THE PALE KING by David Foster Wallace

Reviewed by Angela Leroux-Lindsey

If Infinite Jest was Wallace’s grand gesture toward the ubiquity of the consumer-entertainment junkie, and its complex corollaries in politics, economics, and the general apprehension of a bureaucratic absolute, The Pale King must be, instead, his attempt to wrangle language into a representation of human existence in the absence of that: not just dullness or boredom, exactly, but the “psychic pain” of facing dullness, and accepting its institutional reinforcement. At the emotional core, it’s not the rote that gets us down; the rote itself is a tool, an excuse, to avoid the kind of self-examination that Wallace felt was paramount to being human. But severe introspection carries risks, so we sharpen and arrange our pencils and burrow in Inception-like layers of distraction, becoming gurus of avoidance.

Unintentionally, this unfinished novel completes the metaphor (though perhaps in ways that Wallace never intended): its tragedy is more than the loss of its author, but the startling negative space of the “rest” of it. I play right into Wallace’s hands: even though editor Michael Pietsch’s iteration is excellent—more than excellent, sublime—I want more. The endnotes and miscellanea are both a tease and slightly discomfiting; Pietsch wants to make the point that the writing process is its own tedium, that the richness of Wallace’s writing is even more hyper-apt than we think, but also that, as Wallace’s litany of wigglers attest, even distraction takes intellectual effort to be successful. But writers rarely want to allow a peek behind the curtain. Wallace’s wry pseudo-memoirist paradox is a more comfortable level of revelation, a “vague gesture toward the abstract idea” of revelation. As erudite as Wallace was, this conflict of the author v. “the author” was surely not lost on him, nor on Pietsch as he became the assembler-author, a further convolution of the man v. machine debate that looms over the plot, and ultimately, over the concept of “the novel” in general.

One stand-alone chapter that shows how completely philosophy consumes Wallace’s writing details a boy’s desire to touch his lips to every inch of his own body. Unlike in the bulk of this book, here the absurdity is self-aware; Wallace is brutal in allowing this anecdote to stand as part of his larger bureaucratic metaphor (as Donald Jones, GS-13 Team Leader in the Midwest REC Fats group from 1984-1990, defines bureaucracy: “…adherence to inflexible rules of operation. Inflexible rules of operation”). The boy is determined to complete this task arbitrarily assigned himself, despite any logical or pragmatic argument against it, and with the added incentive of disciplined routine; Wallace’s pun lets us know the story of the boy is all in good fun, but the play on the boy’s young age and his inability to understand the vastness of time in respect to tedium challenges the assumptions that we, as adults, are expected not to question.

It’s really the boy’s chiropractor, though, who speaks most directly as Wallace the philosopher when she is described as believing “in the interpenetrating dance of the spine, nervous system, spirit, and cosmos as a totality—in the universe as an infinite system of neural connections that had evolved, at its highest point, an organism which could sustain consciousness both of itself and the universe at the same time, such that the human nervous system became the universe’s way of being aware of and thus ‘accessible [to]’ itself—”

Wallace’s fictional universe, the IRS in 1985, provides the reader with a bureaucratic arena that “is not a closed system: it is this which makes it a world instead of a thing.” The Pale King’s world is replete with this inversion: people operate as things, serving the limitless elements of the IRS, turning pages endlessly, serving a shadowy higher-up that never really materializes, forever deferring, forever pretending that they’ve chosen not to try to move outside the length of the chain. But the human endowment of self-reflection pervades even this microcosm, and a conversation like that of Meredith Rand and “Mr. X” Drinion explicitly challenges unquestioning dullness with achingly well-crafted dialogue that is itself tedious—yet Rand, Drinion (and I) revel in it.

All of this sounds depressing, but Wallace’s gift is his ability to put a hundred thousand words to paper about the inescapable, unfathomable boredom of the human condition and still make it compulsively readable: in context, he makes actual tax code lyrical and magnetic. The bare glimpses of characters linger even in chapters where they’re not present; it’s remarkable how well over a thousand pages of disjointed material coheres when there is no evidence that Wallace had come close to finishing the project. For this reason, The Pale King may be the most convincing work yet of Wallace’s brilliance, and its messy conclusions exhibit a happening that resonates even without anything ever really happening.