The Pale King is in Full Color
The Pale King is in Full-Color
Looking through my Kindle for something to read, I came upon The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. I didn't know it was published posthumously and when I read that in the Forward, I felt that sadness, that sickening "thunk" in my gut, once again, that he is gone. Then I started reading.
There's no way to give a linear, blow-by-blow of the plot of this novel, as anyone who read it can tell you. I can only describe it in the language of music and rhythm, color and shape.
Foster Wallace takes the dullest of subjects--to be precise, working for the IRS--and he manages to make it enthralling. There is no explanation I have for this other than magic. I didn't understand any of the tax-code jargon, but who would? And I don't think it was Wallace's intent to have us understand. He wanted us to accept; accept that he was going to shove all of these numbers and codes and terms at us so that we are the characters in the novel, and we should just ride the wave, eat it up like we are starving. And I was. I was starving.
In each agonizing detail in the first chapter, it's as though he began his symphony with the crescendo already building. When I use the word "agonizing," I don't mean painful to read. I mean I could feel Wallace's pain as he picked through the minutiae laid out through his words, the utter tedium of a day in the life of this IRS worker. And it was as hilarious as it was tedious, and the more tedious it became, the more hilarious it was. Like a comedian on stage taking a joke further and further into the absurd, this is what Wallace does with his description of the world of an IRS worker.
Then, out of the blue we get these chapters with an unknown character battling the opposite of tedium. Either battling it, or creating his own tedium, depending on the character. I was sucked into these chapters like a starving woman. And the fact that these chapters were these...anomalies, just a cherry bomb dropped into the book, and then suddenly I was back at the IRS, was like finding a splash of color in a black and white film that had me by the throat.
Wallace uses the tedium of footnotes to continue the crescendo. Then we meet David himself. He steps confidently into the book, first person, and we are suddenly in his magnificent mind. We go with him on his journey into the halls of the IRS and the intimacy I felt with him was impeccable.
Soon, the cherry bomb chapters snuck their way into the IRS world Wallace constructed, and you could see how he would put it all together--had he finished the book. It would have been a masterpiece.
I am the last person to look to if you want appreciation for a snooty, self-aggrandizing, avant-garde literary work that deems itself too important to play by the rules and tell a good story. Don't believe me? See my review of Nell Zink's The Wallcreeper.
But Wallace's writing isn't snooty. He wasn't trying to impress the literati. He surpasses the literati with his excruciating humanity. I can't help but mourn the loss of him anew after reading The Pale King. It's as if he himself was the Pale King, the master of language, of words, of the most human writing possible, and yet blood dripped from him as he sat on his throne, and the color drained from his skin with each drop.
He was trying to tell us something--something terribly important. He was trying to tell us that being human, day in and day out, is made up of the most mundane, trivial things one can imagine. And if we can find the courage to face the mundane, day in and day out, we will have surpassed the feats of the heroes and immortals in myth and legend. We would conquer the thing that is the undoing of every mind--boredom. Because in a state of boredom, we are the most susceptible to the greatest enemy of human existence: unconsciousness. Mindlessness. A zombie-like auto-pilot.
I miss you, David. I wonder what other truths you could have taught us, had you only found it within yourself to suffer the insufferable one more day.
