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The Pale King
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
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Some readers have pointed out, however, that in addition to passages of breathtaking brilliance, the novel, like the tax code, also contains sections so eye-glazing they ought to come with a warning advising readers to wait a while before driving or operating heavy machinery. Wallace’s following verges on the cultlike, and some of his admirers will doubtless argue that such passages are deliberate, an attempt to evoke one of the novel’s main themes, which is the nature of boredom itself. Others may wonder whether the author, a renowned perfectionist, would have revised the text had he lived, and even whether, in its unfinished state, “The Pale King” should have been published at all. Wallace, the maximalist author of “Infinite Jest” and lover of the extended footnote, was such a fusser that when it came to the mechanics of editing, a suggestion to add or delete a comma could turn into a debate over the history of punctuation itself. “He would never have wanted it to be published in an imperfect form if he had lived to finish it, but he was not alive to finish it,” Mr. Pietsch said. He added that Wallace, normally a ruthless tosser of notes, correspondence and drafts that he didn’t want, had not only preserved the “Pale King” manuscript, but left an apparently finished 250-page section in the center of his desk. “To me, the fact that he left those pages on his work table is proof he wanted the book published,” Mr. Pietsch said.
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The Pale King
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
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How did you go about ordering a novel that, by its own design, seeks to be non-linear, seeks to challenge, seeks to strain the limits of a reader's expectations?
I had the extraordinary guidepost of Infinite Jest, which I think the reader is something like 350 pages into before they've met all the characters and have all the elements of the story up in their heads. I think one of David's methods was flood the reader with pleasure with many different kinds of stories that were so entertaining and so funny and so interesting and so beautiful that they kept opening up, and taking more and more—and then he'd work with that enormous assemblage to create something even larger.
So I read again and took notes, and read again and took notes, and read again and took notes. I tracked everything I read in terms of whether it was a unique piece, or whether it was a version that existed in other forms. If other versions existed, I'd look at all the multiple versions to find what appeared to be the last version. Once I had all of the distinct pieces, I read them again to try to understand the story that was within them. And gradually, I saw that there was a chronological sequence and spine to the novel. There were characters who arrived at a particular date, and things happened in a particular order.
So the main work of assembling the novel was finding those things that needed to happen an order for the reader to make sense of what was happening—and then arraying the other pieces, which are less time-specific, around those in a way that creates what I hope will be a pleasurable flow of David Wallace—of his brilliant, brilliant range of voices, and narrative techniques, and ideas.
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The Pale King
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
Michael Pietsch's (slightly edited) Editor's Note introduction to The Pale King, In search of David Foster Wallace's Pale King, is now available to read over at the Guardian. It is well worth reading due to the insight it provides into the editing process for The Pale King BUT it contains major thematic and structural spoilers. If you don't want to know anything about The Pale King don't read it just yet: At the time of David's death in September 2008, I had not seen a word of this novel except for a couple of stories he had published in magazines, stories with no apparent connection to accountancy or taxation. In November, Bonnie joined Karen Green, David's widow, to go through his office, a garage with one small window at their home in Claremont, California. On the desk Bonnie found a neat stack of manuscript, totalling nearly 250 pages. On the label of a disk containing those chapters he had written "For LB advance?" Bonnie had talked with David about pulling together a few chapters of his novel to send to Little, Brown in order to commence negotiations for a new contract and advance against royalties. Here was that partial manuscript, unsent.Exploring David's office, Bonnie and Karen found hundreds and hundreds of pages of his novel in progress, given the title The Pale King. Hard drives, folders, three‑ring binders, spiral‑bound notebooks and floppy disks contained printed chapters, sheaves of handwritten pages and notes. I flew to California at their invitation and two days later returned home with a green duffel bag and two sacks heavy with manuscripts. A box full of books that David had used in his research followed by mail.
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The Pale King
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
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Given that Wallace was working on this material at the time of his suicide, it’s difficult for a reader to avoid indulging in what critics call “the biographical fallacy,” i.e., the unfounded conviction that the ideas, emotions and beliefs present in a literary work are necessarily held by the author. But it seems highly unlikely, to say the least, that a story set among Internal Revenue Service employees at a regional examination center in Peoria, Ill. — chronicling the tax-collecting agency’s shift from hand-processing data to increased automation in the mid-1980s — could offer anything resembling profound insight into the human condition, much less into the existential conundrums that have vexed thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard. In Wallace’s hands, however, this tale of nervous bureaucrats becomes a potent extended metaphor for how we’re able to withstand the crushing tedium of modern life and still derive meaning from it. So, bearing in mind the caveat that we’ll never really know how polished any of this is, The Pale King is a nervy, frequently unruly, but consistently engaging achievement. It’s set at an IRS centre in small-town Illinois in 1985—the ideal setting for a story about not just boredom but the kind of infinite, face-melting tedium that requires near-religious concentration to survive. Wallace is interested in the personality types that are drawn to such work. Are they all emotionally defunct robots? How do they get through each day?
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Infinite Jest
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Friday, 08 April 2011 |
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If you guessed this might be a tumblr blog of photos of people holding Infinite Jest... you'd be correct!
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The Pale King
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Thursday, 07 April 2011 |
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Peoria is somewhat well-known for being the standard-bearer of Midwestern values or at least middle-American demographics. The famous phrase “Will it play in Peoria?” refers to the idea that for something to be mainstream in the U.S., it needs to succeed in somewhere as “average” or “common” as Peoria. So, in reality, Peoria is not home to an IRS Regional Examination Center—it is America’s Test Market. And I feel like that Harry Potter and Twilight and Dean Koonz play well in Peoria, but that The Pale King is not the sort of novel or book or entertainment that would likely appeal to mainstream America. And yet. And yet… The Pale King is a bestseller. It reached up to #4 on Amazon’s list of the top 100 books and will likely debut high on the New York Times hardcover fiction list.
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The Pale King
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Wednesday, 06 April 2011 |
Jenny Turner's review of The Pale King in The London Review of Books, Illuminating, horrible etc. is more than 'just a review'. It's an overview of David Foster Wallace's career. There are some major spoilers about 3/4 of the way through this piece: In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I’d said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time; b) but when he got to the ending – 981 pp. body copy, another 96 of small-print endnotes – did I think he was going to think it was worth it? No, I said, the ending’s infuriating, and although the author denied it and I haven’t made a study of the available papers, I still suspect it was to some extent an afterthought, a way of ducking out of a project that, without it, would maybe never have ended at all. But anyway, I said, that doesn’t matter, because the book pays off so much elsewhere. In the whole thing, for example, the whole magnificent construct. And in its thousands of individual moments, funny, tragic, odd, illuminating, horrible etc. And in the late-stage revelation as to what is actually in ‘the Entertainment’, the video said to be so hideously gratifying that people die while watching it, round and round for ever, in an endless loop. David Foster Wallace always had trouble finishing his novels. And yet he put in this one a thought so absorbing and delightful that you could easily imagine yourself, like the rat in the experiment, pressing the lever over and over. ‘Thousands of times an hour,’ as a character in the book explains. ‘Stopping only when the rat finally died of dehydration or simple fatigue.’
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The Pale King
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Wednesday, 06 April 2011 |
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The Pale King is a work that, as expected, only further proves David Foster Wallace's genius. Most of the time the unfinished novel (published posthumously after Wallace's 2008 death) is a thrilling read, replete with the author's humor, which is oftentimes bawdy and always bitingly smart.
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