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The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.
The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.
- Sales Rank: #749625 in Books
- Published on: 2011-04-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.50" h x 1.75" w x 6.50" l, 1.83 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 560 pages
Review
"One hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace.....Stretches of this are nothing short of sublime--the first two chapters are a real put-the-reader-on-notice charging bull blitz, and the David Foster Wallace sections...are tiny masterpieces of that whole self-aware po-mo thing of his that's so heavily imitated.... often achingly funny...pants-pissingly hilarious....Yet, even in its incomplete state...the book is unmistakably a David Foster Wallace affair. You get the sense early on that he's trying to cram the whole world between two covers. As it turns out, that would actually be easier to than what he was up to here, because then you could gloss over the flyover country that this novel fully inhabits, finding, among the wigglers, the essence of our fundamental human struggles."―Publishers Weekly
"The final, beautiful act of an unwilling icon...one of the saddest, most lovely books I've ever read...Let's state this clearly: You should read THE PALE KING.... You'll be [kept up at night] because D.F.W. writes sentences and sometimes whole pages that make you feel like you can't breathe...because again and again he invites you to consider some very heavy things....Through some function of his genius, he causes us to ask these questions of ourselves."―Benjamin Alsup, Esquire
"Deeply sad, deeply philosophical...breathtakingly brilliant...funny, maddening and elegiac...[David Foster Wallace's] most emotionally immediate work...It was in trying to capture the hectic, chaotic reality--and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters--that Wallace's synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes...because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including THE PALE KING, he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life."―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"The overture to Wallace's unfinished last novel is a rhapsodic evocation of the subtle vibrancy of the midwestern landscape, a flat, wind-scoured place of potentially numbing sameness that is, instead, rife with complex drama....feverishly encompassing, sharply comedic, and haunting...this is not a novel of defeat but, rather, of oddly heroic persistence.... electrifying in its portrayal of individuals seeking unlikely refuge in a vast, absurd bureaucracy. In the spirit of Borges, Gaddis, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), Wallace conducts a commanding and ingenious inquiry into monumental boredom, sorrow, the deception of appearances, and the redeeming if elusive truth that any endeavor, however tedious, however impossible, can become a conduit to enlightenment, or at least a way station in a world where 'everything is on fire, slow fire.'"―Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"THE PALE KING represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist...Wallace made a career out of rushing in where other writers feared to tread or wouldn't bother treading. He had an outsize, hypertrophied talent...THE PALE KING is an attempt to stare directly into the blind spot and face what's there...His ability to render the fine finials and fractals and flourishes of a mind acting upon itself, from moment to moment, using only the blunt, numb instruments of language, has few if any equals in American literature..this we see him do at full extension."―Lev Grossman, TIME
"To read THE PALE KING is in part to feel how much Wallace had changed as a writer, compressed and deepened himself...It's easy to make the book sound heavy, but it's often very funny, and not politely funny, either...Contains what's sure to be some of the finest fiction of the year."―John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ
"A thrilling read, replete with the author's humor, which is oftentimes bawdy and always bitingly smart.... The notion that this book is 'unfinished' should not be given too much weight. The Pale King is, in many ways, quite complete: its core characters are fully drawn, each with a defining tic, trait, or backstory... Moreover, the book is far from incomplete in its handling of a host of themes, most of them the same major issues, applicable to all of us, with which Wallace also grappled in Infinite Jest: unconquerable boredom, the quest for satisfaction in work, the challenge of really knowing other people and the weight of sadness.... The experience to be had from reading The Pale King feels far more weighty and affecting than a nicely wrapped story. Its reach is broad, and its characters stay with you."―Daniel Roberts, National Public Radio
"The four-word takeaway: You should read it!"―New York Magazine
