From the Broadkill Review Archives:
The Pale King: Absurdity and Anxiety: David Foster Wallace’s comedic and paranoid voice
I first read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest while I lived in Brighton, a borough of Boston, MA, where most of the novel's action occurs, and at the time I worked as a registrar/teacher at a small immersion English language school for rich foreign kids and corporate big-Whigs who needed a tune up on their idioms before undertaking university or new business campaigns, and the school, located near St. Elizabeth’s hospital where Wallace’s bodily Tennis academy lies with its giant inflated lung, and being a pedestrian, spent hours walking the novel's map, through the copper autumn. I've revisited the novel twice since, and I’ve taught sections, and led students to his essays, his short fiction. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was required reading for my college composition course. Wallace can be challenging (the packaging of IJ does not help...the book is big, not at all beach tote friendly, unless you’re carrying a suitcase) but if you've read any long work, say It, The Stand, then you know that 500 pages into the thing, the author of your long work or trilogy (or Mr. King) hasn't even laid all the traps yet, and the field is wide and deep, and some players still lurk on the edge of the narrative. 500 pages into a 1000+ page book is like looking at the business end of a giant’s fingernail, barely able to perceive the digit its attached to, much less the body it works for. You know it’s there, but it hasn’t come into focus yet.
So a 500 plus page unfinished novel is a tease, a card trick, even for a writer as talented as Wallace.
DFW is lumped in with the intellectual writers of his generation, and it is a deserving lump, but I’ve always thought of DFW with a heart, albeit an emotionally stunted, sometimes paralytic heart, but a heart that likes to laugh. He's damn funny. That’s why I read him, because he cracks me up. The forward to The PK is an acrobatic wink, and I imagine him laughing his ass off as he rips sentences into his notebooks. He sets the story up as truth, and backs over it again, and double talks his way around his pseudo-memoir. And paired with his absurd sense of humor, is his gift of taking you into the abject horror of anxiety and compulsive thinking, and in his newest, unfinished work, The Pale King, the master of absurdity and anxiety is at it again.
The prose has Wallace's keen eye and ear for obsessive compulsive living. The characters suffer boredom and tedium, and many of the characters live transient lives in a large organism that is the IRS. Again Wallace explores how extreme female beauty is a type of deformity, or at least isolation. Like the Prettiest Girl of All Time in Infinite Jest, The Pale King features Meredith Rand, a beauty so intimidating she is an island, and only the most mundane, however also the most gifted, IRS agent can reach her (there’s a great section where Rand tells her convoluted story about her dying husband to the boring agent, Drinion, who is so concentrated on her that he begins to levitate in the bar where the agents blow off steam).
What Wallace would have done with the unfinished story lines one can only guess, and in his notes Wallace states that something awful threatens but never transpires. Which isn’t that surprising, after all Infinite Jest’s chronological ending is its beginning; and one has to re-read the first chapter to figure out what happens to the main characters after the novel’s final flashback. The Pale King, as it stands, reads like a novel whose plot arc is not as nearly as important as the tropes and characters that are hung there, suffering and living on the fringe. There is an intriguing tender relationship between two devout Christians that remains unexplored, an almost Coen-Brothersesque sub-plot involving feuding IRS administrations (one can almost hear Paul Newman sneering in his pinstriped corporate suit), a plot to assemble psychic agents, such as Claude Sylvanshine, the main character who has the ability to psychically “collect” random data about people near him, phantoms and their affect on the agents, a poor man who sweats too much, and even DFW as himself, who is mistaken for another DFW, a high ranking agent, no doubt. There are moments in The Pale King where the slap-stick fun of The Broom of the System flows, and there are moments, chapters, in fact, that tax code, tax jargon and politics pile up, all, one would assume, placed in the narrative flow to mimic the cognitive atmosphere of the characters, or perhaps even the soul crushing boredom his characters deal with day to day. The central thesis, if there is one, is that real heroes suffer tedium every day, and that it goes unnoticed. The tax speak reminded me of how in the Jest Pemulis’ Eschaton physics lingo goes over most people’s heads (it’s a tennis game designed to mimic nuclear annihilation, with dozens of algorithms and computer programs created to track the games minutiae), or the dense film criticism of Himself’s (the nickname of the ghostly father figure who is at the alcoholic, and emotional center of the plot) work, developed to imitate and capture the cognitive aspects the films captured. Wallace is winking at us of course, the tax code and jargon are distracters that do not detract from the narrative, but are there for us to encounter as objects. We can choose to read them or skim them, and Wallace allows us to choose. If we choose we are subjected to the hell of boredom experienced day to day by the agents, whose loneliness and despair form the novel’s core heart. If not, we save a few minutes of reading, and are better for it.
His famous footnotes are there, but unlike reading the Jest, where one has to flip to the back of the tome, and require two bookmarks, these footnotes are thankfully at the bottom of the page for our entertainment ease.
The notes Wallace left about the novel are just as fascinating as the fragments themselves, as Wallace envisioned the novel like a tornado, coming at us with shreds of narrative debris, long arms of whipping narrative wind. He didn’t leave enough behind to connect the plots or the threads in any satisfying manner, but they are there, at the edge of a corn field, outside of Peoria, Illinois, awaiting some final wind to send them on their way.
Comments