When David Foster Wallace hanged himself on September 12, 2008, aged only forty-six, his place in the history of American literature was already secure. His second novel Infinite Jest (1996), over 1,000 pages long (of which the last hundred or so are endnotes), is a work of extraordinary ambition, an addictive entertainment about addiction and entertainment, and it set a new standard for experimental fiction, influencing or challenging a generation of writers. He subsequently published some remarkable short fiction and essays, and a book about infinity. It is now clear that he was also working, with great difficulty, on his third novel.
Reading Wallace is not undemanding. His range of reference is large, his vocabulary extensive, his thought dialectical and sinuous, his descriptions painstakingly precise, comically exhaustive, sometimes tediously so. He flickers even within sentences between a slangy conversational tone and a technical or philosophical address. He frequently withholds and releases information in a way that exacts unusual levels of attention and memory. As a result, his readers tend to be passionate and committed; those who have followed his winding, diligent journeys of imagination (in the fiction) and ethical thought (in the essays) have tended to fall in love with Wallace’s work, and have been hungry to see everything that he wrote.
This may explain why, much faster than usual, there have been a number of posthumous publications in little more than two years. Wallace’s Commencement Address to Kenyon College in 2005, a moving consideration of mindfulness which now reads like a self-admonition, was published as This Is Water (2009); parts of his unfinished final novel have been selected and arranged as The Pale King (2011); and his graduate thesis on fatalism has been published, with immaculate apparatus and introductory essays, as Fate, Time, and Language: An essay on Free Will (2010).
That last item might seem like a piece of archival barrel-scraping, of the sort normally arrived at after several decades of scholarly estate-raiding. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wallace was a formidable philosophy student, as well as an impressive junior tennis player and linguistics enthusiast; he wavered between philosophy and creative writing, to the extent that his supervisor Jay Garfield comments “I thought of David as a very talented young philosopher with a writing hobby, and did not realize that he was instead one of the most talented fiction writers of his generation who had a philosophy hobby”.
Just as his father had done, Wallace won the Gail Kennedy Memorial Prize in Philosophy at Amherst for his thesis, a refutation of Richard Taylor’s provocative essay “Fatalism” (1962). Fate, Time, and Language prints Taylor’s essay, various contemporary responses and Wallace’s essay; it also includes Garfield’s memoir of teaching Wallace, and useful introductions of the issues to orient the non-philosopher. The opening essay, “A Head That Throbbed Heartlike”, by James Ryerson, an editor at the New York Times Magazine, is an excellent summary of Wallace’s thought and writing which shows how his philosophical interests were not purely cerebral, but arose from, and fed into, his emotional and ethical concerns.
There is an almost symbiotic relationship between Wallace’s philosophical anxieties—about solipsism, about empathy and about self-consciousness—and his psychological anguish. In the wake of his suicide there has been an upsetting stream of revelations about his depressions and neuroses. He sweated profusely, for instance, and became so self-conscious about this that he took to carrying a towel and a tennis racket everywhere; the towel to mop up the sweat, the racket to justify the towel. Wallace’s fiction depicts pitilessly the loops and vicious circles of self-consciousness; thus David Cusk in The Pale King, a clearly autobiographical figure, sits in a training room worrying about the fact that worrying about having a sweating attack might provoke a sweating attack:
“Cusk … was aware that other people did not suffer from phobic anxiety about attacks, which combined with the other terms ruminative obsession, hyperhydrosis and parasympathetic nervous symptom arousal loop in a self-diagnosis he had arrived at through scores of hours of covert research—he had even enrolled in psychology courses he had no interest in, in order to create a plausible cover for the research … and an awareness of his unique anxiety was one of twenty-two identified factors that could prime him for an attack, though not one of the really super-drive factors.”
Wallace could riff like this with facility, from painful experience; his award-winning short story “The Depressed Person” is a cruelly brilliant account of how depressive thinking eventually becomes self-consuming, as nagging footnotes rise further and further up each page, and each needy gesture leads to self-disgust and depression and further needy gestures, in a toxic boiling stew from which there seems no escape.
