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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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DFW Archive
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Tuesday, 05 April 2011 |
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Make a coffee, tea, whatever. Sit yourself down. Take a deep breath. Then read. There is no quote I can provide to do it justice. Read it. (A couple of minor Pale King spoilers if you know nothing about it). (Oh and tissues. You might need tissues.)
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 05 April 2011 |
For much of my reading of The Pale King I was reminded of David Foster Wallace's life, not his death. He was in my head again, a wonderfully familiar, and comforting, feeling. I did not expect to experience joy such as I did. Gabriel Brownstein's article for the Guardian, The shadow over David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, gives great insight into the evolution of his love for DFW's writing, I hope he enjoys The Pale King and that his expectations are not fulfilled as he predicts they might be: Now the last novel is coming out: the unfinished manuscript that sat in the study while the body swung on the patio. If the book had been going well, would he have done that? Will anyone be able to read The Pale King without thinking of his death? I know I won't. This is my fear: that all the fun and fireworks of his prose will become pathologised. We'll all become Woodian gastroenterologists, trying to figure out how the writing related to Wallace personally, how it came out of him. God, would that stink.
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The Pale King
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Tuesday, 05 April 2011 |
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The American writer David Foster Wallace killed himself in 2008, at the age of 46, having authored two novels. He also had published some excellent nonfiction and short stories. But novel-wise, that was his literary output: two books (one of which was very long).
That basic set of facts made it confusing to read, in the New York Times on Friday, Michiko Kakutani's review of a book published under the title The Pale King, and in the name of Wallace, which she described as a "posthumous unfinished novel." This project or literary event had been in the pipeline quite publicly and for a while, yet those three words, as a description of a published book with a specific final length and price (548 pages, $27.99), are moths eating holes in the whole project of the review.
What is this book? If it were a David Foster Wallace novel, Wallace would have sent it to his publisher himself. It was made out of "heaps of pages," Time magazine reported, stuffed into a duffel bag by Wallace's editor. Maybe, in a world where Wallace kept on living, the collection of words would have turned out to have been half of a novel. Maybe it would have been one compact novel and a one collection of short fiction. Maybe it would have been tinder for bonfire.
It's not so much a problem of Art—David Foster Wallace took himself out of the conversation about what David Foster Wallace wanted, after all—as a problem of craft. The Pale King is not a finished object. Reviewing it as a novel is like eating whatever was in a dead person's fridge and calling it a dinner party and comparing it to the dinner parties the deceased gave in the past.
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The Pale King
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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Emmett Stinson's review of The Pale King can be found over at Readings: Books, Music and Film: But the fragmentary nature of the book seems appropriate given that Wallace’s work always refused simple narrative closure: he worked hard to create complete novels that felt like fragments. Even his 1,079-page doorstop of a novel,Infinite Jest (1996), left at least as many questions unresolved as it answered. And it’s to both Penguin’s and Pietsch’s credit that they haven’t attempted to craft what Wallace left behind into a coherent work, avoiding the critical disdain that has accompanied other heavily edited, posthumous ‘novels’, such as Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth (1999). Click through to the The Pale King info page with links to all reviews so far.
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The Pale King
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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Sam Anderson has an article / review about The Pale King (almost... Anderson writes, In the end, “The Pale King” is basically impossible to review) and DFW in the NYT Magazine, David Foster Wallace’s Unfinished Novel — and Life. Plenty of spoilers, but one to come back to once you're done: [...] It’s fitting, then, that the story of the publication of David Foster Wallace’s final book, “The Pale King,” has much in common with a D.F.W. story. Most obviously it recalls “Infinite Jest,” which pivots around the release of the unfinished final work of a troubled genius (James O. Incandenza) who struggles with the same artistic issues Wallace struggled with and eventually, like Wallace, commits suicide. Incandenza’s film, “Infinite Jest,” is so entertaining it actually kills people. Wallace’s final work, “The Pale King,” was rumored to be something like the opposite: one culture blog, on hearing about its subject, wondered if it might turn out to be “the most boring book ever.” But all of this throat-clearing is probably just my attempt to delay writing directly about “The Pale King,” a book (or manuscript, reconstruction, whatever) that’s hard to write about for a big, heaping handful of reasons. For D.F.W. fans, “The Pale King” is emotionally fraught in a way that a normal novel could never be — it’s as much an absence as a presence, as much dark matter as solid mass. And that absence turns out to be, as D.F.W. often said about just about everything, extremely complex. Wallace’s absence is complicated, for instance, by the fact that his “authorial presence” in “The Pale King” is every bit as strong, as relentlessly present, as it has ever been.
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The Pale King
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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Tom Ruprecht on The Pale King over at Huffington Post Books, The Relationship Between Author and Reader: Examining David Foster Wallace's 'The Pale King': [...]What do you do when a person you relied on to make sense of the world decides life is no longer worth living? That's a question I've been mulling over ever since David Foster Wallace took his own life in 2008. This month sees the release of his unfinished novel The Pale King. The book concerns IRS agents trying to deal with the tedium of their work and still find meaning in their lives. In other words, a book about how to endure life's unpleasantness written by a man who has killed himself. Friends of Wallace have already expressed worry that the author's suicide will affect how readers experience the book. I agree that it will. But is that really the reader's fault? And is it necessarily a bad thing? Continue reading...
