‘The Pale King’ by David Foster Wallace

I suppose that I should begin by explaining why my copy of the late David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King is sans dust cover. While packing my small suitcase for a recent jaunt to Scandinavia I evidently forgot that hardbacks, as a rule, do not travel particularly well, but I was clearly too intrigued by the novel’s alluring ominousness to pay too much mind to practicality, and so the book ventured off with me. In short, somewhere between Finland and the United Kingdom, the edges of the dust cover began to curl conspicuously, and I even succeeded in spilling a thimble-sized cup of airplane coffee on it also. So my copy of The Pale King and his long suffering cover were forced to part ways.

I have spent just under a month with this book, not just because of its length (a meaty 550 pages), but because of its sheer writerly weight. It is my belief that, even if halved in length, Wallace’s final work would still be anything but a light, quick read. For the late Wallace no detail is too insignificant to overlook, whether it happens to be the beguiling scent of a female IRS agent to her fellow male IRS agents, or the minute rivulets of sweat slushing down a GS-9 examiner’s forehead. These painstaking details, though thought provoking and often fascinating, require an advanced level of patience on the casual reader’s part, though fans of Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest will surely be enthralled.

Far from completion at the time of Wallace’s suicide in September 2008, The Pale King has been carved up into a cohesive narrative by his friend and longtime editor Michael Pietsch and was published posthumously this past April. Though unfinished, the novel is sprawling in both its physical size and its storytelling scope, and it is therefore impossible to summarise in a straightforward manner, save for to say that the majority of the text relates the often awkward and deeply unfortunate experiences of employees of the perennially misunderstood Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois. Furthermore, much of the novel is set during the mid eighties.

Considerable credit must be given to Pietsch for the unenviable task of organising more than a decade’s worth of manuscripts and notes left behind by David Wallace, a process he has described as being ‘a challenge like none I’ve ever encountered.’ The version of The Pale King that was published this past spring is likely very far removed from the book that Wallace originally intended to put out into the world, and though it is imperfect it is still undeniably magnificent. It is a work of pure literary fiction in a world addled with hurried commercial pulp, and a staggering achievement in spite of being unfinished. For fans of David Foster Wallace it will appear as nothing short of a prose treasure trove - footnotes and all.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in September 2011.