The Pale King [Hardcover]

How do you review a book that was never meant to be read in its current form? Where do you start? How do you know? "The Pale King" was left as a neat pile of papers as a final gift by DFW to his wife Karen; a kind legacy, a bitter suicide `gift'. The manuscript was by no means a coherent, complete piece of work and as we learn from the introduction to "The Pale King", Michael Pietsch, DFW's editor, had to sift through the debris in an attempt to join the dots. So this is what we have: "The Pale King: A Book that DFW, Maybe".

Revolving around the world of the IRS - the US tax office - "The Pale King" is fundamentally a book about boredom. For over 500 pages, this novel deals with the endless tedium of the modern worker; the alienation, the total absence of meaning. Even the luckiest among us will have, at some point, have experienced the soul-crushing effects of being trapped into the time-reversing vortex of boring work. For some of you, it might now only be the distant memory of a summer job; for others, and I sadly belong to the latter category, the above is a description of pretty much our entire working life.

If the thought of reading about Tax Assessors is already filling you with terror, I would call it a justified reaction. There are parts of this novel that are undeniably boring - making "The Pale King" a sort of `meta-novel' that bores the reader into understanding boredom. Characters describe long and abstruse administrative procedures; a handful of pages are devoted to explaining the intricate, arcane mechanisms of taxation.

Other parts - starting with the opening Section 1- are of pure, undiluted lyrical beauty. Others, still, are seemingly self-contained stories about characters who, had Wallace lived to complete the novel, might have played a big role within the narrative. Even in their embryonic state, characters like Leonard Stecyk, `Irrelevant' Chris Fogle and Shane `Mr X.' Drinion, the levitating Utility Examiner, will probably be etched in my memory forever.

It must be relatively easy, for any half-decent writer, to entertain a reader with stories of wizards, lost symbols, love triangles and unsolved mysteries. Instead, Wallace chose the tax examiner as his unsung hero; the dragon-slaying weapon of choice is a mindful state, the sense of being present in the moment to pay close attention to the `now'.

Mindfulness, as it gradually emerges as one progresses through the book, is the antithesis to boredom; a state of awareness, we are shown, is the only way to transcend the tedium of modern working life. This is clearly the `big' message that TPK would have carried, had it been completed. In one of the notes left with the manuscript - published as the "Notes and Asides" of the book, Wallace wrote:

"Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom".

So this is it; there is no resolution, no plot line that really develops. The `tornadic' nature of the novel was only beginning to take shape by the time I turned page 538 - "Section 50", the final chapter; as a result, I felt as if the story was only just beginning. If "Infinite Jest" was 1079 pages long, who knows how many pages would have been filled to contain a full, completed (albeit in relative, DFW terms for `completed') "Pale King"?

Giving this novel a `star' rating feels inappropriate, somehow; it was at the same time a great read, a dull read, a sad read, a funny read. At times, it had me want to shout `that's it! that's it!'. At others, I struggled to keep my attention focused on the page, all the time knowing that Wallace was testing me, putting me in the shoes of the IRS Examiners. When I got to the end, as if struck by momentary amnesia about the fact that I had been reading an unfinished piece of work, I felt the disappointment of realising that nothing was going to even remotely be given the chance evolve, let alone be resolved.

And yet, nothing I have ever read has ever felt so hard-hitting and relevant to my life. Am I, too, one of the modern life's unsung heros? Will I, too, be able to `step from black and white into color'? Can a mindful state save me, will I, too, metaphorically levitate above the humdrum of 9-to-5 living and find bliss?

Maybe. Despite the inevitable sadness associated to its posthumous form, this is a book of hope. For this, I thank you, and rest in peace, David Foster Wallace.

Writing reviews on the late American author David Foster Wallace is an anxious and parlous process. There is first of all the saint like reverence in which is held in by his fans with Paul Morley on the Review Show proudly proclaiming himself as "Wallacistic" and in an almost Stalinist unthinking manner stating that within this new novel "every sentence and every word is tremendous" Then there is Wallace's brutal suicide in 2008 at the age of 46 which left the Pale King unfinished after 10 years of work. It was eventually compiled by his editor, Michael Pietsch, who has pieced together the finished chapters and undertaken a degree of guess work to bring a kind of conclusion to a work in progress. Then there is the literary figure of Wallace himself coming on the back of 1996's labyrinthine yet uber smart "Infinite Jest" a novel, which takes months to read, but which you can quote for years. This is followed by his tragic death as he stood on the steps of becoming one of the giants of American literature.

