Order THE PALE KING here
(also reviewed)
Order THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM here
Order GIRL WITH CURIOUS HAIR here
Order INFINITE JEST here
Order A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I'LL NEVER DO AGAIN here
Order BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN here
Order OBLIVION : STORIES here
Order CONSIDER THE LOBSTER here
Order THIS IS WATER here
The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.
''Everybody is identical,'' David Foster Wallace once said, ''in their secret, unspoken belief that way deep down, they are different from everyone else.'' * Ironically enough, this bit of wisdom came to accurately represent the relationship that every David Foster Wallace reader thinks he has with David Foster Wallace. Some sort of privileged intimacy with Wallace's intellect, like only they can hear the secret music behind his most intimidating writings. After being punished and utterly defeated by my reading of INFINITE JEST, I hesitated a long time before undertaking THE PALE KING. So how was it? Right? Not only I loved THE PALE KING, it eerily felt to me like a completion. As if David Foster Wallace, through his long time editor Michael Pietsch, has driven home every empathic ambitions of his fiction (or almost). It's a pretty fucking unreal experience.
So much has been said about the unfinished nature of THE PALE KING. Reading the notes at the end, it's evident it was unfinished. It's like Wallace built that enormous tanker, but didn't move it in any particular direction, yet the object Michael Pietsch built with the fractal scraps he found in Wallace's writing garage feels coherent enough to stand on its own. It makes sense as a complete and finished object. The IRS Office Wallace created in Peoria, Illinois feels like some sort of purgatory where a proliferation of lonely, alienated and self-conscious people come to face their worst fear about the world they live their life in. There are way too many characters involved with the narrative to read THE PALE KING conventionally, but there is a light still shining bright anchored within all these damned souls. A light that makes them all uniquely flawed, tortured and beautiful.
We has us a big dog that my daddy would keep on a chain in the front yard. A big part German shepherd. I hated the hain but we didn't have a fene, we were right off the road there. The dog hated that chain. But he had dignity. What he'd do, he'd never go out to the length of the chain. He'd never even get out to where the chain got tight. Even if the mailman pulled up, or a salesman. Out of dignity, this dog pretended like he hose this one area to stay in that just happened to be inside the length of the chain. Nothing outside of that area right there interested him. He just had zero interest. So he never noticed the chain. He didn't hate it. The chain. He just up and made it not relevant. Maybe he wasn't pretending - maybe he really up and chose that little circle for his own world. He had a power to him. All of his life on that chain. I loved that damn dog.
Another big question is : how does it stand, next to INFINITE JEST? The answer is: pretty damn well and the reason is simple. It's a very different novel. THE PALE KING is almost completely stripped of the idiosyncratic games that were in his predecessor, that I didn't enjoy at all. I know lots went completely mad over the Eschaton chapters, yet I didn't I thought it was clever for about ten pages, but by the end of it, the needlessness of its sheer size made me stop readong for a little while. No, THE PALE KING is much different and in several aspects is more like THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM, a Wallace novel with a much more digestible form, yet almost no discourse. While the first hundred page is a little more laborious, THE PALE KING takes its stride and becomes both super pertinent and as user-friendly as a David Foster Wallace novel can be. Is Wallace or Pietsch to thank for that? It'll forever remain a mystery.
Part of what makes THE PALE KING so engaging and damned righteous to read is the use of dialog. Most of it, maybe 60-70% is written under dialog form, as long, meaningful conversations. I don't know how deliberate it was from Wallace to proceed like that, but it's interesting to me because it emulates what people fell in love with his persona for. His capacity to turn every moment into a long, meaningful conversation about life. One of my favorite chapters of THE PALE KING is about seventy pages long and involves to characters who are barely present before that. I know it sounds unseductive said like that, but the way Meredith and Shane approach the utmost banal happy hour, doing the utmost banal thing (Shane clumsily hits on Meredith) and turn it into a life-altering conversation, bare themselves completely to someone they barely know. Two characters who were strangers to everyone, to one another and the reader alike, dropped their guard and revealed their true selves. An truly uplifting moment.
...a feeling not as dark as the wing of despair but tinged carmine with a resentment that was both better and worse than ordinary anger because it has no specific object. There seemed no one in particular to blame; something in Gary or Gerry Britton's aspect made it obvious that his question was some inevitable extension of his character and that he was no more to be blamed for it than an ant was to be blamed for crawling on your potato salad at a picnic - creatures just did what they did.
THE PALE KING was, in several aspects, the David Foster Wallace experiene I always been waiting to have. Apparently, I was not alone feeling this way, since I was hugged by a hipster with an afro, seeweed colored pants and vintage sneakers on the street. ''You're somebody special,'' he said. ''I'm sure you're somebody special.'' Then he proceeded to tell me how Wallace's genius affected his life and that he read INFINITE JEST with a dictionary in hand, and still didn't understand two-thirds of it. I'll be damned if I haven't heard the same thing about a dozen times before. I wonder why people try to enter a power relationship to others by bragging to have a privileged relationship to a celebrity they romanticize. There is a lot of similarities the way two very different crowd love Kurt Cobain and David Foster Wallace.
Another burning question was : are there pre occurring signs of David Foster Wallace's suicide in THE PALE KING? If there were, I didn't see any. What I saw was a genuine concern about the subject that always made him passionate - what characterized human nature in its darkest hour - and a genuine confusion about where to go with it. Maybe that confusion was meant to be. Maybe it's an integral part of what makes THE PALE KING an object of such beauty. For a novel about taxes and boredom to be so genuinely moving, it had to it the most difficult possible way, by not harvesting for its reader's emotions at all. I can only compare reading THE PALE KING to an experience akin to meeting the most beautiful, yet unself-conscious girl in the world. She doesn't wear make-up or particularly sexy clothes. She probably has short hair. Yet you can't look away. It's like you're floating in the air, dragged towards her by and invisible force.
BADASS **
* I think you can find it somewhere in the long, fascinating interview with Larry McCaffery or maybe in the legendary Charlie Rose episode. Both are worth your time.
** It's a weak word for it. It's a weak word to describe an experience I had too seldom as a reader. But within the confines of this blog, it'll have to do.