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The Pale King
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Saturday, 02 April 2011 |
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Wallace dug into his subject by taking accounting classes starting as far back as 1997. As it turns out, his longtime agent Bonnie Nadell tells Raz, Wallace was also quite good at math. "He could take very advanced accounting classes and follow them." Papers left in his office reveal Wallace started correspondences with various accountants around the country. He took great interest in his own accountant, Nadell says, "who loved him to pieces, because no one ever asks about all the minutia of doing someone's taxes." Wallace sought these details, Pietsch says, because he wanted to write a novel that connected to peoples' true lives. "He's trying to write about what's it's like to go home every day to the same spouse for 40, 50 years," Pietsch says. "How do you look into the face of a job that you know you're going to do again and again for 40 years? "How can you find meaning? How can you find delight? How do you find love? How do you find someone who will sit with you while you talk about what happened to you in line waiting to get to the bank teller?" Those are questions Wallace grappled with until his death, Pietsch says. The evidenceof that struggle was found in nearly 3,000 pages of drafts left in Wallace's office. Some were typed. Some were handwritten. Some were on floppy discs. "When I first encountered it, it was this mass of material," Pietsch says, like a puzzle with no directions for assembly.
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The Pale King
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Saturday, 02 April 2011 |
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Online confessions are a bit disgusting and have the distinct odor of guilty conscience so I’ll keep the self flagellation and buck passing to a minimum.
Today I purchased David Foster Wallace‘s “The Pale King” from Amazon.com. Yes … I read the New York Times article this morning about bookseller fury at Amazon being given the book before brick-and-mortar retailers, and I felt the characteristic frustration any retired indie bookseller would feel. Then mere hours later I surrendered to temptation and bought the book online.
I’d like to claim that there was a moment of hesitation, that I wrestled with the better angels of my conscience but that would be a lie.
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The Pale King
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Friday, 01 April 2011 |
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Under the hood, though, what’s remarkable about The Pale King is its congruity with Wallace’s earlier ambitions. Recent generations of Americans have, with a few notable exceptions, been allergic to what used to be called “the novel of ideas.” Information we love, and the more the better. Memes? By all means. But inquiries into ontology and ethics and epistemology we’ve mostly ceded to the science-fiction, self-help, and Malcolm Gladwell sections of the bookstore. A philosophy-grad-school dropout, Wallace meant to reclaim them. Infinite Jest discovered in its unlikely milieu of child prodigies and recovering addicts less a source of status details than a window onto (in Wallace’s words) “what it is to be a fucking human being.” And 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.
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The Pale King
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Thursday, 31 March 2011 |
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Update: So it's now tomorrow (Friday 1st) and a mate and I asked around a few bookstores here in Canberra. Nothing yet. Anyone anywhere else in Australia pick up a copy? Leave a comment if you did so other readers know where to find them. Australian David Foster Wallace fans will be able to find The Pale King in bookstores from tomorrow! "Great news! The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace, will be available in stores from tomorrow! http://pen.gy/i7cAFp"
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The Pale King
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Thursday, 31 March 2011 |
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The New York Times review of The Pale King by Michiko Kakutani, Maximized Revenue, Minimized Existence is now available to read. Heaps of spoilers if you're trying to avoid them. Possibly Kakutani's most positive DFW review: This novel reminds us what a remarkable observer Wallace was — a first-class “noticer,” to use a Saul Bellow term, of the muchness of the world around him, chronicling the overwhelming data and demands that we are pelted with, second by second, minute by minute, and the protean, overstuffed landscape we dwell in. It was in trying to capture that 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. And this is why his novels, stories and articles so often defied closure and grew and grew and grew, sprouting tendrils and digressions and asides — 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. Click for the The Pale King info page on The Howling Fantods. All the reviews and more.
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The Pale King
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Thursday, 31 March 2011 |
Fantastic article about David Foster Wallace and The Pale King in GQ by John Jeremiah Sullivan, Too Much Information. Once again, plot spoilers if you don't want to know anything about the book, but also one of the best reviews so far: The Pale King is different. He left us this book—the people closest to him agree that he wanted us to see it. This is not, in other words, a classic case of Posthumous Great Novel, where scholars have gone into an estate and unearthed a manuscript the author would probably never want read. Wallace seems to have laid this book before us in an all but do-with-it-what-you-will sort of way. Supposedly one of his last acts on earth was to arrange the most-ready pages and leave them in a place where his wife, the artist Karen Green, could find them. His notebooks led to the identification of partial chapters, which his longtime editor Michael Pietsch has assembled into something like a draft of the novel as it might have looked in Wallace's head—more polished than that, in places, less so in others. Think of a big mural that was half done. You'd be forgiven for suspecting that a book about random people who work for the government sounds insufferably tedious. The reason it's not has to do with the word about—it's the wrong word, the wrong preposition. Wallace doesn't write about his characters; he hadn't in a long time. He writes into them. That thing he could do on a tennis court or a cruise ship, or at a porn convention, that made him both an inspiration and a maddening, envy-making presence for the scores like me who learned to do "magazine writing" in his shadow (he was one of those writers who, even when you weren't sounding like him, made you think about how you weren't sounding like him)—Wallace liked to do that, in his fiction, with his characters' interior lives. Click for the The Pale King info page on The Howling Fantods. All the reviews and more.
