Obligatory contribution to the online DFW appraisal

The Pale King is not best describable as an 'unfinished novel'. Certainly it is true the work was left uncompleted when the Author David Foster Wallace's relapse into a particularly bad surge of the depression that had plagued him since his teens, which (relapse) was in part precipitated by his cancelling the prescribed antidepressants he felt where beginning to stifle his creativity, resulted in his committing suicide in 2008. There is also the contentions of the authors notoriously painstaking approach to his prose, his occupational neurosis, dissatisfaction with his novels to that point and evident desire to achieve a level of thematic perfection in his work which give credence to the tagline on the cover page and of course subsequently raise the debate over the ethics of publishing an artists work when said artist is no longer in a position to discuss it. If you then add to which that the non-linear transitory POV's which stitch through the novel discovered upon his desk after his death, where, as described in the prologue by the editor to whom the task of publication was assigned, without any definitive order regarding the arrangement or order of the chapters, and you are led to ask whether you should even be reading this? Whether in fact Wallace even intended for the novel to see the light of day? And if he did, whether the version you then held would be shorn of the faults that all to often draw you out from the narratives longish breadths of genius, to consider its tragic contextual background? Well ‘if’ then yes yes and yes. However, unfortunately such speculation is now fruitless and what there is to review must ultimately be considered upon its true merit rather than potential. Luckily with a writer of such poetic brilliance and imagination, assessing this novel for what it is; rather than for what It could be, stills places it amongst some of the most creative prose I’ve ever read.
It is worth mentioning that the form the book takes, is one of a whole elaborately rendered paradigmin within which the reader is at liberty to dip in and out- practically at any point without disrupting the stories cogency. Although characters reoccur TPK is by and large episodic-, which is partly explainable by DFW’s ruse that the whole plot is in fact sourced from, his own formative experience spent in a IRS tax office making it actually a pseudo-memoir. The whole confounding lexicon of the tax system, its strange GS- hierarchy, system of ‘wiggler’s’ in ‘chalk’s processing forms held in their ‘tingles’ whilst adjusting to a new policy drive to marketise the tax system and reap greater revenues which is dubbed the ‘initiative’ is a perfectly alien habitat to the average citizen. This makes it a brilliantly chosen lens for Wallace to view the themes that unite each chapter together, which concern the concepts of Tedium in extremis, Existential longing, The purpose of work, ethics of taxation, life in bureaucracy and Memory. The most prevalent of which is the issue of Boredom, and the fascinating doctrine he occasionally posits that “[It] is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
So we see an employee of the Regional Examing Centre where the novel is set whose death remains unnoticed for four days and whom later begins to appear on the desks of Examiners stranded at the utmost nadir of their ennui to muse philosophically upon the how’s and whys. We see how 'Toni’s' habit of acting catatonically during her traumatic upbringing, literally playing dead to avoid death, endears her to an occupation at the IRS.
Then we are introduced to the incredible, but all 360 degree human, cast of freaks who are drawn towards a drudgery almost unparalleled in other human endeavour. A series of physical and mental neurosis' are the principle common denominator ; although the tasks they are assigned- the mountains of forms that require just enough brainpower to be engaging- may be dull, the people perpetrating them are anything but. One character’s condition is a hilarious satire on the atomised ‘data’ we accumulate through modern life. He has something called ‘Random Fact Intuition” whereby streams of highly precise, entirely irrelevant and irrefutable ‘intelligence’ appear to him with no provenance at any given moment. One episode shows him trying to streamline his disorder into one that could assist him, to no avail.
Another character fictionalises Wallace’s own well-documented anxiety about public perspiration- on a level that is at once unfathomably uncomfortable yet entirely relatable, given the tone of non-sequiters and digressions which so perfectly match the quality of true thought. Each new invention offers myriad delights, by turns funny and repellent yet still revelatory about a profound aspect of the human spirit. Its hard to pick a favourite, but the child who decides heroically at the age of 7 that he intends to touch every region of his body with his lips but is subsequently confronted by the impossibility of certain areas, as a method of exploring the necessity of human relationships and the limitations of egotism as well as the frailty of human dreams is something of a tour de force.
There are times when you are so in awe of your narrators ambition- the pure effort he exhorted in pursuit of the readers enjoyment, that you revolve back once more, agog, to what it could have been where DFW to have remained stable! The hilarious deconstructions of everybody's unredeemable faults are positively Flaubertian for a writer who was so defiantly anti-realist. Wallace has to be the undisputed master in the modern age of the humour of hate, the comedy of errors, the perpetual examination of fault as a route to finding true beauty. Stumbling across his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men in an Italian bookstore, I was transfixed by the enormous determination of every story and how the collection was, as I’m certain no reviewer phrased it, ‘all killer and no filler’. Few short stories collections have scored such an imprint- indeed remarkably few aspire too- particularly the now alarming prescient and sullenly sardonic deconstruction of his own condition, and so many others, ‘the depressed person’. In which the narrative voice’s endless self-flagellation barely allows one sentance to transpire without subjecting it to an analysis about how it might have been perceived and a further recrimination about their own act of analysis and how said analysis is such a manifestation of their own endemic flaws. It perfectly places on the scales the combination of one hand guilt and on the other great irritation for the interlocutor without judging them for it that will be so familiar to those coping with the mentally ill. I have made it sound tedious but it is anything but, which Is so utterly typical of me ;)

Where you to approach the Pale King and find your self immediately wading through a strange nomenclature related to a trade you have no particular interest in or desire to learn about- bogged down in 7 page paragraphs, then trust that time spent within this excruciatingly real paradigm is more worthwhile than some of our more approachable fiction. Wallace and his friend Jonathon Franzen entered into a dilemma about the best way to preserve and sustain the novel when every facet of 'the information age' is competing for the readers attention at any one moment, how 6 hours with one viewpoint could possibly be considered worthwhile at a time when there is more ‘entertainment’ than ever before. JF chose to revert to the medium of a great story- the ripping yarn- appropriating in a way the classical form-using suspense and thrill to great effect as a way to inject intellectual novelty into popular fiction. What makes DFW the prototype, the paragon, for me was that he chose for the victim to imitate the illness. To make the novel a sprawling, disparate, post-modern web of interlacing themes- what Delillo on the backcover is quoted as calling DFW’s wish to
“be equal to the vast, babbling, spin-out sweep of contemporary culture”
No one could ask for a more fitting epitaph than this novel, to the memory of a vitally needed voice for the 21st century silenced all to soon.F and W were in coalescence on one thing though, which was on the rewards available through intense patience and dedication to a book- and the trouble we are to find if we allow the monoculture to erode these qualities. Also the absence of irony and purge of satire in an analysis of 'the man', 'the system' and 'the establishment' directs through to the new narrative tone DFW agonised to hone, and ultimately fell short of. Although it does at times take stullifying patience and concentration on the reader’s behalf The Pale King more than reimburses them in the pleasure it distributed as it stakes what are unusual claims for our leisure-saturated times; that there is dignity and nobility to be found in boredom, that life owes you nothing and that it is through your relationships with other people that you can achieve eudemonia.