David Foster Wallace

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions--questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society--through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.

The Pale King

Gavin

What to say?

Fifty fragments: unintegrated, contradicting, only sometimes amazing. Themes you’d expect: self-consciousness, freedom, duty, routine - the awful effect of unconstrained self-consciousness, freedom, duty and routine - the death of American civics - ‘the horror of personal smallness and transience’ - the repugnance we feel for pure virtue - the extraordinary fires alight beneath some people. But where in Jest these were expressed through (burdened with) drug slang, pharmacology, advertising dreck, and calculus, here we get accountancy minutiae surely intended to repulse us. Yet the style is far less mannered than his finished work, which style we might call Postdoc Valleyspeak.

  The reason for this public ignorance is not secrecy. The real reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull. 

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this feature. Consider, from the Service’s perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help to insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting.

Institutional tedium – the default state for developed-world adults – is profoundly important to address, a topic it will take an unusual mind to illuminate for us. But Pale King is actually not a Kafkan tale of the ever-growing horror of bureaucracy; actually he is deeply impressed and convinced of the value of the people and the work of the IRS, in large part because of its inhumane strictures, lack of glory, and unpopularity.

"Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one." (Though if ‘corporate’ is there read merely as meaning ‘maximising’, the distinction can be misleading.)
 To me, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ and ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way… I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.

I tried to read them as short stories rather than chapters. This half-works. Actually the entire book was intentionally fruitless – the major agonists all off-stage, everyone else just enduring. 

A couple of intentionally unconvincing first-person authorial inserts – “I, David Wallace, social security no…” – affirm the reality of the garish IRS underbelly he fabricates, put him in the scene. Fragment #8 is a horrifying Cormac McCarthy lyric, childhood psychosis. One (#22) is a hundred-page monologue, the character repetitive, rambling and conceited, but also the most developed and affecting. Of this wreckage we are given to read. 
What to say? That you’d have to love this writing to like it, that you should.

Fraser Simons

I was actually really ready to not like this but It’s pretty incredible, imo. To the point where I will sit with it and right something long form about it because there’s a lot to unpack. Which is wild if you think about it because it’s not even actually in it’s finished form. 

I usually hate things without a plot clipping along nicely and this is more like you’re wandering around with a flashlight illuminating random things that are interconnected but the plot isn’t really anywhere in sight. Yet I’m not sure I’ve been provoked to think about multiple subjects more than this book, with it’s weird, kind of lynchian approach.

Melanie Richards

Ok, I'm going to rate this book as it exists right now (more a 2.5 than a 2). From the story notes at the end of the book describing where a plot might have formed, this seems like it would be a much better book, were it finished. If you're considering reading a tome by DFW, I would say either a) read Infinite Jest instead or b) read the notes at the end of the book first. Yeah, they'll kinda be spoilers, but they'll be spoilers for things that never happen, and you'll have a better context for how to read as you go along (unfinished for DFW doesn't mean "missing chapters at the end", it means going back through the whole book to add and revise major points). I wish I could have read the final product. RIP, DFW.

Rachel

I don't know how I feel about this book. It was mind numbingly, dull but thats also kind of the point of the book. So i hate it for being so boring, but the author did a good job for what he set out for it to be, a long, drawn out and mundane tale of IRS workers. It does provoke some deep thoughts about life in general, but its still painfully dull, but it is also unfinished so maybe if it was completed the payoff from the book would of felt better.

Juan Sacco

Brian Gillis

Karolina Klermon-Williams

lucinda ventimiglia

Markus Mui

The Pale King is David Foster Wallace's final novel - a testament to his enduring brillianceThe Internal Revenue Service Regional Examination Centre in Peoria, Illinois, 1985. Here the minutaie of a million daily lives are totted up, audited and accounted for. Here the workers fight a never-ending war against the urgency of their own boredom. Here then, squeezed between the trivial and the quotidian, lies all human life. And this is David Foster Wallace's towering, brilliant, hilarious and deeply moving final novel.'Breathtakingly brilliant, funny, maddening and elegiac' New York Times'A bravura performance worthy of Woolf or Joyce. Wallace's finest work as a novelist' Time'Light-years beyond Infinite Jest. Wallace's reputation will only grow, and like one of the broken columns beloved of Romantic painters, The Pale King will stand, complete in its incompleteness, as his most substantial fictional achievement' Hari Kunzru, Financial Times'A paradise of language and intelligence' The Times'Archly brilliant' Metro'Teems with erudition and ideas, with passages of stylistic audacity, with great cheerful thrown-out gags, goofy puns and moments of truly arresting clarity. Innovative, penetrating, forcefully intelligent fiction like Wallace's arrives once in a generation, if that' Daily Telegraph'In a different dimension to the tepid vapidities that pass as novels these days. Sentence for sentence, almost word for word, Wallace could out-write any of his peers' Scotland on SundayDavid Foster Wallace wrote the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, and the short-story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair. His non-fiction includes Consider the Lobster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Everything and More, This is Water and Both Flesh and Not. He died in 2008.

Brock

Will Vunderink

Maurice FitzGerald

Hannah Swithinbank

Brian Duffy

kate

Mykyta Barabanov

Nadav Spiegelman

Nicholas Christowitz

Kaleb McClellan

Cindy Lieberman

Alex Gee

The character David Foster Wallace is introduced to the banal world of the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, and the host of strange people who work there, in a novel that was unfinished at the time of the author's death.

The Pale King

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