By Don Oldenburg, Special for USA TODAY
An April release for David Foster Wallace's literary finale The Pale King is only appropriate.
By Giovanni Giovannetti Effigie
David Foster Wallace ended his life at age 46 before ending The Pale King.
By Giovanni Giovannetti Effigie
David Foster Wallace ended his life at age 46 before ending The Pale King.
The posthumous and unfinished novel's tenuous plot revolves around U.S. tax code enforcement, specifically the Internal Revenue Service's Regional Processing Center in Peoria, Ill., in 1985, a pivotal year when forces within the IRS were battling over instituting an automated computerized tax-return system.
Did someone say "dull"? Wallace does so emphatically, calling it "massively, spectacularly dull" in his first-person Author's Foreword that starts on page 66 ? a humorous, Wallace-at-his-best detour from a plot of detours in which he claims the entire book is true and disclaims the book's standard fiction disclaimer. (If you read no other chapter in this book, read this one.)
But he's referring to the IRS bureaucracy and not so much his novel, which is based supposedly on his real-life experience working a year for the IRS after being suspended from college for ghosting term papers for cash. No, the novel itself delves into that bureaucratic dullness in a remarkable and imaginative way, replete with dead-ends, disappearing characters, disjointed tales, amusing tiny footnotes and exotic punctuation.
But that's David Foster Wallace. And there aren't (m)any like him. Readers witnessed Wallace's over-the-top creativity in his second novel, Infinite Jest, published in 1996, not to mention other short stories and writings, from his extraordinary profile of John McCain to essays on tennis, television and lobsters.
From the first paragraphs, Wallace pushes the bounds of excess with vivid descriptions and humorous observations that run up against off-the-wall thoughts and random inanity, one breezy non sequitur after another, as if streaming uncensored from a 110% hyper brain.
But just as the reader is about to say "What the ? " Wallace drops an unexpected clarity bomb on the chaos, and with a single short sentence everything makes sense.
The Pale King
By David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown, 547 pp., $27.99
So you reread a lot of The Pale King to figure out how Wallace just did that. Or to embrace the beauty of his narrative. Or bask in his off-kilter insights and irony that Wallace effortlessly elevates to an art form.
Early on, Wallace refers to one character as having "a storm in his head "? an apt description of himself. Despite the storm, Wallace's observational prowess finds meaning in everything, segueing from a teenager picking at his face, to a rhythmic spelling of the word "headache," to an IRS pension benefit formula.
In his writerly wheelhouse, Wallace just jams. He writes best the way our minds operate ? flitting from one thing to the next, lighting on a question from the CPA exam to that isometric buttocks-tightening exercise.
He unfortunately ended his own life at age 46 before ending the book. He died in 2008, leaving behind assorted stacks of manuscripts and notes and computer files, already titled The Pale King. Eventually, his Infinite Jest editor, Michael Pietsch, pulled the pieces together. For the reader, it doesn't matter that the novel is unfinished. Read its chapters in random order and you'll still be amazed by the talent. If you read only half of what's there, it would be one of the best reads you've had in a long time.
There are geniuses and there are geniuses. David Foster Wallace was both, and The Pale King is a testament to that. What he could've accomplished beyond this, we'll never know. But as Wallace, one of the most influential literary voices of our times, wrote in what became his last line, "It's the ability to be immersed." So immerse yourself.
Haylie Duff Jessica Paré Rebecca Mader Amy Cobb Aisha Tyler
No comments:
Post a Comment