Daniel Kolitz has written an extensive piece for Hopes and Fears about The Pale King, specifically §22 (The Fogle novella), Attention without choice: David Foster Wallace's Adderall novel:
The piece in question comes early in The Pale King, Wallace’s unfinished, posthumously published novel-in-fragments. It’s a 98-page monologue (really, a novella) delivered by one ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle, a near-derangedly prolix IRS employee. Fogle tells us of his self-described “wastoid” adolescence spent drifting in the post-Watergate ‘70s, an apparent wasteland of drugs, divorce and daytime television. He says that he “had no motivation,” that “everything at that time was very fuzzy and abstract.”
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The FDA approved Obetrol in 1960, as a diet drug. It was meth, mostly, with some dextroamphetamine tossed in to distinguish it from the competition. Obetrol was just one of many drugs then ushering in a kind of golden age of rampant speed abuse. Truckers, hippies, housewives: Collectively they popped, snorted and shot the country into an outright epidemic, as detailed in Nicholas Rasmussen’s On Speed.
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Did Wallace realize he was writing about Adderall? It’s not impossible: Anyone whose risked their vision reading Infinite Jest’s 8-print footnotes knows the guy had more than a passing interest in pharmacology. And by the time he started writing the Fogle section, in the mid-‘00s, Adderall was already a decade into its steep ascent, generating countless newspaper pieces on overmedication and undergraduate pill-slinging. Wallace—a well-informed adult working on a college campus—would likely have been aware of it.
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Continue reading Attention without choice: David Foster Wallace's Adderall novel.
For more about the Fogle novella check out Matt Bucher's essay, The Fogle Novella: Catalysts in the Conversion Narrative, that he presented at the DFW2015 conference earlier this year.
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