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?
