The Pale King: Reviewing the Reviews

From the Globe and Mail review by Matt Kavanagh

Introductory Note:
In the early 1980s, American writer David Foster Wallace suffered a nervous breakdown while away at college and retreated to his parents’ home to recover. He drove a school bus for a while. He was diagnosed with depression and started taking medication. Eventually, he returned to Amherst, where he took courses in creative writing. He went on to pen Infinite Jest, one of the most critically lauded novels of the last novels of the last quarter-century. His short stories garnered wide acclaim; several pieces of his long-form journalism are rightfully celebrated as classics of the genre. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the “genius” grant. In 2008, after discovering that his antidepressant no longer kept the symptoms of his illness at bay, he killed himself.

Relevant Portion:
Like its predecessor, The Pale King is an electric novel of ideas. Wallace uses the tax system as a means to explore our obligations to one another, what it means to be bored and the problem of information, which is to say, what happens when there’s too much of it, overwhelming our ability to make meaningful choices.

My take: The review begins by trying to elaborate the plot of TPK. Thus, we spend about four paragraphs with the author sort of gallantly floundering to elucidate just what the hell was happening in TPK. The big reveal comes in the last ten pages of TPK though. Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, chose to include ten pages worth of notes on possibilities for where the plot might lead. And, if you are familiar with Wallace's work you'll know that ten pages worth of notes is probably 300 pages or so of actual text. Thus, the project that the early portion of the review sets, explaining the plot, is misguided. This book, even more so than Infinite Jest, is about characters, voice, ideas, polyphony in the grand tradition of Faulkner. The plot hangs together loosely at best, and it's probably unfair to expect it to do anything else. The work was unfinished.

From Boston.com

Relevant portion:

Wallace’s genius was that he could absorb the infernal logic of data — all those vectors of complexity, its relentless torrent — and still give us the magic of narrative. That moment when we, as readers, become co-imaginers of a text because there are characters in whom we believe, and a story we learn how to anticipate. Information and storytelling: They are opposing forces, like certainty and faith, yet Wallace stood across this divide and proved that if there was, in fact, a social novel of our time, here is where it would be built. Not by papering over the ruptures in realism, but by writing right through them.

My take: Uh, yes. I think the thing that I'm saddest about is losing the enormity of Wallace's talent and ambition. I haven't read any other contemporary authors who are as interested in attempting to synthesize everything that it means to be happy and hail in these data tinged days. The largest manifestation of this in Wallace's work comes when characters spend time doing things like thinking about thinking or in TPK, the awkwardness of flying on a plane, all the little details that make it a strange type of hell. And I'll miss his ability to catalog all of those things that generally pass by us because we are so rarely truly aware. I suppose the last bits seem unrelated, however, they are central to TPK. Ie, when we have five thousand things to pay attention to, what do we choose?


From the Kansas City Star's review by Kevin Canfield:

Relevant portion, which Canfield actually pulled directly from TPK.

“I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity,” explains David Wallace, a fictionalized version of the author and the book’s occasional narrator. “About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. … And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull.”

In what is as close as he comes to a direct explanation of his decision to write about boredom, Wallace notes the lengths to which many of us go to avoid it: “Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everybody knows it’s about something else, way down.”

My take: Yup.

Thought Catalog's Phil Roland

Although, to be pedantic, I suppose no one will be finishing it. David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel is incomplete, after all. Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t bother to read it. You most certainly should. Just be aware that it’s not the kind of book designed to be a blockbuster, to keep you turning pages late into the night. Which you’ll be doing a lot of, if you’re a fan of literature. But it won’t be because the plot is so engaging (it is indescribably tedious at times) but because DFW was so damned good at writing that you can’t really believe what you’re reading. If it renders you speechless it won’t be because the prose has taken your breath away, but because you suddenly feel unworthy to be speaking the same language as someone who has so obviously and completely mastered the art of bending it to his will. And if it makes you sad, it will have less to do with the book itself and more to do with the fact that The Pale King is the last you’re ever going to get from the greatest American writer of this generation. That’s it. That’s all. Show is over, folks. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

I never even heard of David Foster Wallace until a few days after his suicide in 2008. And I likely wouldn’t have heard of him until long after were it not for my desire to impress the cute, bookish librarian and the honest realization that Salvatore’s Icewind Dale trilogy wasn’t going to quite cut it. So I chose the weightiest, smartest-looking tome I could find, which turned out to be Infinite Jest. (Atlas Shruggedwas on the short list; I declined on the grounds that I was having a good day and didn’t feel like hating everyone.)

“For the kids,” I lied, seeing the smirk on my cute, bookish librarian’s face as she scanned my selection of fantasy novels.

“It’s so sad,” she said when she came upon Infinite Jest.

“I know, right?” I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought she meant the book.

“I still can’t believe he could just kill himself like that.”

Oh. Oh.

Cont:
It’s a fractured, potholed mess of intentionally dull descriptions of white collar government work and “Realism, monotony. Plot a series of setups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.” While most of this can be ascribed to the book’s unfinished nature,

Like the last few cigarettes in the pack before another attempt to quit, I’m making the The Pale King last. And then I plan to give up when I get close to the end. Because right now I can’t conceive of living in a world where I’ve read the entire oeuvre of one of the greatest literary minds to ever exist–a human iceberg whose depths will never be fully charted–knowing that there will never be any more. Rather nonsensical, true, but I will at least have ensured myself that there is some measure of beauty and mystery left unexplored in my world at least, and I can tease myself with those final, unread pages for years to come, each time thinking the exact same thing I was thinking when I first found myself lost in his work:

God I wish he hadn’t killed himself.

My take: Extra points for being a more personal review. I'm not going to touch the NYT review by
Michito Kakutani because her reviews are all over the map. She called Franzen's Freedom, a good but decidedly not great or excellent novel, a masterpiece. She also reviewed Infinite Jest and called it essentially a work authorial selfishness. When reviewers miscast, or seem to misunderstand books I don't generally give them much credence even if they review for The Times.
On Endings by Robert Douglas from The Telegraph

Wallace seems to have recognised as much all along. His first novel, The Broom of the System, ended mid-sentence, with fictional editor Rick Vigorous explaining that “You can trust me… I’m a man of my ”. Automatically we find ourselves filling in the missing “word”, which is both a joke about publishers always having the last word and a reminder that we have been Wallace’s collaborators from the start. His short story “Good Old Neon” ends twice, once with the phrase “Not another word”, and again two pages earlier with a footnote that concludes “THE END”.
It is, then, a wonderful example of editorial tact that the fragment chosen to end The Pale King has “you” as its final word: “She’s right there, speaking calmly, and so are you.” Because that’s what Wallace’s writing came down to: not him, but “you”, the reader.

Everything he wrote was unfinished, because it was offered as one side of a bargain: he would extend his readers’ sense of the possible, and all he asked was that they populate his fictional world to make it feel less lonely. It made everything he wrote into a work in progress. But then, as a character in one of Tennessee Williams’s plays points out: “Humanity is just a work in progress.”


And so on....