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The Pale King
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Thursday, 31 March 2011 |
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Edit: Beware, there are MAJOR (novel ruining) spoilers beyond page 1 if you follow the link. There's some great stuff in this article about the process of putting the novel together. But I think some of the best lines in the novel are revealed and it's just not worth reading them in this context. Also, I disagree with Grossman's reading of Infinite Jest... although it's not anything that hasn't been said before.
Wallace's papers for The Pale King form a remarkable record of an idiosyncratic mind at work. He began by taking notes in, apparently, whatever notebook was within arm's reach; one of them has a Rugrats character on the cover. He switched pens practically every paragraph. The notebooks contain scattered words, character names and observations, as well as what appear to be personal admonitions. (One note reads: "If I wanted to, the solution is to get up early and go to the library.") They're chewed over and bent and practically charred by the intellectual energy Wallace expended in them. When Pietsch finished his survey, he had found a total of 328 chapters and drafts and fragments from The Pale King, but Wallace had left no clues as to how they fit together. At that point Pietsch's role skewed from editor toward collaborator. "It took me quite a long time to read all of that," Pietsch says, "and take notes, find the latest draft of every chapter, read it all again, find the things that made sense together and discover that there was a central chronology, which was not at first apparent." Pietsch organized the chapters in a spreadsheet, sorting them by type and character, choosing among multiple drafts and arriving at a tentative order from circumstantial clues. He edited the actual text as little as possible, but some chapters didn't have proper endings — they just trailed off midparagraph — and Pietsch had to choose a spot and then snip them off cleanly.
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The Pale King
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Wednesday, 30 March 2011 |
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It's totally understandable that bookstores are frustrated over the early release of The Pale King. I'm happy for everyone who's been able to get their hands on a copy because it's a wonderful book (particularly overseas readers who often wait longer for international copies to be shipped to local stores), but I'm sad because this will have an impact on the excitement of the launch parties. The date gives readers something to celebrate, but it's not so much fun when the book's already out there... Subterranean Books have already brought their release Party forward to April 1st 8:00pm (in case you were planning on going). From today's New York Times: Amazon and Barnes & Noble were selling the book on their Web sites on Wednesday, long before many bookstores would receive copies. Nicole Dewey, a spokeswoman for Little, Brown, part of Hachette, said the official on-sale date for the book was March 22, but the publication date — when the book is available everywhere — remained April 15. (A countdown clock on the Hachette Web site ticks away the days, hours and minutes until April 15.) “I don’t really understand the confusion,” Ms. Dewey said. “This happens all the time. There’s nothing unusual about it.” It was a distinction lost on many bookstores, who erupted in protest on Wednesday when they heard that Amazon was already selling the hotly anticipated book. “Outrageous,” said Zack Zook, the general manager and events coordinator at BookCourt, an independent store in Brooklyn. “If stuff like this keeps happening, booksellers are going to start suing publishers.” Kelly von Plonski, the owner of Subterranean Books in St. Louis, said she was “irate” after hearing on Wednesday that the book was already on sale. She had planned a midnight release party for April 14, the night before she thought the book was being released. “I’m really, really angry about it,” she said. “Add it to the list of advantages that Amazon has been given.”
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The Pale King
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Wednesday, 30 March 2011 |
It's late. I've done it. I knew I wouldn't be getting to bed tonight until I finished The Pale King. You know the feeling... close enough to the end and suddenly swept up in a flurry of words that makes it near impossible for one to stop reading. I don't want to ruin anything. All I'll say is that the more familiar you are with David Foster Wallace's body of work, the more I think you'll get out of this unfinished novel. It's part of an arc that I thought ended with his death and has miraculously been extended beyond it. I wrote previously about my initial thoughts / first impressions and they haven't changed now that I'm done. In fact the maturity of emotion and refined (even muted) style delivers some of the best writing of DFW's career. The Pale King is a catalyst for reflection and celebration, not mourning. We all have much to learn from the contents of this book. David Foster Wallace, thank you.
(And now it's time for bed)
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The Pale King
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Wednesday, 30 March 2011 |
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If there are past participants who would like to use the site as a venue for discussion of The Pale King in the coming weeks, I’ll be happy to set up user accounts and try really hard to look the other way so as to avoid the discussion (which, I’ll admit, will be hard to do). Speak up if you’re game (especially if you want to write for the blog; I’ll decide more or less arbitrarily when to stop adding new bloggers, probably somewhere around the half-dozen-participants-in-all mark). If there seems to be interest, I’ll set things up and let those who wish to drive the read run with it.
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