Wallace started working on The Pale King just a couple of years after Infinite Jest appeared in 1996, and kept on with it while publishing two books of essays and two books of short fiction. After his suicide in 2008, at the age of forty-six, Wallace’s notes and drafts were taken over by Michael Pietsch. The published work apparently comprises half the material Wallace had amassed: there has been talk of putting it all online, and it will be curious to see if there are various crowdsourced editions. This version is so far from being a finished work that it is hard even to speculate about what form it might eventually have taken, and Wallace hadn’t reached the stage of knowing this himself. It doesn’t go anywhere much, but there are many other writers with whose work this might be more of a problem than it is with Wallace’s. Infinite Jest’s various plotlines have momentum, though it is glacial and circuitous, and that book’s digressions and set pieces are like an instance of Guy Davenport’s remark that there is a certain kind of modernist novel – Ulysses is a good example – that is really just a set of short stories in disguise. So, too, with The Pale King. One can read it at length without being overly bothered that there is far more exposition than there is development, or that some of its best writing has an undisclosed relationship with what there is of the main action. Although The Pale King hasn’t the profuse inventiveness or verbal density of Infinite Jest,the activities of Wallace’s mind and his language are still more important than whatever his story gets up to, or doesn’t.

The IRS workers who populate The Pale King tend, like Wallace’s earlier characters, tobe exceptionally gifted, or exceptionally damaged, or both in a toxically symbiotic way. There is David Cusk, prone to sweating attacks that have a way of coming on when he is worried about having a sweating attack; and Leonard Stecyk, whom we first meet as a child so relentlessly selfless, considerate, and obliging that he makes adults want, or indeed try, to kill him: he is like an ethicist’s comic thought experiment on the topic of whether it is possible to be too good. Then there is Lori Ware, who, at the IRS centre, is hardly more than a walk-on or a name, but in other chapters is shown as the amoral product of underclass violence and deprivation. There is Claude Sylvanshine, a ‘fact psychic’, whose inner life is a ‘fractious boiling confusion’ of random information supernaturally received, as if his brain were Googling non-stop: ‘The length and average circumference of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger’s small intestine. The exact (not estimated) height of Mount Erebus, though not what or where Mount Erebus is …’

Someone called David Foster Wallace makes a number of rather unwinning appearances, disavowing the cute meta-fictional games in which he is engaged. Against these strange creatures is Lane Dean Jr, who has joined the IRS to provide a living for the family he has started with a girl he doesn’t love but wants to do the right thing by, inducting himself into what one of the other characters calls ‘the weary stoicism of young fathers. [Though] Reynolds would not call it stoicism but acquiescence to some large and terrible truth.’

David Foster Wallace, 2002

That large and terrible truth has to do in part with the thing that the young Stecyk gets so badly wrong: our obligations to others, which takes its most material form in the paying of tax (in a raggedy, unfocused Platonic dialogue, Wallace has a group of IRS workers discuss the political theory of this while trapped in a lift). But it mostly has to do with overcoming boredom. Another of his characters, Chris Fogle, has an epiphany when, as a young wastoid enrolled in yet another college, he walks into the wrong lecture theatre by mistake and hears an Accounting lecturer say: ‘True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care … Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui – these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.’ The technologies of the self, the disciplines of self-command and self-transformation that the characters in Wallace’s other fiction tried to employ – to get off drugs or beat depression, to win and impress people and get things out of them – are here brought to bear on nothing more than how to stay at one’s desk all day and not make mistakes: what we all have to do, extraordinary or not.

Although The Pale King speaks to the ultimate necessity and difficulty of knuckling down and being a regular guy, as Wallace in his interviews also did, it also contains an apprehension of horror at the very idea. The inevitable description of the IRS workers as drones is made literal and sinister by the bugs, bees, and insects that buzz away in the background; Wallace incorporates that urban legend about the office worker who died at his desk and wasn’t discovered for days, and Lane Dean, zoning out over his forms, is visited by one of the processing centre’s resident ghosts, like Ivan Karamazov’s dream of the Devil, who lectures Dean about the history of the word ‘boredom’.

But the whole book itself shows up the message, in a way. Although The Pale King, like all of Wallace’s writing, has its longueurs, and although Wallace isn’t worried about the imitative fallacy (writing about boredom has to be boring, etc.), there is a form of the banal to which he himself would never have submitted. At one point, he talks about how hard it is in fiction to represent concentrated desk work, and gives us samples of the kinds of thing novelists usually come up with: ‘Only when she had finished the report did the executive glance at her watch and see that it was nearly midnight. She had been completely absorbed in her task, and was only now aware that she had worked through supper,’ etc., etc. That’s what ordinary, unexceptional fiction sounds like, the kind of fiction that, to his readers’ deep and enduring gratitude, David Foster Wallace found too boring to write.

CONTENTS: JULY–AUGUST 2011