Aegis 2012
108
Book Review >>> Eleanor Detrich
The Pale King David Foster Wallace. New York, NY: Little, 2011. 548 pp.
David Foster Wallace’s final novel, The Pale King, is an unfinished work, editorially pieced together after Wallace’s suicide in late 2008. Though it cannot be known just how far from finished the work is from what Wallace would have produced, or how much would have been added and excised in from the lengthy novel, the work deserves to be read. David Foster Wallace was known to push experimentation in his writing to the limits. When it comes to reading the work of the late literary genius, you can never project with complete certainty what you are getting yourself into. Known for his trademark use of lengthy, and thereby often comedic footnotes, Wallace constantly convolutes the classic ideas of the rules a piece of writing must conform to. Through his short stories, essays, and novels, Wallace offers the world the presentation of thought in ways that are entirely vanguard, causing outbursts of laughter from the reader in doing so. His experimentation is without explanation, apology, or closure, and—surprisingly—without narcissism. Never afraid to try, David Foster Wallace broke new literary ground throughout his whole life. Though The Pale King will not likely be favored over his previous novel, Infinite Jest, the work falls right in line with Wallace’s other fantastic works. As D.T. Max of The New Yorker notes, “[Wallace] realized that fiction could order experience as well as philosophy could, and also provide some of the same comfort.” Though comfort is not what this work offers, it does cause us to challenge our own thinking, and that, if nothing else, seems like an accomplishment that Wallace was always trying tried to achieve. The book is set primarily in the Midwestern city of Peoria, Illinois, at the droning workplace of several characters: the IRS Regional Examination Center. The novel is intended to function, at least in part, as, “a portrait of a bureaucracy…at a time of enormous internal struggle and soul-searching, the birth-pains of what’s come to be known as the New IRS” (70). If you’re wondering if a novel about the IRS could possibly be entertaining, you’re in for a paradoxical treat. The chapters vary in length and form, some only a short page or so in length, and some causing the reader to wonder what that their contents had to do with the chapter before. Just as the reader adapts to reading an already-peculiar form of one chapter, the following chapter requires a stepping back or reading readjustment to appropriately switch to the next. An example is the extensive stream-of-consciousness narration of the mind of Claude Sylvanshine, a primary character who is a nervous employee of the IRS who constantly and harshly compares himself to a superior colleague. The reader is made to feel that a transcript is being read of literally all incoming information from the man’s limbic system, complete with tedious—and even strenuous—observations to the most minute degree, like those of
