The Pale King, like its progenitor Infinite Jest, is a puzzle - a bit like one of those 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that consumes the family's attention for weeks - and before emptying the pieces onto the table, Wallace shows us the cover on the box in a chapter that luminously sets the stage and instantly reminds the reader that whatever follows, this is a David Foster Wallace novel. And if there's one thing that Wallace did better than most everyone else on the planet, it was writing singularly wonderful sentences.
"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat... Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers."
And then, as if in a whirlwind, pieces of the puzzle come spinning into place from multiple points in time and space. One by one, Wallace visits characters who will convene in 1985 (the novel's present day) at the Internal Revenue Service's Midwest Regional Examination Center:
"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat... Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers."
And then, as if in a whirlwind, pieces of the puzzle come spinning into place from multiple points in time and space. One by one, Wallace visits characters who will convene in 1985 (the novel's present day) at the Internal Revenue Service's Midwest Regional Examination Center:
Leonard Stecyk, an 11-year-old do-gooder in 1964, whose unnervingly incessant good deeds make him the object not only of peer spite but "a complex hatred" from just about everyone, including a homeroom teacher who "ends up brandishing blunt scissors and threatening to kill first the boy and then herself, and is put on Medical Leave, during which she receives thrice-weekly Get Well cards, with neatly typed summaries of the class's activites and progress."
Toni Ware, whose tragic childhood at the hands of a single mother whose "relational skills were indifferent and did not include consistent or truthful speech," whose mother's physical and/or mental absence left Toni prey to the lechery of the men and boys with whom she shared her impoverished circumstances, fending for herself as best she knew how.
Present-day Claude Sylvanshine flying into Peoria on a commuter plane from Chicago, "a terrifying thirty-seater whose pilot had pimples at the back of his neck and reached back to pull a dingy fabric curtain over the cockpit and the beverage service consisted of a staggering girl underhanding you nuts while you chugged a Pepsi." Sylvanshine is afflicted with Random Fact Intuition (RFI), something akin to ESP or precognition except that Sylvanshine's insights are, as the name suggests, random and, as far as he can tell, useless.
Toni Ware, whose tragic childhood at the hands of a single mother whose "relational skills were indifferent and did not include consistent or truthful speech," whose mother's physical and/or mental absence left Toni prey to the lechery of the men and boys with whom she shared her impoverished circumstances, fending for herself as best she knew how.
Present-day Claude Sylvanshine flying into Peoria on a commuter plane from Chicago, "a terrifying thirty-seater whose pilot had pimples at the back of his neck and reached back to pull a dingy fabric curtain over the cockpit and the beverage service consisted of a staggering girl underhanding you nuts while you chugged a Pepsi." Sylvanshine is afflicted with Random Fact Intuition (RFI), something akin to ESP or precognition except that Sylvanshine's insights are, as the name suggests, random and, as far as he can tell, useless.
A teenaged David Cusk, whose extreme public sweating kept him from having anything like a "normal" childhood, and who resurfaces in 1985 jammed up against and profusely sweating into the corduroy suit of one David Foster Wallace in the backseat of a U.S. Government-owned AMC Gremlin en route to the IRS's Midwest REC in Peoria.
Yes, Wallace inserts himself as a young man among this motley assemblage. In an Author's Forward that for various legal reasons explained in lengthy footnotes occurs on page 66 of the text and begins simply, "Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona," Wallace explains that The Pale King is, in fact, not the fiction that you might suppose it to be or that the book's publisher is passing it off as, but in fact a memoir of the 13 months that Wallace spent betweeen 1985 and 1986 working as a GS-9 examiner at the Peoria REC.
The story of how David Wallace, literary wunderkind ostensibly enrolled at Amherst College during the mid-1980s ends up toiling in the mind-numbingly tedious employ of the Internal Revenue Service, this self-inserting, genre-subverting backstory is, along with the aforementioned character studies, some of the best writing in The Pale King. In fact, some of the most incandescent writing of Wallace's career can be found in this book, but also here are some spectacularly boring passages rooted in Wallace's IRS research, pages that you'll never want to read, nor do I believe David Foster Wallace would have wanted you to.
Yes, Wallace inserts himself as a young man among this motley assemblage. In an Author's Forward that for various legal reasons explained in lengthy footnotes occurs on page 66 of the text and begins simply, "Author here. Meaning the real author, the living human holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona," Wallace explains that The Pale King is, in fact, not the fiction that you might suppose it to be or that the book's publisher is passing it off as, but in fact a memoir of the 13 months that Wallace spent betweeen 1985 and 1986 working as a GS-9 examiner at the Peoria REC.
The story of how David Wallace, literary wunderkind ostensibly enrolled at Amherst College during the mid-1980s ends up toiling in the mind-numbingly tedious employ of the Internal Revenue Service, this self-inserting, genre-subverting backstory is, along with the aforementioned character studies, some of the best writing in The Pale King. In fact, some of the most incandescent writing of Wallace's career can be found in this book, but also here are some spectacularly boring passages rooted in Wallace's IRS research, pages that you'll never want to read, nor do I believe David Foster Wallace would have wanted you to.
As Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, reminds us in the novel's forward, this is an unfinished work, to what extent being anyone's guess. I would say that The Pale King is half-finished at best, that there are still missing pieces to this puzzle, and that many of these pages wouldn't have seen the light of day had Wallace survived to finish this work. The fact that he's not is our loss, and we're grateful to have this final chance to read "new" work from an author whose talents were only matched by his demons.
Read The Pale King if you're a reader of Wallace's work who has eagerly awaited the release of this volume since its discovery, someone who most assuredly is not waiting for me to give you the nod to do so. But if this is not you, if you've not dipped your toes in the deep waters of Mr. Wallace's prose, then might I sugggest you turn instead to one of his other books, a collection of essays perhaps or, if you're feeling brave, Infinite Jest, a puzzle more engrossing than The Pale King and one for which we have all of the pieces in our possession.
Read The Pale King if you're a reader of Wallace's work who has eagerly awaited the release of this volume since its discovery, someone who most assuredly is not waiting for me to give you the nod to do so. But if this is not you, if you've not dipped your toes in the deep waters of Mr. Wallace's prose, then might I sugggest you turn instead to one of his other books, a collection of essays perhaps or, if you're feeling brave, Infinite Jest, a puzzle more engrossing than The Pale King and one for which we have all of the pieces in our possession.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
