The Pale King

The Pale King is an unfinished novel that David Foster Wallace was working on when he committed suicide. His editor, Michael Pietsch, pieced together the manuscript that was found afterward and had it published. It was one of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. It didn't win (none of the finalists were chosen), and a certain segment of the literary establishment put on a pout that now Wallace would never win a Pulitzer.

I've never read anything by Wallace before--a copy of Infinite Jest was lost in a flood. He's alternately loved and loathed, and I think I can see why. This novel, set in an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois, is alternatively brilliant and stupefying. But I think that was his intention. The Pale King, in essence, is a novel about boredom.

"The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable...It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."

The Pale King, in many ways, reminds me of Catch-22, except that it's the Internal Revenue Service, not the Army. The bureaucracies are similar, as is the structure of the book. It flits from character to character, each vividly sketched but not complexly developed. There is also no Yossarian, except if you count the author, who appears in the book, but not as himself. The author's note is chapter 9, where he identifies himself as the author, but nothing he tells us is true (Wallace never worked at the IRS, though he studied accounting and tax law to write the book). As is his wont, his narrated sections are heavily footnoted, which turns out to be a hassle when reading on a Kindle.

This book is unfinished, so it can't be subject to the same criticisms. As is, it is an interesting collage. Much of it is background on some of the IRS agents. One is Stecyk, and his chapter is hilarious, as it describes a boy who is such a goody-goody that it inspires blood lust in others: "The principal fantasizes about sinking a meat hook into Leonard Stecyk's bright-eyed little face and dragging the boy facedown behind his Volkswagen Beetle over the rough new streets of suburban Grand Rapids. The fantasies come of out of nowhere and horrify the principal, who is a devout Mennonite."

Then there is Toni Ware, a woman who comes from the wrong side of the tracks: "The neighborhood was one where people's dogs were going to bark behind their fences and people were sometimes going to burn their trash or keep junked cars in their yards." Chris Fogle was an aimless college student who, instead of finding religion, like his roommate's girlfriend, wanders into a tax accounting class by mistake and has a revelation. His chapter includes the gruesome death of his father, whom he had a difficult relationship, in a mass transit accident. "I remember my father wearing madras shorts on weekends, and black socks, and mowing the lawn like that, and sometimes looking out of the window at what he looked like in that getup and feeling actual pain at being related to him."

There is also a long dialogue, a tour de force, between an attractive agent named Meredith Rand and a Spock-like mystery man, ironically nicknamed Mr. X (short for "Mister Excitement"). Rand tells him about how she met her husband, who is dying, and she is intrigued by the calm consideration that X gives her.

Though the book has electrifying stretches like that one, it often seems like a joke--Wallace purposely writing long sections designed to induce the reader into a stupor. Lots of tax code, or a few pages describing people turning pages. Wallace's main section, when he is picked up at the airport and has a sweaty ride to town in a compact car with four other men, pushes the tedium to Olympian levels. Wallace goes on and on about how to improve the parking lot.

Wallace was a gifted wordsmith, though, using wonderful words like Cerberusian. This is a passage early from the book, that sets the tone, and at least lets the reader know that even if the book is often boring, it is always impeccably crafted: "From Midway Claude Sylvanshine then flew on something called Consolidated Thrust Regional Lines down to Peoria, a terrifying thirty-seater whose pilot had pimples at the back of his neck and reached back to pull a dingy fabric curtain over the cockpit and the beverage service consisted of a staggering girl underhanding you nuts while you chugged a Pepsi."