True courage, according to one of the eccentric wizards of accountancy who populate David Foster Wallace’s impossibly ambitious, unfinished but nonetheless just-published new novel, The Pale King, is “enduring tedium over real time in a confined space.”
The wizard is preparing initiates for a lifetime spent examining income-tax returns, the quintessence of tedium, which Wallace perversely chose as the dramatic heart of The Pale King. But readers who have penetrated that far into the dense core of this aptly described tornado of a novel – an Internal Revenue Service sub-office on Self-Storage Parkway, Peoria, Ill. – will inevitably read the exhortation as coming direct from the author himself, urging them to buck up as he buries them in a thick mass of financial arcana in a bold attempt to recreate the actual feeling of being bored to death.
Courage is required to endure The Pale King. But whatever rewards it might pay in return will always be clouded by the fact that its author failed in the same task, notoriously hanging himself in the fall of 2008, leaving less than half the novel in a neat pile on his desk and what appeared to be the balance of it in a scattered mass of files, disks, printouts and handwritten notes equivalent to 3,000 pages in manuscript – “a green duffel bag and two Trader Joe’s bags” worth, according to Michael Pietsch of Little, Brown, the seasoned New York editor who rescued it from the California garage where Wallace worked, and spent the next two years collating and reducing it into a dense, hyper-articulate and anything-but-linear 539-page novel.
The fact that Wallace did not survive the effort of writing The Pale King haunts every chapter of the book, especially the jaunty incursions written in the first person, each beginning with the brisk salutation, “Author here,” which enliven the early chapters. “It’s a book that’s being published after his suicide, and it’s a book that looks into the fire of some of life’s most difficult aspects,” Pietsch said. “So of course readers will look at it in that light.”
Pietsch surveyed the work at the behest of Wallace’s literary executors, his widow Karen Green and agent Bonnie Nadell
“I feel it was an entirely valid decision,” Pietsch added. “If he had lived, of course, the book would not have been published in this form. But he did not live.”
As the editor who helped Wallace bring Infinite Jest into print, Pietsch was extremely aware of the author’s perfectionism. After Wallace’s death, he published a now well-known essay on the intense bargaining process of editing his work. But the novel-like text published as The Pale King – its structure a matter of guesswork, crucial pieces clearly missing and others made from unrevised, handwritten drafts – is anything but perfect.
The easiest part was to find the latest versions of chapters Wallace had reworked, according to Pietsch. But their order was a matter of guesswork, he said, and neither beginning, middle nor end were readily apparent. The “Rosetta Stone” of his search for coherence appeared as a handwritten chapter that intimated the semblance of a plot. “It was the 234th piece that I read, and at last I saw he had written a scene where all these characters were in one place at the same time,” Pietsch said.
