“HE DIED IN 2008, leaving behind unpublished work of which The Pale King is a part,” reads the inside back jacket of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel. The front jacket copy bills The Pale King as “David Foster Wallace’s last and most ambitious undertaking.” And, before The Pale King even begins, Michael Pietsch’s editor’s note stands in the way, carefully and gracefully contextualizing what’s about to follow. “David was a perfectionist of the highest order,” Pietsch writes, “and there is no question that The Pale King would be vastly different had he survived to finish it.”
But Wallace didn’t survive to finish it, and while parts of The Pale King feel polished, effortless, and worthy of standing alongside, or above, the best of Wallace’s work—there are chunks that are just blisteringly smart and observant, and others that’re hilarious and affecting and melancholy—other parts don’t. The Pale King sometimes feels like a half-exposed archeological site: characters rise up, then vanish; plot points whip past in bursts of static; Wallace’s footnotes flit by in grayish blocks of tiny numbers and type at the bottom of the page. Frequently, but not always, The Pale King‘s chapters, sketches, and shards connect; while at first the novel feels like a jumble, the book’s final quarter finds a surprising number of pieces solidly interlocked. Still, there’s no getting around the state of things: At the abrupt end of The Pale King, a “Notes and Asides” section compiles some of Wallace’s “hundreds of notes, observations, and larger ideas” that were left unexplored. Given the long, difficult process Wallace had writing The Pale King, the book’s immense Infinite Jest-style narrative, and Wallace’s suicide, it’s tempting to think of this as little more than a rough collage of drafts.
Which maybe it is. Largely set in 1985 in a sprawling, demanding bureaucracy—an IRS regional examination center in Peoria, Illinois—The Pale King is about taxes the same way Infinite Jest was about tennis. Which is to say it’s sort of about taxes, but it’s mostly about everything going on around them: lives (and afterlives) lived out beneath florescent bulbs; philosophies and conflicts forged out of complex numbers and arcane subsections; sadness and hope and panic and humor and longing squashed down and built up by rules, regulations, and clocks that tick at a pace glaciers would find insufferable.
So maybe instead of declaring taxes the backbone of The Pale King (the book’s characters certainly aren’t—as astonishing as some of them are, most of them rise and fall and appear and disappear too frequently to grasp onto), a firmer assertion might be that The Pale King is about boredom, sadness, and the kind of liberation that’s only found in oppression.
That’s my guess, but hey, yours is as good as mine: A lot of things are started in The Pale King, but few are wrapped up. The lack of closure can’t entirely be attributed to Wallace’s death; as his notes explain, The Pale King was kind of supposed to be this way. (“Central Deal: Realism, monotony,” Wallace wrote below the phrase “Embryonic outline.” “Plot a series of setups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.”)
That isn’t to say, though, The Pale King isn’t satisfying. This is a tricky book, and a dense one, and—for a number of reasons—a sad one. But it’s also stunning, funny, and far more engrossing than any book involving exemptions and 1040s should be. As a final entry in Wallace’s bibliography, The Pale King feels unexpectedly appropriate: There are vast amounts of fascinating, stirring stuff here, and yet somehow, it doesn’t seem like enough.
What do we think about publishing a dead author’s unfinished novel? He’s dead and all, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that he’d object to it’s publishing, and it’s entrance into his body of work with it’s half-formed nature becoming more and more of a dusty footnote over time. Part of art is declaring a work finished and fit for judgment and entry into the rest of one’s body of work, no?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/ar…
Publishing this as David Foster Wallace’s book is misleading, at best. It is a book of his work, compiled and organized by others, but not his book. The publisher calls it “an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace,” but really it is what was in his files when he died. Should it be published? Yes, if there are readers who want to read it and an estate that wishes to make it available. But it should not be called “a novel by David Foster Wallace,” unfinished or otherwise. I can attest to the myriad changes of mind an author goes through on the way from “writing a novel” to having a finished novel, or having nothing at all. Intentions do not correlate to achieved art, and it is presumptuous for the publisher to assert otherwise.
