The Pale King
By David Foster Wallace
Penguin/Hamish Hamilton 2011
David Foster Wallace’s posthumous unfinished novel is one that defies your average review. I’ve considered a lot of different approaches in how to write this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that my review will just be a piece on how it felt to read this book.
David Foster Wallace had been working on The Pale King over a ten-year period; by the time he took his life in 2008. His wife and his agent came across his manuscript and accompanying notes and files, and asked his good friend and editor Michael Pietsch to edit the unfinished novel, and subsequently publish it. So this is not a finished novel, and it is made up of approximately fifty scenes. Apparently there were over a hundred to choose from in the unedited text left behind. So you just can’t quite be sure that what has made the cut is what Wallace would have chosen himself. But you do feel grateful that Pietsch has laboured over this mammoth task.
I felt fortunate to be poring over the words of a remarkable author, whose light was put out much too soon. I am at once pleased to have The Pale King in print, and uncomfortable too that I may be window peeping into a private world, with very locked doors. Reading this novel is like co-habitating with a solemn ghost. I could not shake the sense of sadness I felt, to be reading this book that kept David Foster Wallace company in his last days. I wondered how he would feel – he of such exact and absolutes of language, he of the most particular eye – to know his unfinished work is here in the world, and he is not. He is not here to speak for it. So that’s an unusual feeling – though you could argue that is the case for every dead author, in a way, couldn’t you?
The Pale King is a treatise, for the most part, on boredom, and the tedium of the modern age. A large portion of it is set in the IRS Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois. There are characters, including David Wallace (fictional counterpart), whom we return to frequently in this cardboard world of intense banality, pencil pushing, tax filing obscurity. And there are fleeting scenes adrift in a landscape unfamiliar – of characters drawn from, and seemingly returning to, the air; that shake you, make you howl with laughter, make you weep, make you rage. The whole novel is like a film in its slip slide through the consciousness of a huge cast of characters. We dip in and out of a world that does seem, for the most part, to be inhabited by an unruly band of depressives, outcasts, and disenfranchised lost souls.
As you read this novel you get a sense of the bleak interior of Wallace’s mind. There is a pervasive feeling of disquiet, of average despair and tedium, and you cannot help but attribute this to what you know of Wallace himself – a man who wrestled with crippling depression his whole life. Yes, it’s about boredom and futility, but it’s also a glimpse at what might be a tiny hope - that perhaps if you push through the tedium, if you hang on through the gloom, there might be something salvageable at the other end. That feeling makes Wallace’s exit that much more unbearable, and you wonder that he might have glimpsed that hope himself, if he had been able to hang on long enough.
That is not to say that this book is melancholy and heavy for the duration. There are passages that are hysterically funny, that made me tromp off to force my friends to read them. There are character descriptions that beggar belief – they are so brilliantly, vividly drawn. There are conversations so banal, so entrenched in minutiae that they become absurdly fascinating. David Foster Wallace is a superlative wordsmith. He is a genius with language and a master dialogue writer. It is a delight to be in his company, although parts of this book seem ponderously overwritten, and one wonders if Wallace may have taken judicious snips with his scissors, where his editor kept things in. Then again you could argue that ponderously laboured might be the point, at times. But the parts that soar really soar to terrific heights, and you forgive the verbosity because you are conscious it’s the last new work in a very long forever.
Early on, when I began reading this book, an acquaintance asked me how I was enjoying it - was it any good? I replied the following: “It deserves the quietest room”.
And in the wake of it, that’s still exactly how I feel.