But he could also apply these feedback loops to other subjects; “Mr Squishy”, from Oblivion (2004), is set in a rigged focus group who are tasting a sickening confection; the convenors of the focus group are themselves being psychologically manipulated, tested and observed, as are their puppet-masters, in a terrible entanglement of predatory manoeuvres. In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2001), several of the hideous interviewees employ the language of feminism or empathy in order to seduce or rape their victims, or mask their denial with acrobatic displays of self-awareness. In The Pale King, two characters use the phrase “hall of mirrors”; Cusk about his meta-anxiety (“what he really had to fear was fear of the fear, like an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear, all of which were ridiculous and weird”), and Chris Fogle, more acutely, about philosophy:
“past a certain point, the element of choice of attention … could get lost, and the awareness could sort of explode into a hall of mirrors of consciously felt sensations and thoughts and awareness of awareness of awareness of these … then the questions often end up not answered but more likely beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle’s different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started.”
Wallace’s writing, which is both rigorously intellectual and achingly attentive to human pain, might seem a worked-through proof that the overexamined life is not worth living. But it also testifies to a belief that only through sufficient consciousness and attention is anything like an ethical life possible; and at his best he dramatizes this dilemma, with all its angles and tensions, while letting his subjects breathe and grow.
The action, if it can be called that, mostly takes place in an IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, IL, in the mid-1980s. Through fragments, dialogues, monologues, narratives, shifting viewpoints, in what purports (at times) to be a memoir, Wallace conjures the damaged childhoods and damagingly dull working lives of a bewildering number of characters, some drawn in detail, others merely named. First and foremost, this is an attempt to portray a bureaucracy at a time of transition—towards computerization, with an emphasis on profit rather than civic duty. The tussle between DeWitt Glendinning Jr, an old-school believer in civic idealism, and Merrill Lehrl, determined to implement the “Initiative”, whereby examiners will be replaced by machines, is the peg for Wallace’s exploration of the benign and malign aspects of the act of attention.
It is dispiritingly clear from some notes by Wallace which Pietsch has chosen to append at the end of The Pale King that Wallace had not decided how that plot was to pan out, or how the characters would play their parts in it, or even what the characters’ personal destinies and motivations were to be. Some of Wallace’s suggestions to himself make the novel seem frankly banal, as he reduces his various themes to a set of crude dichotomies: “Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs … Being individual vs. being part of larger things—paying taxes, being ‘lone gun’ in IRS vs. team player”. Yet what is here—albeit fragmented, inconsistent, repetitive, unpolished, borrowing too often from his earlier stories and novels—suggests that there was at least one good book to be drawn from the raw materials. Some of the stories in Oblivion must have begun life as chapters before taking on lives of their own (for example, “The Soul is Not a Smithy”, which is here diluted and shared between two narrators).
One of the central concerns of The Pale King—information, its relevance or irrelevance in different contexts, its management, what it reveals or conceals—is also its largest problem, aesthetically. Wallace was adept at burying significant information in a sea of irritatingly or comically pedantic and unnecessary details; reading him often requires the sort of careful attention that the perfect IRS examiner can offer. Indeed, there are passages here where you can see Wallace explicitly make this connection. In Chapter 25, the quiet progress of the examiners is described in a succession of barely varying sentences (“Howard Cardwell turns a page. Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page”), through two pages of sniffing, scratching, yawning and page-turning, each in two thin columns of text, until the bored but alert reader encounters, startlingly, among this deadpan recital, the sentence “Devils are actually angels”, then “Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror”, and later “Every love story is a ghost story”, until the final line “Ann Williams turns a page”; and so do we. The problem is that these concealed signals lead almost nowhere; we do meet the ghosts, and have them explained to us, but we do not get the love story. There is one character—Lane Dean Jr—whose moving and straightforward tale reflects a sincere and silent self-sacrifice because of his love for his wife and child; and there is a storyline begun late in The Pale King which might, at a stretch, have provided romantic interest, though little of Wallace’s work ever displayed much interest in such relationships.