"An astonishment, unfinished not in the way of splintery furniture but in the way of Kafka's Castle or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine ... What's remarkable about The Pale King is its congruity with Wallace's earlier ambitions ... The Pale King treats its central subject--boredom itself--not as a texture (as in Fernando Pessoa), or a symptom (as in Thomas Mann), or an attitude (as in Bret Easton Ellis), but as the leading edge of truths we're desperate to avoid. It is the mirror beneath entertainment's smiley mask, and The Pale King aims to do for it what Moby-Dick did for the whale ... Watching [Foster Wallace] loosed one last time upon the fields of language, we're apt to feel the way he felt at the end of his celebrated essay on Federer at Wimbledon: called to attention, called out of ourselves."―Garth Risk Hallberg, New York Magazine
"Wallace's gift for language, especially argot of all sorts, his magical handling of masses of detail...[these] talents are on display again in The Pale King."―Jeffrey Burke, Bloomberg
"An incomplete, complex, confounding, brilliant novel...Reading THE PALE KING is strangely intimate...it also comes with a note of grace."―Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine
"The most anticipated posthumous American novel of the last century...[Wallace was] America's most-gifted writer...American literature will rarely, if ever, give us another mind like Wallace's...ferociously written...richly imagined...a deep panoply of lives and the post-modern awareness of how this all was constructed, both the work and the vortex of current life."―John Freeman, Boston Globe
"THE PALE KING represents Wallace's effort, through humor, digression and old-fashioned character study, to represent IRS agents...as not merely souled, but complexly so. He succeeds, profoundly, and the rest of the book's intellectual content is gravy. Yes, parts are difficult, but 'boring' never comes into it. And it's very, very funny."―Sam Thielman, Newsday
"It may be unfinished, but the reviews-cum-retrospectives all soundly agree: It's still a book to be read."―The Miami Herald
"A fully imagined, often exquisitely fleshed-out novel about a dreary Midwestern tax-return processing center that he has caused to swarm with life.... a series of bravura literary performances--soliloquies; dialogues; video interview fragments; short stories with the sweep and feel of novellas...This is what 360-degree storytelling looks like, and if it doesn't come to a climax or end, exactly, that may not be a defect."―Judith Shulevitz, Slate
"It could hardly be more engaging. The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying and rousing."―Laura Miller, Salon
"Strange, entertaining, not-at-all boring...Wallace transforms this driest of settings into a vivid alternate IRS universe, full of jargon and lore and elaborately behatted characters, many of them with weird afflictions and/or puzzling supernatural abilities.... hilarious...brilliant and bizarre, another dispatch from Wallace's...endlessly fascinating brain."―Rob Brunner, Entertainment Weekly
"Exhilarating."―Hillel Italie, Associated Press
"Heroic and humbling...sad, breathtakingly rigorous and searching, ultimately hysterically funny."―Matt Feeney, Slate
"Brilliant...[it] glimmers and sparkles."―Richard Rayner, The Los Angeles Times
About the Author
David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.
Most helpful customer reviews
322 of 352 people found the following review helpful.
The Pale King: Short recommendation for a Wonderful, Messy Read
By Elias Z
There are so many different reasons to love David Foster Wallace's work, and so many reasons to feel that his death ripped an irreparable hole in the fabric not just of literary culture in America, but also in our daily world. In everything he wrote, DFW was grappling with the hardest subject of all--what does it feel like to be alive, not generally, but specifically, in the here and now, with billions of details crashing through our fields of perception? For that reason, although always dark, his work shimmers with a kind of graceful light. He was a philosophical novelist in the way the great nineteenth century Russians were. He couldn't hide the fact that he loved people, and he loved teasing out the unique predicaments that people encounter by just being people who love things and hate things and want things and enjoy things and grow tired and jealous and bored.
These elements, and more, are abundantly available in The Pale King, DFW's unfinished novel. In terms of organization, it is understandably a huge mess, although neatened admirably by the editor. But who reads DFW for conventionally organized plots? And why should you read this novel? For starters:
1) The language. DFW is a masterful stylist, a brainiac who always could have sounded much more intellectual than he chose to, instead embracing an easy-going, colloquial tone because he wanted people to read his books. The opening lines of PK alone ring with the linguistic sensibility that sounds like him and him alone. His signature music courses through passage after passage. His verbal precision, so simple word-wise, gives a jolt by making you see things in a new, though until-now, overlooked, way.
