Book of the week: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
Large swaths of The Pale King contain some of Wallace's finest work, on par with his landmark novel, Infinite Jest.
(Little, Brown, $28)
The IRS’s faceless bureaucrats have found their James Joyce, said Lev Grossman in Time. David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008 before finishing this novel, had wished to confront “those parts of life that are massively, spectacularly dull.” In the routines of the tax-return examiners he depicts here, he certainly hit his mark. Wallace doesn’t satirize his paper pushers: He’s made them into heroic figures “engaged in a silent war” against “soul-flattening boredom.” As in his landmark 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, there’s “very little resembling an overarching narrative” in the 580 pages Wallace’s editor has pieced together from the chapters and fragments that the author left behind. Yet despite this book’s “shattered state,” it “represents Wallace’s finest work as a novelist.”
The Pale King is actually “impossible to review,” said Sam Anderson in The New York Times. Because you’re aware at all times that Wallace never finished it, “you adore what’s good” and “forgive what’s less good.” That said, large swaths of the book are “full-on Infinite Jest–level great.” The first 150 pages “contain an amazing range of tones, voices, subject matter, and forms,” taking us from the internal monologue of an IRS agent named Claude Sylvanshine to an “empathetic portrait of a Christian couple considering an abortion.” As it delves into the personal history of each employee in its regional IRS office, the book is often very much about accounting—about “how the primal urge of taking stock insinuates itself into everything.” Somehow, Wallace even found a way to turn IRS jargon into “a sneaky kind of data poetry.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
It’s what he does with boredom, though, that establishes him, posthumously, as the author who “speaks most directly” to our contemporary condition, said Garth Risk Hallberg in New York. Wallace seems to have recognized that boredom represents “the leading edge of truths we’re trying to avoid”—the thing we’re left with when our various attempts to escape, “via drugs or TV or idol worship,” run dry. The Pale King can be seen as the author’s attempt to demonstrate that if each of us could somehow push beyond boredom to a heightened attentiveness, “we might find ourselves in the presence of what connects us: longings, loneliness, mortality,” maybe even “gratitude for the gift of being alive.” That effort didn’t save Wallace, but it graced the rest of us with a big, baggy novel that very nearly does for boredom “what Moby-Dick did for the whale.”
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Where does Elon Musk go from here?
TODAY'S BIG QUESTION After gambling big on Donald Trump's reelection bid, the world's wealthiest man is poised to become even more powerful — and controversial — than ever
By Rafi Schwartz, The Week US Published
-
Usha Vance: a political spouse with a 'conspicuous resume'
In the Spotlight The new second lady plays a behind-the-scenes role
By Joel Mathis, The Week US Published
-
New DNA tests of Pompeii dead upend popular stories
Speed Read An analysis of skeletal remains reveals that some Mount Vesuvius victims have been wrongly identified
By Peter Weber, The Week US Published
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-ups
feature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
By The Week Staff Last updated
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”
By The Week Staff Last updated