I'd read some of David Foster Wallace's short stories and non-fiction before, enjoying his essays on David Lynch and tennis and especially cruise ships, quoting lines from the latter to anyone stupid enough to go on one, but I'd never tackled his novels. Given my fondness for long books, Infinite Jest has always tempted me, but the comparisons to Pynchon, the deep postmodern multiplicity of it, and all those damned footnotes, had me daunted. Details of The Pale King however had me itching to read it: its exploration of the tedium and emptiness of life in contemporary white-collar employment seemed both enticingly Kafkaesque and incredibly prescient. It's one of those books I enjoyed so much being immersed in that I'm sad I no longer have it to look forward to. Sadder still that we no longer have Wallace around to give us more.
There is no disguising the unfinished status of The Pale King, but editor Michael Pietsch has done a commendable job of fashioning the book into a cohesive and highly readable structure. For the most part it reads like a short story collection linked by the IRS, with the majority of stories taking place around an internal revenue processing facility in Peoria, Illinois in the 1980s. Tangential stories exploring the earlier lives of characters who wind up in this facility are less closely linked, yet the air of bleak cynicism is consistent and ties them to the overall plot regardless of narrative divergence.
In the NY Times Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and C, discusses two ways of reading The Pale King:
The first is as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale: a grand parable of postindustrial culture or “late capitalism,” and an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual who finds himself caught in this system’s mesh. The setting that Wallace has chosen as his background (and foreground, and pretty much everything in between) could not be more systematic: the innards of the Internal Revenue Service — the sheer, overwhelming heft of its protocols and procedures...
...the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward — properly and rigorously forward — in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents “the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info.” He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also “called to account.” It’s hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer — nor, given Wallace’s untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide.
Sadness, nostalgia, regret, hopelessness all pervade The Pale King, making it a particularly bleak suicide note. Combined with his speech to graduates about the difficulties of daily life and 'making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head', it makes a conclusively depressing suicide note, but one so beautifully drawn as to allow readers to effortlessly succumb to its downbeat charms. Furthermore, as an essay on the hopelessness, meaninglessness and misery of contemporary working life, and the soullessness of consumer society, from its pervasive ugliness, overcrowded roads, bad architecture, meaningless drudgery, unsatisfactory personal relationships, selfishness, unfairness, violence, etc. etc. etc., The Pale King provides an articulate summary of what's wrong with life, and an urgent - but failed - plea to open our eyes, notice this horror we're in, and do something about it.
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