The Pale King

When a character named David Foster Wallace arrives at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, IL, he takes on a job so joyless and machinelike that (along with other new recruits) he's given boredom-survival training. This last, unfinished work by the author of will be getting a big push and likely considerable attention, given Wallace's reputation and tragic death. Readings and discussions are being scheduled nationwide at the time of publication. Wow, I want to see; pitch to all your literary readers.

Partway through this compendium of materials discovered after Wallace's tragic 2008 suicide, a character conflated with the author by name and false protestations of memoir writing recalls a youthful moment of drug taking. He could, he explains, "not only hear the music and each note and bar and key change and resolution of each track, but know, with the same kind of awareness and discrimination, that I was doing this, meaning really listening…but also being aware of the exact feelings and sensations the music produced in me." That sentence replicates exactly the experience of reading this book, which seems less to describe than to embody, in a carefully calculated overflow of language, the events presented. Ostensibly, this is about a man who ends up working for the IRS in the 1980s, a time of major administrative shift from gray-flannel servitude to aggressive number cracking, while also giving the backstories of not only our protagonist but other characters who end up encapsulating the IRS's defining ennui. This book delivers the powerful sensation that we're awash in data that only certain people know how to control, and they control it to their advantage. It's unfortunate that we can't see how the brilliant Wallace might finally have exerted control here, but at least we're invited into his final thoughts on the limits of our culture. Read this not as a novel (not even as an unfinished one) but as fragments of profound meditation, and you'll be fine. [See Prepub Alert, 10/25/10.]—Barbara Hoffert,

Few are the books that, like a rich, deep Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, change your life. This is one, though it's hard to qualify why. I suspect that it's the John Lennon factor. Wallace, like Lennon, died young and sadly; both were loved by critics and fans. Though both had misfires (Rock'n'Roll; Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present), both also kicked ass. You could ignore PK, but why? DFW is nearly Nabokovian in how he swirls words around. "Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk." While the setting is mid-1980s Peoria, IL, and the characters are IRS auditors, DFW is really just letting rip every idea he ever had. So it's not really about "plot" per se. This is the sort of book you return to over the years and discover parts of yourself. In that sense, it's a good choice for a desert island read, right up there with Walden, Updike, and Janet Jackson's True You. (See LJ's original review.) — Douglas Lord, "Books for Dudes", Booksmack! 5/5//11