@Commenty Colin: I don’t know how I feel about it, honestly. I will say I had a lot more reservations about reading The Pale King before I figured out how obviously unfinished it was—at which point reading it started to feel like a wholly different exercise than reading a finished novel. One point that’s also worth bringing up, I think: Wallace was smart. He had to know what’d happen with his papers and files after his death. Yet he left ’em around, some of them neatly organized and ready to be sent to his publisher. It’s not like Wallace’s death was unexpected (for him, at least); one could make the argument, I suppose, that if he hadn’t wanted this stuff to be read, he would’ve made those feelings clear, or even destroyed the work in question.
@Matthew Stadler: The book is referred to several times—in both publicity materials and on one of its title pages, I think—as The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. (I’m not aware of any instances where it’s been officially billed as “a novel by David Foster Wallace.”) This, along with Pietsch’s editor’s note and the “Notes and Asides” section, makes the book’s unfinished state pretty explicit.
@Erik, this is what I was going on, from Little, Brown: http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/books_978…
“The Pale King
An Unfinished Novel
By David Foster Wallace”
I agree, they’re dealing with the odd nature of the material pretty well; but the implication is that David Foster Wallace wrote a book, which is far from true.
@Matthew Stadler: Have you read the book yet?
By all accounts (or at least all the ones I’ve found), Wallace had been working on The Pale King for a good chunk of time before his death—like 10 years, apparently. He didn’t finish it, and since it’s clearly incomplete, there’s really no way to read it as if he had. (That said: It’s impressive how well the book holds together and how whole it feels, given the circumstances.) The publisher’s being about as clear about all of this as they can be while still letting people know that (A) it’s Wallace’s writing they’re selling, and (B) Wallace had been writing The Pale King as a novel. I’m just not sure how many more disclaimers you feel need to be hung on this thing.
@Erik again, My tone must be off, sorry. I don’t think they need to hang disclaimers. They published a book they call “an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace.” In answer to Colicky Colin I said I think there’s no such thing. Or, more accurate, everything in my life is an unfinished novel; everything, that is, except the five novels. A writer does a ton of stuff, but a book by a writer is a finished thing. There’s no book — there is nothing — until it’s finished.
I’m intrigued by your point that DFW must have known something like this would happen, and so his acquiescence is his consent. More saliently, his estate’s consent is his consent, and thank goodness they gave it. I’m looking forward to reading this DFW writing, but I don’t agree that it is a book by David Foster Wallace. (btw, I like the cover designer’s solution. No “by.”)
@ Erik, 1) I also disagree that not setting the manuscript on fire before hanging himself is tacit agreement to publishing – he obviously had some weightier things on his mind.
2) I’m also glad the publisher’s making these disclaimers, but there’s no doubt in my mind that with each year that passes, the “unfinished” tag will get buried further and further and Pale King will inevitably be included fully in DFW’s acknowledged body of work.
@ Stadler, “Should it be published? Yes, if there are readers who want to read it and an estate that wishes to make it available.” What?
If that’s the standard, we may as well force all authors and other artists to turn over all of the their unfinished work right now, shouldn’t we? After all, WE WANT IT, and distributors want to make money off it.
Is it just death that takes him out of the conversation over what happens with his work?
I guess the underlying question is, “why do we feel we have a right to this stuff?”
I’m not very satisfied with the answers “because he failed to burn it, and we want to read it.”
@Colin I was hewing to the legal answer, but I’m tempted to defend it as the ethical one, too. Death takes the author out of the conversation, irreversibly. Authors do everything they can to keep their interests alive, training people like you and me to articulate their needs as our own (they train us by writing so well). And crucially they choose an executor. Someone agreed to sell the rights for this work to Little, Brown. I presume DFW chose that someone, but maybe he neglected to. Regardless, now Little, Brown has the right, morally as well as legally. I don’t think the intuited needs of the dead should ever trump the articulated needs of the living.
@Matthew Stadler: Probably worth noting: The Pale King’s cover was designed by Karen Green, Wallace’s widow.
You guys are funny.