real plot, but the story unfolds around an IRS agent in training, with unrelated asides throughout. Reader Robert Petkoff's voice drips with Wallace's irony. Though billed as fiction, the story was claimed by the author to be true. (LJ Xpress Reviews, 10/15/11; an LJ Best Book of 2011) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Rollicking postmodern romp, by the late cult-favorite novelist and essayist Wallace (with help from an editor), through the bowels of the IRS.Leave it to Wallace (Infinite Jest, 1996, etc.) to find fascination in the workings of a tax audit. Yet, with its mock-Arthurian title, his novel explores the minds and mores of the little men in the gray flannel suits, or at least their modern gray-souled counterparts. The story of the making of the novel is at least as interesting as the book itself: It was assembled, writes editor Michael Pietsch, from "a green duffel bag and two Trader Joe's bags heavy with manuscripts,"working from multiple drafts and notes and various other clues, but with no certainty that Wallace intended the book to have its current, somewhat lumpy shape. Neither would Wallace, obsessive perfectionist, allowed some of the sloppinesses and redundancies in the present version to stand. Thus it deserves its title-page rubric "An Unfinished Novel," and thus it should be thought of less as the last word by the late writerand certainly more manuscripts will be extracted from the vaults and publishedthan as a glimpse into his mind at work. And what a mind: Wallace was nothing if not thorough, and his tale of accountant Claude Sylvanshine, heroic traveler on bad commuter airlines and dogged reader of spreadsheets, is full of details, facts and factoids assembled over years of study and rumination. There's something of the author, perhaps, in Claude, but then there's something of him in the other characters, too, and it would be a mistake to read this as roman clef. All of Wallace's intellectual interests come through: the notes and asides, the linguistic brilliance, the fact piled atop fact, the excurses into entropy and, yes, autobiography ("Like many Americans," reads one note, "I've been sued...Litigation is no fun, and it's worth one's time and trouble to try to head it off in advance whenever possible.") Does it add up to a story? Not always. But there are many moments of great beauty, as with this small passage: "Drinion looks at her steadily for a moment. His face, which is a bit oily, tends to shine in the fluorescence of the Examination areas, though less so in the windows' indirect light, the shade of which indicates that clouds have piled up overhead, though this is just Meredith Rand's impression, and one not wholly conscious." Unfinished or no, it's worth reading this long, partly shaped novel just to get at its best moments, and to ponder what Wallace, that excellent writer, would have done with the book had he had time to finish it himself.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