2) The characters. Sure, they're a lot of them. Some will grab you, others won't. But at least one of them you'll probably recognize and glom on to and follow and love. The great thing about the juicy, rich, character-bound novels of DFW is that you really can (and must) skim through the sections that bore you. (Skimming, skipping, lingering, underlining and rereading are interactive engagements that mean the book is making you do things with it and to it over a long period of time.) This is another way DWF is like Tolstoy and Dosteovesky. Just read, they seem to say, don't try to think too hard as you read. And then read again and again. This isn't school, after all. This is LIFE.
3) The humor. The idea/hook is, let's face it, flat out funny. And poignant. A novel set in an IRS Center in Peoria. The po-mo stuff is also sardonic, even as it's instructive. If you don't like the "apparati" ignore them. And you'll see why they're not just snooty, but also funny ha ha. DFW was, tragically, too smart for his own good, but he tries not to be too smart for us, and that disjunction laces the novel with humor. I also suspect that he took it in stride that people would inevitably make fun of him too; that's how we work.
4) The love of mind. This book brims with it, not negatively, as in his masterpiece Infinite Jest, but more sloppily. DFW was not afraid to address the fact, and to delve into it for page after page, that we have minds, and that what we choose to do with our minds every day of our lives is what makes us finally who we precisely, irrefutably are. If this is a novel about the plague of boredom, it is also a revelation about the rippling power of imagination and play, flexibility and hope, as it copes with and escapes from that plague. This power lies within each individual. We may be amused, or tempted to mock, but really what makes anyone measurably any better than anyone else? If I'm really using my mind, I'll know the answer.
This mindful modesty is, of course, DFW's greatest legacy. He was a critically depressed man of prodigious talents who could have become simply a seething cultural critic, marked by a sense of superiority to the masses. But he wasn't superior--his depression made him see that--so he chose, and it was a choice he kept making from page to page, section to section, to be both kind and sardonic to all of us, as equals, at once. This is the combination that makes him wonderful to read. His hugeness, his too-muchness, may feel annoying at times, but this immensity also feels brimming with possibility. There's nothing neat about The Pale King, and that makes it unusually wonderful. It doesn't seem to be "over," because it is in no way "finished." It's raggedy and keeps going.
Such a novel-ish thing can teach you how to read with patience and generosity and a curious openness to lived experience. Another DFW trademark. He understood that writers have an obligation to make their readers work for their reward. The work needn't be grueling, but the truth is, reading through a novel should be a little like living through a life. You should feel that you've really done something big, been somewhere life-changing, by the time you're through.
If you like novels to be neat, pre-packaged, tied-up, not roiling and complicated and baggy, chances are you won't love anything by David Foster Wallace, but reading him will teach you something about yourself. He's that good.
If this will be the first DFW for you, I recommend starting not here but with his first published boyish novel The Broom of the System, and reading your way through them all. You'll find the same brilliance and snarkiness, tenderness and dark, precise humor, shot through with simple hope. Enjoy.
108 of 117 people found the following review helpful.
Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story
By Kevin
I'm going to start off by saying that this book made for one of the most frustrating reading experiences of my entire life. Before even considering reading TPK, know this: it is grossly, grossly unfinished. Wallace fictions are never a walk in the park. They usually never seem to "come together" the way most stories do. That's just not who Wallace was as a writer. Despite this, the amount of narrative threads that just sort of trail off and the almost total lack of anything even resembling a gesture towards a plot is a bit much, even for DFW. One gets the sense that we are reading nothing close to the completed Pale King we would've gotten had Wallace not eliminated his own map.
Now that that's out of the way, let me tell you: this book is amazing. Wallace meditates on heroism, boredom, civics, duty, attention, authorship, religion, family, love, language and nature with levels of grace, humor and wisdom that other contemporary writers could only dream of having. DFW sure has come a long way from the cold cerebral linguistic games of The Broom of the System and the mind-bending erudition of Infinite Jest. The Pale King showcases Wallace at his most accessible, most heartfelt and most mature.