In Infinite Jest, the many and various storylines are clearly converging, and we can glimpse the aftermath of that convergence; but Wallace boldly skipped all of the crucial events. Readers can weigh up the various possibilities on offer, but never decide. This is a remarkable achievement in a book containing so much interconnected detail. But in The Pale King, even Wallace didn’t know which, if any, of the strands would connect with each other, or how much of the existing material he would cut, and so we are left with a book which can only gesture suggestively at the suggestive gestures it might have made (an abstraction appropriate for this particular writer).
There are signs that Wallace wanted to write a realist novel. According to Pietsch, there are suggestions in the notes that the novel is “a series of set-ups for things to happen but nothing ever happens”, and “something big threatens to happen, but doesn’t actually happen”. Wallace clearly wanted to make boring and repetitive work somehow interesting in and of itself, and he sometimes does achieve this, generating a moving sense of heroism and triumphant humanity at the end of some lethally dull passages (most notably in a passage of nearly a hundred pernickety rambling pages delivered by a character who we later, disarmingly, learn has the sobriquet “Irrelevant”).
In the novel as offered, something does happen. The bureaucratic battle, according to the notes, was going to utilize the supernatural talents of its eccentric cast (though on which side was unclear, even to Wallace). In the event, in the antepenultimate chapter, at a company picnic, more drastic action is taken, rendered opaquely through unattributed dialogue, and involving drugs and psychological (and possibly physical) torture. Nothing prepares one for this in terms of plot, though in its ornamental details it has been foreshadowed in many of the previous chapters, and the cruelty has also been an unpleasant and persistent motif throughout. The attempt at realism is suddenly and brutally abandoned.
Likewise, there was clearly some intention to create a political novel; to extract from the changes in the IRS under President Reagan the same charge as Thomas Pynchon, for example, got from Rex-84 in Vineland (1990). As it is, this aspect of the novel never gets off the ground, except at the most banal level. Wallace is oddly unconvincing in his take on the political aspects, creakily rendered, for instance, in a dialogue between people trapped in an elevator in 1980, in which any effort to identify all the speakers is futile, and which becomes an unconvincing symposium. Elsewhere Wallace misdates the Iranian hostage crisis by almost a year.
The zanier part of Wallace’s imagination couldn’t be content with realism and political satire. It is not just the two ghosts; there is also a sinister and precocious child, who accompanies Merrill Lehrl everywhere, and who may have possessed him; as well as a “data psychic” who receives, unbidden, flashes of (mostly useless) information; and an examiner whose powers of concentration are such that he unwittingly levitates when completely focused. There are also an astonishing number of damaged children, deaths, accidents, cruelties and eccentricities, some rendered in terrible detail, others merely alluded to, sometimes as if in anticipation of later explanation, which is never provided (“Two eventual suicides on this plane, one forever classed as an accident”; “In psychotherapy after the incident with my own son”; “Some of these survived the eventual fire”; etc etc). There are two tedious metafictional interludes which disingenuously criticize the very metafictional games they play, and which cannot be reconciled with significant problems of narration elsewhere.
Pietsch says that “given the choice between working to make this less-than-final text available as a book and placing it in a library where only scholars would read and comment on it, I didn’t have a second’s hesitation”. There is no doubt that his labours have been heartfelt; but I think he may have misjudged Wallace’s readers. They have always read with at least as much attention and interest as scholars; and there has already been a report from the David Foster Wallace archive by one of them. There are passages here which display the masterful comic touches and moving ethical probing that Wallace’s readers admire; and the more developed characters, especially the possibly sociopathic Toni Ware, are gripping, if inconsistently drawn. But, as a novel, The Pale King is nowhere near to being a finished work. From the internal evidence, it is clear why David Foster Wallace was having insuperable difficulties in making it one