Author: J. Mohorcich
In the years preceding his death, David Foster Wallace wrote a book about you. It is called “The Pale King” and is being published by Little, Brown & Co. on April 15. It is 548 pages and retails for $27.99.
Don’t worry, though. No one will know it’s about you. You yourself might not have even known, had I not just blurted it out. In reading “The Pale King,” it is possible, even natural, to transport cover-to-cover the innocent notion that you happen to be reading a series of dazzling, breathless sentences about the employees of an IRS Regional Examination Center in Illinois. The book would not at any point dispossess you of this idea. This makes figuring out what hangs beneath and between the novel’s archly beautiful bureaucratese so important and so difficult.
The plot gathers around one David Foster Wallace, a younger and lightly-fictionalized version of the author. As the fictional Wallace moves deeper into his twenties, he struggles to find purchase in the adult world. His ability, honed in college, to “sit still and read the same thing for large amounts of time” lands him a job at the Internal Revenue Service. His experience at the IRS’s Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, brings him nose-to-nose with life after college. What he finds is, at first, a total and compressing boredom without horizons or ceilings. Then, much more interestingly, he finds people who have managed to carve out lives within this tedium. And, most interestingly, author-Wallace suggests, in his own intricate and tangled way, the crucial nature of learning how to confront the blank-eyed specters of adulthood.
Wallace left the “The Pale King” about two-thirds unfinished when he died in 2008. The third we have refuses to cohere or sit down. It sprawls outward in convulsive fits, lapses into catatonia and baffling fugues. The work’s metafictive cleverness fights for space, and not always gracefully, with the sustained howl of the emotions very near its core.
Wallace published his first short story, “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing,” in 1984, during his junior year at Amherst College. It suffers no shortage of postmodern tricks, traffics in planetary metaphor, ends in midsentence, et cetera. Yet, it is at its core really and truly and simply about a kid trying to figure out a way to live here, on the planet Earth, without destroying himself. Ever since Trillaphon, this tension between literary tricks and simple but unavoidable how-to-live questions has defined Wallace’s career.
How to arrange the flying buttresses and intercolumniations and spidery latticework of postmodern lit into a human edifice? Real, live, flesh-and-fingernail human beings who aren’t just narrative alibis, eyeballs within eyeballs. People whose joints crack. Characters who excite in the reader something real, who set astir undeniable human things. How to be, in a novel, thoughtful and playful about things like narrative structure and also open-eyed about how it feels to watch something you love die. That high wire has long been Wallace’s territory.
“The Pale King” wobbles occasionally, sometimes in ways that can’t necessarily be excused by its incompleteness. Most of the ever-revolving cast of characters converse in the same whip-smart, hypersyllabic, DeLillo-stained voice that fingerprinted Wallace’s earlier work. While the many and protean tongues in “Infinite Jest” show Wallace can escape the weight of his own style, the pressure of voicing so many identically-employed and similarly-situated creatures seems to have hemmed him in.
This sameness is, of course, very much the novel’s raison. Reviewers might (and have) observed that the novel is, well, pretty goddamn tedious in stretches. However, the novel has something to say in these parts, too: this enormously heavy and crushing sameness and boredom is an invariable and infrangible part of the existence for which you are signed up. Here it is, right here, not mediated or adulterated or attenuated. Don’t blame the mirror.
Most great novels offer the truths that come from sorrow, from love, from betrayal; truths of heartbreak and of glory. “The Pale King” offers the truths of boredom. Of not mattering. Of being so inconsequential you can feel it in your fingers.
As it turns out, boredom’s truths are no less scary and no less profound than any other sort. We’ve all — especially those of us here at Occidental — been taught in complex and invisible ways that we are the irreplaceable centers of the universe. That the spoils of the world are on layaway for us. That we are the heirs of dynamic and rewarding futures.
“The Pale King” does not promise exciting or even interesting lives for its characters. It realizes a world whose greatest challenge is learning how to live with the day-to-day stuff in front of you. The world that presses against your eyes as you read this review.
We, the whip-smart and large-eyed youth of the Western world, are approaching the world described in “The Pale King.” And what those of us on tippy toes see over the rim of graduation is a world in which boredom and disappointment are no longer occasions but constants. That the burdens of adulthood will present themselves to us in banal, unassuming ways, but that this does not make them any lighter or easier to carry.
“The Pale King” is about the things at stake in every petty and soul-shrinking moment of every adult day. And if you extend a careful and exploratory finger toward its deepest, darkest and most elusive parts, the only thing I can ever imagine you’d find is the cold, abrupt touch of your own mirrored finger, pointing back at you.
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