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As most of the people in my corner of a corner of a corner of Goodreads know—just as well as they know about my rabid, undying affection for David Foster Wallace—I tend to use Occam's razor to slash through supernaturalistic irrationality on a pretty regular basis. Despite this reflexive skepticism, I couldn't help feeling like this book was somehow written for me while reading it. Working the graveyard shift at a residential treatment facility for "at-risk youth" (the second such facility I'd c...
The Pale King is a skyscraping achievement. Separating Wallace's backstory from the novel might be impossible, but the edited text, however incomplete, astonishes. The Pale King doesn't need a sympathy vote; the book soars on its own merits.I should also point out that, after two attempts, I never finished Infinite Jest. A couple years back I recommended IJ to my friend James because he plays tennis and I remembered something in that doorstop about a tennis camp. James is still mad. So I didn't
I have been a little fascinated with David Foster Wallace since learning of his suicide on the blogosphere several years back. I have already written a little bit about my reading of some of his work and just happened upon The Pale King in the CDG airport on the way to Berlin. Perhaps it was just a funny twist of fate because the English book selection at Relais H in France tends to be something between the abysmal military fiction of Tom Clancy and the insipid modern novels pretending to be lit...
Original review: May 10, 2011100 Words in Search of a Precis (For Those of Us Who Prefer the Short Form of Stimulation)DFW is calling on us to become Heroes or Pale Kings. There is something Proustian at work in “The Pale King”. DFW isn’t so much in search of lost time or even perceptions; he is in search of a lost ability to “perceive” or to “sense” or to make things “interesting”. In a time when there is so much boredom, DFW is offering us a way of seeing and engaging with the parts of the wor...
“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.” ― David Foster Wallace, The Pale King If a novel about IRS examiners in a Midwest Regional Examination Center seems like a bad pitch, and definitely a boring novel, you will have almost grasped about one-half the magic of DFW. This is absolutely a novel about boredom, tedium, loneliness, isolation, bureaucracy, melancholy, and depression. Did I also mention this book is damn funny and absurd? I giggled at parts. I cried at part
After a second reading, my feelings haven't much changed. I'm adding half a star for those sections that do have really good writing, but all in all the novel feels too "patchwork" to really land for me. It's like one of those pointillist paintings in reverse: when zoomed in on the small individual sections look great, but zoomed out and looked at as a whole they don't complement each other as well as perhaps might have been intended.3.5 starsFIRST READ-THROUGH REVIEW:Reading the introduction to...
It’s a little misleading to call The Pale King unfinished: in fact, it barely gets started. Despite the novel’s physical size, it’s less than half the length of Infinite Jest, and it was clearly intended to become megafiction of that order. Throughout what we have of the novel, Wallace writes using various styles and perspectives. Sometimes he is overly detailed, expounding at length on the intricacies of tax law and the ins and outs of IRS processes – this is an exercise in immersion, an attemp...
"Almost anything you pay close, direct attention to becomes interesting…"When David Foster Wallace committed suicide he left the pages of his unfinished manuscript in neat orderly piles which convinced his wife and editor he wanted what he had written to be published. What all this writing amounts to can probably be better described as ideas for a novel rather than a novel itself. The only other novel I've read where the author died before completing it (unless you believe Virginia Woolf still h...
That there James Joyce fella recast the minutiae of existence to epic and heroic proportions, elevating the single day of an everyman into a hero’s odyssey. The Pale King too, is intense and dramatic in a similar vein. The drama is internalised, as the characters work through laborious tax issues, assessing optimal routines to identify where to expend their energies, where to scrutinise and focus and where not to squander their attentions in distracted ignorance.The novel opens with a character
