David Foster Wallace Files Mash Note to IRS in Posthumous Novel
David Foster Wallace
Hachette Book Group via Bloomberg
David Foster Wallace, author of "The Pale King."
David Foster Wallace, author of "The Pale King." Source: Hachette Book Group via Bloomberg
"The Pale King"
Hachette Book Group via Bloomberg
"The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace.
"The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace. Source: Hachette Book Group via Bloomberg
David Foster Wallace, whose “Infinite Jest” offered readers with literary legs a fictional Everest in 1996, had been working on another long something before he killed himself in 2008 at age 46.
That work has now been published. Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch, organized reams of prose into “The Pale King,” an unfinished novel about the Internal Revenue Service.
Fans of “Infinite Jest” may not be daunted by the prospect of a fragmentary, inconclusive work. Wallace planned something structurally similar to “IJ,” “with large portions of apparently unconnected information presented to the reader before a main story line begins to make sense,” Pietsch writes in an introduction.
“Infinite Jest” does in fact move among seemingly disparate narrative lines that eventually connect a tennis academy, a rehab house, legless Quebec terrorists and a movie that turns the viewer’s brain into suet.
Over the course of 1,079 pages, “IJ” is tiresome, exhilarating, ugly, frightening and often wonderfully funny. Wallace’s gift for language, especially argot of all sorts, his magical handling of masses of detail -- his nonfiction showed him to be a tireless if eccentric journalist -- and his bent for chasing serious themes as entertainingly as possible easily justified the MacArthur “genius” award he received shortly after publication and the devoted fans who populate the Web.
Mushy Brains
These talents are on display again in “The Pale King,” but in muted form, with far less glee shared by reader and writer, and yet again with a likely suet theme, as in the consistency of the brain after working through 10,000 1040 tax forms.
The inaction takes place in and near a Peoria, Illinois, IRS outpost. We see and hear staffers on their breaks, during videotaped interviews and in flashbacks to their youth. This material may explain what sort of person chooses the mind- numbing paperwork trenches of an IRS career or it may indicate that any sort of person can have his brain suetized by such labor.
A young Drew has a poignant scene on a lakeside picnic bench with a girlfriend heading for an abortion clinic. Cusk sweats in deluge quantities when stressed, as shown in high school and in an IRS training session.
One boy is such a do-gooder that his school “principal fantasizes about sinking a meat hook into Leonard Stecyk’s bright-eyed little face and dragging the boy face-down behind his Volkswagen Beetle over the rough new streets of suburban Grand Rapids.”
Enter David Wallace
Also on this strange stage is a character variously named David Foster Wallace, David Wallace (there is a mistaken identity problem) and “the author.” He explains that the book is “a kind of vocational memoir. It is also supposed to function as a portrait of a bureaucracy.” He is an IRS staffer who dreams “of becoming an immortally great fiction writer a la Gaddis.”
Several long sections are vintage Wallace, notably the tale of a young man who wanders into the wrong college classroom and is so impressed by an accounting lecture that he trudges through a Chicago blizzard to an IRS recruiting office and joins up.
Then there’s the 50 pages detailing traffic problems on the approach road to the IRS outpost in Peoria, whose facade, by the way, “was some kind of tile or mosaic representation of a blank IRS 1978 Form 1040, both pages of it, complete in all detail down to verso Line 31’s slot for the computation of ‘Adjusted Gross Income’ and recto Line 66’s terminal ‘BALANCE DUE’ box.”
I note the form because yonder looms the deadline for filing U.S. tax returns.
Heroic Readers
While Wallace posits an IRS seal depicting “the mythic hero Bellerophon slaying the Chimera,” the real heroes may be those who survive or succumb to the boredom of wading through reams of IRS forms to earn their daily crouton. (There are stretches of tedious prose that can have the effect, whether intended or not, of making heroes of readers as well.)
Some of the writer’s working notes are appended, and one describes a narrative arc as “Paying attention, boredom, ADD, Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs.” It’s a monumental ennui here, cataloged in many phrases and images.
For instance, Pam Jensen “had promised herself a bullet in the roof of her mouth after her 1,500th training presentation.” Another character learned “about negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes.”
Yet another staffer waxes eloquent on civic duty and de Tocqueville and the Federalist Papers, suggesting that both paying taxes and collecting them bear real moral freight. The ambiguity is also vintage Wallace.
“The Pale King” is published by Little, Brown (548 pages, $27.99). To order the book in North America, click here.
(Jeffrey Burke is an editor for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer on the story: Jeffrey Burke in New York at jburke21@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for the story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
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