'The Pale King' by David Foster Wallace is an unfinished novel that delves into the world of IRS workers in the mid-1980s, focusing on themes of boredom, mindfulness, and attention in the face of mundane tasks. The book is a collage of banal bureaucracy, featuring a mix of fact and fiction, and explores the human condition through heartbreakingly real characters and their backstories. The narrative style is described as verbose and complex, often veering into stream of consciousness, with moments of brilliance amidst the tedium.
The book is a sprawling, messy, and incomplete masterpiece that captures Wallace's unique voice and signature themes, despite its unfinished state. It presents a series of linked stories and character studies that offer profound insights into human behavior, particularly in the context of performing tedious tasks repetitively. Through labyrinthine sentences and witty observations, 'The Pale King' prompts readers to ponder on the nature of memory, human existence, and the tragedy of boredom in modern life.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings for The Pale King include themes of suicide, mental health struggles, and the depiction of bureaucratic drudgery.
From The Publisher:
The Pale King is David Foster Wallace's final novel - a testament to his enduring brilliance
The 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 Sunday
David 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.
Ratings (10)
Incredible (1) | |
Loved It (5) | |
Liked It (2) | |
It Was OK (1) | |
Did Not Like (1) |
Reader Stats (27):
Read It (10) | |
Currently Reading (1) | |
Want To Read (15) | |
Not Interested (1) |
1 comment(s)
"It is the key to modern living. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."
All you really need to say about this book is that it's about the IRS, and I loved every page. Wallace took a subject that probably 90% of people find boring and distasteful (taxes, and the bureaucracy that requires and supports them) and wrote most of an awesome book about it. It would have been a masterpiece on par with
Infinite Jest.
Reading his notes at the end of the text is heartbreaking.
What can you read after
The Pale King?
About the Author:
David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008, was the author of the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System. His final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011. He is also the author of the short-story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Girl with Curious Hair, and his non-fiction includes several essay collections and the full-length work Everything and More.
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