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DFW Remembrance
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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Over to Chris: I work at Broadcastr, a new social-media platform from Electric Literature. To celebrate the release of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, we're compiling a series of audio appreciations--short recordings (+/- 2 min) by writers, bloggers, journalists, and fans--that memorialize readers' most memorable experiences with DFW's work. We want fans to consider their first (or most memorable) moment with a DFW piece. Reactions, thoughts--any memorable experience you may have had involving DFW. We're asking our contributors to have their recording posted by the end of the first week of April--we want to be sure to have as many posts as possible up and running before the book's release. We're hoping this will spread to at least 1,000 fans, so if you have any friends who you think might like to contribute as well, feel free to pass along the instructions below. Here are your instructions: Visit www.Broadcastr.com, or download the free app by searching "Broadcastr" in the iTunes store. Hit the red "record" button in the top left-hand corner to add your message to the map. Your reaction or message can be up to three minutes long; if you don't like what you recorded, just hit "redo" and try again. If you find yourself getting stuck on what to say, let me know and I can suggest some prompts. When you like what you've got, add a title, tag, and category. (For category, we suggest "Arts & Culture"). IMPORTANT: Be sure to add the tag "PaleKing", so that your message will be displayed to other Wallace fans. Finally, pin your recording to the map. Hit the "Pin it to the Map" button, then move the pin to wherever is most appropriate for your story, and click. Share your story on Twitter, Facebook, and email your friends to encourage them to join our appreciation. |
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The Pale King
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
Lovely review of The Pale King over at The Hipster Bookclub, The Pale King and I. This one is by Marie Mundaca, who I had the amazing opportunity to catch up with when I was in NYC for the Footnotes conference a year or so ago (Hi, Marie!). If you don't want to know anything about The Pale King there are quite a few little spoilers in this review. But make sure you come back and read it once you're done. There's some neat stuff about the design of the text... did I mention Marie designed The Pale King? Super cool: The Pale King is the most recent David Foster Wallace book I’ve designed. It may be the last, but who knows what will pop up? (3)
When I design books, I usually read most or all of the book before I start designing—not a close read, but I want to know the plot and the characters so I can think about what fonts would best represent them. Do I want a dense, gray page, or a light, airy page? Are the characters more masculine or more feminine? If there are long sections of letters, how will the reader react to the italic font of this face? And can I use Dalliance? I love that font.I knew pretty much what I wanted to do with TPK(4), but I also was anxious to read it in manuscript form. We Wallace fans had been hearing about “this longer thing” he was working on, “a brick”—those were two ways he referred to it. And we’d all followed the story of his widow, Karen Green, along with his agent Bonnie Nadell and editor Michael Pietsch, gathering up years of disks and manuscript pages, piecing everything together. I even had a dream about it once, running into Pietsch getting off a bus with a duffel bag full of pages. As it turned out, it was too distracting and sad for me to read while I was designing it. Wallace’s tiny, pointy notes were all over the manuscript copy, mostly name changes and corrections and small additions...
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DFW Archive
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Monday, 04 April 2011 |
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There are some very minor Pale King spoilers in this one, with most of the article considering other archive contents: "Good Old Neon", a short story that appears in the 2004 collection Oblivion, is perhaps Wallace’s most deliberate, unadorned conversation with himself. I first read it in a car ride from Montreal to New York on a sunny, summer day. Through the Adirondacks, with my sister on my right and my parents in the front, I was totally destroyed and absolutely electrified. When I finished the story, I couldn’t speak, I just thought to myself remembering the time before I read the story, who I was then, a couple hours ago. In it, a man sees a "therapist" (a word he later changed to "analyst"), finds it useless, and, without alternative, decides to kill himself. In BOX 24, at the top of the first page of this first handwritten draft is "FRAUD" followed by, "This is the bad part, the foggy part where there's way more than I can ever make you see." Wallace, and the reader, has no choice but to go on. In different pen colors, blue to black to red to green, the story gets better, shorter, fuller. Where there was once an "analyst" with a "mustache", there is later an "analyst" with a "small ginger mustache", a mustache that is likely taken seriously by its owner and not by anyone else. In his revisions, Wallace would not only correct himself but comment, taunt. Unsatisfied with the first few pages, he wrote at the top of four above the first line, "(I know this part is boring and probably boring you, but it gets a lot more interesting after I kill myself)." This aside made it into the final version of the story. But even the thin sheen of self-defacing humor fades away: "Everything gets so abstract all this free-writing I can't be bothered to even type up. We tried to bombard our problems with will power instead of bringing it into alignment with God’s intention for us." Wallace did not write or talk in extremes, he lived in them. "Good Old Neon" ends with an oracular exhale, a portion of prose that makes the reader at once alive, aware, terrified, and tired. After going over it for probably the hundredth time, he wrote in a tidy box, "incoherent, but moving." The story is dense, bleak, again necessary, but not incoherent. The last line on that page is also that, "[Ghosts talking to us all the time—but we think their voices are our own thoughts.]" It is no longer the "I" of the protagonist, or the writer, but a "we" that includes us in the nightmare, a self-imposed nightmare, though it feels inevitable.
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