Perhaps no American writer of the past 25 years has inspired more devotion, hope and resentment than David Foster Wallace. When his dense-prosed, block-paragraphed doorstopper, Infinite Jest, dropped in 1996, it felt to many of us that the book actually gave literature a chance to truly matter again—that a novel could actually still be an integral part of what it meant to exist here, now, as a shared culture rather than merely an aggregation of disjointed marketing categories.
Others were more interested in calling him out as a hoax, a hollow and banal stylist. People who had not read the book told people who had read the book that doing so made them foolish or pretentious. Still: It seemed important to have an opinion.
The root of why Wallace is so loved but also so infuriating is because he doesn’t always offer literature’s traditional comforts—economy, balance, absorption into character. Proust, Harold Brodkey, William Gaddis and also Wallace do not create perfect books or well-made stories but rather flabby-seeming repositories of language, unlikely observation and deeply human empathy; the world seems new because newly described, understandable because conscientiously articulated, but their books spill over as sloppily as the world.
The excerpts of his posthumous, unfinished The Pale King (Little Brown, 560 pages, $27.99) that were published in The New Yorker and Harper’s seemed, nonetheless, a little airless—devoid of entertainment or joy or possible redemption. This turns out to be no accident: The book’s stated goal is to escape the damaging need for entertainment altogether, to find the heroism in boredom and the bliss that lies in transcending it. But boring isn’t remotely what the book becomes, even though it mostly takes place in an IRS office.
It is a book of wildly disparate, hyperbolic set pieces, stunningly described small moments of doubled consciousness or examinations of character. Again and again, the capacity to withstand the mind-crushing boredom required to be an IRS examiner is shown to be a product of brutal damage or a denial of those qualities that make us human. One of the examiners, Stecyk, can only do right, is always polite and attentive. He is also the most hated man alive. Toni played dead while she watched her own mother murdered, and David Wallace (yes, that’s the author) is so disfigured by acne he can’t be looked at.
The effect on the reader is an absorption of sorts, but one without a climax, just a continuing, engaging engagement of a problem deep in the fabric of American bureaucratic life. It is also a deeply moving, deeply intelligent work, despite that neither the work nor its author was able to complete its project of transcending the boredom that’s just plain killing us, or the need for entertainment that’s doing the same.
READ IT: The Pale King is in bookstores now.
"Others were more interested in calling him out as a hoax, a hollow and banal stylist. People who had not read the book told people who had read the book that doing so made them foolish or pretentious."
I read it. I want my money back. To paraphrase John Gardner, density does not mean you had something to say. That book had nothing to say except "hey, assholes, look at me!" Perhaps he grew discouraged before the end when he realized the book was an exercise in ultra-narcissism.
This new book you're reviewing was published for the money, not for literary value.
@ David Foster: It's funny that you don't feel despicable, as opposed to merely self-satisfied and cynical, while accusing Foster Wallace's grieving widow of being a money-grubbing mercenary for thinking her husband's work might be of value to the rest of us--as, indeed, it already was.
Next time tell her to her face if you have the guts, rather than libel her in the name of her own dead husband.
His widow didn't instigate publishing of the work. The publisher did. And it's not new work--it's all been published already, years ago. Claiming his 'grieving widow" wanted to publish a compilation out of desire to give the world Wallace's genius is, er, rather absurd.
@Chaser Pape: You're a bit confused. DFW left his work out to be found by his wife upon his suicide, including its multiple drafts and revisions and notes, and other than one tiny bit in TriQuarterly none of it had been published or even spec'd prior to his death. What she was doing in putting the thing out was honoring his obvious wishes. Not sure what you gain by making up obvious falsehoods.
"DFW left his work out to be found by his wife upon his suicide, including its multiple drafts and revisions and notes, and other than one tiny bit in TriQuarterly none of it had been published"
You mean, except for the SIX other excerpts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale_King#Published_excerpts
"DFW left his work out to be found by his wife upon his suicide, including its multiple drafts and revisions and notes"
According to one source only, he "tidied up" what was already on his computer before he killed himself. Several excerpts of it were published almost immediately, and he wasn't even cold before a writer and publisher set to pulling it together for publication. Again, the gauzy romantic picture of his grieving wife stumbling upon some lost manuscript suits a humorless fan's dreams, but it's not reality. Reality's hard, isn't it? It was for Wallace, too.
Dude, I don't care if you like Wallace. That's okay by me. But clearly, anybody NOT liking Wallace's work is not okay with you. Time to grow up.
Nobody is saying that the publisher is an altruist; the publisher publishes for money, as does his agent (who placed the excerpts, after his death, with magazines eager for circulation.) But the person who decided to publish at all was his wife, and you were being a grotesquely bitter little snipe about it.
Im done talking to sad little trolls, however, shooting rubber bullets from their basement windows. Go outside; it's sunny.