Reading this book is like finding some pieces of a beautiful shattered urn. The shards in themselves are gorgeous, so much so that it makes the heart ache wondering how they're all meant to fit together, what the urn would look like if it were made whole. This doesn't make the broken pieces any less beautiful, though.
40 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
The IRS is hell for other people . . .
By John B.
. . . and so too may be this book, for some of you. It will not appeal even to all of David Foster Wallace's fans. You should give it a try, though.
I'm halfway through The Pale King as I write this, so keep that context in mind as you read (or not) what follows.
The three-star rating seems most appropriate to me: As Michael Pietsch's Introduction makes clear, what we have here is NOT Wallace's final intention for The Pale King, but Pietsch's version of that intention. That doesn't mean, though, that we shouldn't have this. While it may be unfinished in and of itself, I think that it clearly reflects Wallace's larger concerns in the latter years of his life--both life-affirming ones and, yes, darker ones as well.
(Something else you might want to keep in mind, by the way, is that I think it's a mistake to read The Pale King only or primarily as an indirect suicide note.)
The review proper is here: The version of The Pale King that we have takes us into a place most of us loathe, into the minds of the people who work there (whom most of us would probably regard as at least unpleasant), recreates (deliberately, through its prose style) the tedium of that place, and reveals its workers as, sure, flawed human beings (but who among us is not?) yet strangely drawn to (and more or less good at) the work that loathsome place requires of them. He locates their humanity, in other words. We may not want to hang out with some (most?) of them, but we end up acknowledging and maybe even respecting them as we say, yes, I'm glad it's not me, but someone has to do this work. But then again, that is the notion of Service in a nutshell. I'd argue that that's not just thought-provoking but ultimately life-affirming. At its best, literature should get us to really think about ourselves and others, to the point that, in Harold Bloom's formulation, it should make the world look strange. The Pale King is not a great novel, but I'd argue that it does that work, at least for me.
What follows is some commentary on how I think this fits with Wallace's prior work.
Systems (most of them) are not evil, but they ARE necessary, whether or not we like that fact (or them). The ones that really matter, such as the IRS (in The Pale King), or entertainment culture (see Infinite Jest) are meant to serve some need we have (and yes, amusement, in the case of entertainment, is a need). I think, early on, Wallace feared Systems, like all good, thoughtful young people (and postmodernists) do, as infringements on Freedom: Beneath the hysterically-funny surface of his 100-page essay on a week-long cruise, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" (absolutely essential reading, by the way), there's a serious question lurking: Do we REALLY want to submit ourselves to a System whose sole purpose is make sure we have no needs (or desires, for that matter) unmet whatsoever, often without even asking or being asked whether we have needs? His meditation on the cruise's promotional material's recurring word "pamper" is a case in point--the only other time when all of us now alive had absolutely all our needs met automatically and without our thinking about it was when we were in the womb; and while being in utero is certainly a version of the human condition, is it, finally, the most fulfilling version we know or can imagine?
The usual postmodern move is to make the case that, if a System wrongs us, those who maintain that System are also monsters, and those of us who participate in it must be, ipso facto, unthinking dupes or sheep. But in his Kenyon College commencement address (also essential reading) and, I think, in The Pale King, Wallace proposes something subtler: these Systems exist, and work at their best, when they serve not just their maintainers but their participants--however imperfectly, all benefit when the System works. It's our responsibility to be just as attentive when the System works as it should as when it doesn't--or, in the case of the IRS, to think about our relation to it and about the people employed by it at times other than tax season. To deny or not actively consider other people's humanity in favor of our own is, for Wallace, at least a social sin, if not something more metaphysical.
In his close, thoughtful attention even (and especially) to the ordinary, mundane things and people of the world he comes into contact with and finding something special, even revelatory, in them, Wallace resembles no one so much as he does Thoreau in Walden. Like Thoreau in his call that we live deliberately before, at our death, realizing that we had not lived, Wallace at his best is the writer-as-public-servant, and I think that as he approached middle age he was finding his voice in that role. THAT is the loss I feel most deeply as I think about his death: in more ways than one, his work was unfinished.
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