The Pale King

In all the discussions of DFW, I never hear mention of one of his books, a collaboration with his college roommate, the lawyer and novelist Mark Costello: Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. I remember even at the time it came out it seemed like a weird and out-of-place book, an earnest and academicish, white-guy analysis of rap in a very late-80s kind of way (it came out in 1990). Not sure what Wallace thought about it in retrospect, or whether it holds up at all. I just ordered a used copy (the only kind these days): I’ll see… it holds up at all. I just ordered a used copy (the only kind these days): I’ll see…

via Omnivoracious

At the same time, with posthumous publications, there are also concerns. Wallace was a compulsive drafter and re-drafter, and we cannot know what decisions and revisions lay ahead on a book with which he had clearly been wrestling for years. Press coverage so far suggests that the editing of The Pale King for publication will be undertaken with extraordinary care and commitment. But the fact remains, this will not be the book that Wallace would have sent into the world if he had had more time.

via The Guardian

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

via The Guardian

Perhaps most significantly, Max summarizes a bit too approvingly Wallace’s sense that he had never “hit his target.” Indeed, Wallace’s attempt to do so becomes the narrative hinge of the article. But many who have read Infinite Jest will feel differently.

via The Millions

The obvious problem — and the one that Wallace was apparently still struggling with before he died — was how to spin the premise into non-tedious narrative. According to his editor, Wallace “posed himself the task that is almost the opposite of how fiction works,” which — as every author who is not Stephenie Meyer knows — is “leaving out the things that are not of much interest.” So who the heck wants to read about a bunch of tax-processing bureaucrats filling out forms?

Wallace allegedly attempted to resolve this by DFW’ing it as best he could — turning the book into a mock memoir, inserting himself as a character, and presumably sticking footnotes all over the place. Still, despite the fact that he allegedly “tidied up the manuscript so that his wife could find it” in his final hours, it was clearly unfinished, definitely not intended for publication, and quite possibly still boring. And even though Wallace fans are used to ambiguous endings that don’t go out of their way to satisfy, The Pale King’s will be really ambiguous — it’ll cut off about 400 pages before its author intended.

via Vulture — Entertainment & Culture Blog — New York Magazine

The characters in “The Pale King” are Internal Revenue Service agents working at an IRS facility in the Midwest. The intense tediousness of their jobs and their attempts to transcend boredom reflect Wallace’s preoccupation with the concept of “mindfulness” — the idea, as he put it in a 2005 commencement speech, that you should be “conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”

via Washingtonpost.com

The subject of the novel is boredom, as confronted by workers at an IRS center in Illinois. The blog Howling Fantods assembled a list of what turn out to have been “Pale King” excerpts going back to 2006, many of them online. The most recent excerpt is the one published by the New Yorker alongside this week’s profile (partly typeset and party as a photographic reproduction).

Little, Brown released a statement that the novel runs “several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines and other material.” Wallace left the manuscript in the garage, to be discovered by his wife. He apparently did not feel the material ready to publish. But the work, like the New Yorker’s epic, “intimate” and ultimately difficult profile, would seem befitting the “maximalist” postmodern author at least in its (hopefully glorious) sprawl.

via Gawker

Early information regarding the content of the novel has been released to the public, in addition to portions which have already began popping up online. The premise of The Pale King’s storyline involves the universal concept of boredom and how it specifically applies to a group of IRS employees in Illinois. According to an article in the March 9, 2009 issue of The New Yorker, the novel “expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration…[and shows how] boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment”.

It is interesting to note just how much hands-on research Wallace did in preparation for writing what would become The Pale King. He took accounting classes, labored over IRS publications and assembled a copious amount of information related to concepts such as boredom and mindfulness.

via Suite101

Two hundred pages of an unfinished novel were found on the late David Foster Wallace’s desk. The New Yorker has an excerpt in this week’s issue, and the pages will be published in full next year. The novel is set “in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s.”

via BuzzFeed: Pics, Videos, Links, News

I’m sorry, I want a final novel from David Foster Wallace as much as anyone, but the novel described in this article is unfinished. This isn’t Kafka-style unfinished, where you know more or less where the thing’s headed and you’re just lacking the ending. This is unfinished as in incomplete.

via Conversational Reading