This reviewer may as well be honest from the start and state that "the Pale King" is far from the greatest novel I have ever read or reading pleasure I have ever experienced. It is a novel whose main subject matter is after all about apathy, bureaucracy, death and taxes. In addition the Pale King is a cloth sewn together with a raw outline workable pattern rather than a finished garment. Set in the Mid West during the Reagan era it is focused on the poor souls who "work" for the Internal Revenue Service Offices at Peoria, Illinois, in 1985. The IRS sits on the brink of huge change and the big question whether it is to be automated, computerised tax returns or human accountants are the future of this service. Some have seen the book as a direct descendent of Herman Melville's , Bartleby the Scrivener where a Wall Street clerk politely refuses to do anything other than copy, others will see it as a critique of late capitalism and the dehumanising impact of work. Nothing about Wallace however fits such easy pigeon holing. This is especially so since the main character in the book is none other than 20 year old David Foster Wallace a trainee whose acne is "disabling" and who comes into this stultifying environment where a training officer "has promised herself a bullet in the roof of her mouth after her 1,500th training presentation". Indeed Wallace prefigures the novel by describing it as seeking to "Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens." This is not true since the novel does have a sort of villain the "fact psychic" Claude Sylvanshine, brought into Peoria at the behest of "an administrator of administrators" to plot the sinister future and numerous other story lines and plots. Similarly the writing is on occasions wonderfully sharp and pointed with the IRS office described as giving "the spectacular impression of being in the centre of some huge and stagnant body of water", while at other times the description of tedium will resonate with those who have intimately watched the office clock on the wall.

In a book whose central theme is soul negating boredom it seems that the debt to one of Wallace's heroes namely Franz Kafka is writ large. Like Kafka his writing can be grotesque and gorgeous, check out the teenage character David Cusk, whose extreme public sweating kept him from having anything like a "normal" childhood. Yet you could never describe the Pale King in terms of sheer enjoyment, its neither a page turner and you put it down and don't break a sweat to rush back to it. On times it suffers from being a very messy novel, which has nothing to do with its "unfinished status" and everything to do Wallace's indulgent detours with the section on an employee "happy hour" taking an age to describe at which point I felt like the training officer subjected to a never ending stupor. Yet it is a strangely compelling read where references to suicide feel particularly raw and are coloured by your own views forged in hindsight and understanding of Wallace's fate. Equally was the Pale King the novel that Wallace really wanted us to see or was it one of the factors that led to his death? We shall never know but there is something tremendously sad about the publication of this intriguing book which even though it often reads as fractured reminds us that the author had many more brilliant literary miles to travel and that undoubtedly his best work was yet to come.

Subtitled, "An Unfinished Novel," The Pale King startles by being so exceedingly unfinished. This isn't Kafka's The Trial, a largely complete novel; this is a very bare bones sketch of a work still in its infancy.

The Pale King should not be dismissed as worthless, however. Wallace's gift for writing means just about everything he finished is worth the effort required to read it. Loosely connected though many chapters may be there are still some gems here - chapter six, also published in the New Yorker, is extremely tender, almost heartbreakingly so; chapter 22's one hundred sprawl is as interesting as any of the author's previous maximalist prose.

However, there are many other chapters in this book that are a single page long and don't bring anything to the story apart from obvious humour. There are also longer sections that hint at greater details and revelations but, due to the unfinished nature of the novel, are ultimately meaningless. The novel's two longest chapters are a combined 160 pages. In a book that isn't even 550 pages long those two sections account for over a quarter of the novel - that shows how unbalanced this work is.

Michael Pietsch has no doubt done the best job with what the author left behind. This book is a jumble of characters, storylines and random pages with flashes of brilliance. Yet the hagiography that surrounds Wallace should not cloud the fact that this is far from finished and a novel that exhibits the expected shortcomings of any incomplete work. It's a good book that I enjoyed reading, but it's no final masterpiece and anyone looking for insights into the author and his end can find greater illumination in his other works. Only for established fans of the author, it's still a great joy that these pages have been published.