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"FacebookPinterest\n\n One of the few detectable lies in David Foster Wallace's books occurs in his essay on the obscure '90s-era American tennis prodigy Michael Joyce, included in Wallace's first nonfiction anthology, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Apart from some pages in his fiction, it's the best thing he wrote about tennis\u2014better even than his justly praised but disproportionately famous piece on Roger Federer1\u2014precisely because Joyce was a journeyman, an unknown, and so offered Wallace's mind a white canvas. Wallace had almost nothing to work with on that assignment:2 ambiguous access to the qualifying rounds of a Canadian tournament, a handful of hours staring through chain link at a subject who was both too nice to be entertaining and not especially articulate. Faced with what for most writers would be a disastrous lack of material, Wallace looses his uncanny observational powers on the tennis complex, drawing partly on his knowledge of the game but mainly on his sheer ability to consider a situation, to revolve it in his mental fingers like a jewel whose integrity he doubts. In the mostly empty stadium he studies the players between matches. \"They all have the unhappy self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and waiting around in hotel lobbies,\" he writes, \"the look of people who have to create an envelope of privacy around them with just their expressions.\" He hears the \"authoritative pang\" of tour-tight racket strings and sees ball boys \"reconfigure complexly.\" He hits the practice courts and watches players warm up, their bodies \"moving with the compact nonchalance I've since come to recognize in pros when they're working out: the suggestion is one of a very powerful engine in low gear.\"\n\n The lie comes at the start of the piece, when Wallace points out a potential irony of what he's getting ready to do, namely write about people we've never heard of, who are culturally marginal, yet are among the best in the world at a chosen pursuit. \"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something,\" Wallace says. \"At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard.\"\n\nThis is not or not purely a tribute footnote but an actual editorially defensible appendage to this piece: I was supposed to write that Federer essay, for Play, the sports magazine published for too few years by The New York Times. Like Wallace, I played tennis in school and had continued to follow the game. It was an easy answer when Play called saying they had access to Federer at Wimbledon. GQ wouldn't let me do it, though. Turns out I'd signed something my agent described as a \"contract\" that forbade me from writing for other mags. Also, in fairness to GQ, I'd been slacking for a couple of months, maybe blew an assignment or two, couldn't really argue. At the end of the last conversation with the guy who would have been my editor, after telling him it was a no-go, I suggested he contact Wallace, which to me was like saying, \"Why don't you call the White House?\" The editor was forced into an awkwardness. \"Well,\" he said, \"actually, we called him first. He couldn't do it.\" Wallace must have had a change of heart, however. Several months later, there was his essay on my kitchen table. Reading it gave me complicated feelings. On one level it was gratifying to see that he'd made a case I had vaguely imagined making, that the greatness of Federer lay in how he evolved his elegant all-court game from inside the unforgiving speed and brutality of the power-baseline game. But Wallace had explained it all with an accuracy and effortlessness that I knew I wouldn't have achieved or seen as possible. In this humbling there was a strange intimacy. I got to feel, for a woozy instant, exactly how Wallace's brain would handle a subject I'd held in my own, in a vacuum, before knowing that he would take it up. Anyway, that's my contribution to the Wallace oeuvre, his last magazine piece. I don't begrudge the reader for feeling the world of letters benefited by the substitution. Just saying you're welcome.Wallace often preferred it that way. Recall that he got himself invited onto a David Lynch film set by assuring Lynch's people that he had no actual desire to interview the director. Early in 2008, GQ asked him to write about Obama's speeches or, more largely, about American political rhetoric. It was still a somewhat gassy idea as presented to him, but Wallace saw the possibilities, so we started making inquiries to the Obama campaign, and even made reservations for him to be in Denver during the convention. Our thought was to get him as close to the head speechwriters (and so as close to Obama) as possible. But Wallace said, very politely, that this wasn't what interested him. He wanted to be with a worker bee on the speechwriting team\u2014to find out how the language was used by, as he put it, \"the ninth guy on the bench.\" It also seemed like maybe a temperament thing, that he would be more comfortable reporting away from the glare.What's strange is that this was written in 1996\u2014by then, Wallace had completed his genre-impacting second novel, Infinite Jest, as well as the stories, a couple already considered classic, in the collection Girl with Curious Hair. It's hard to believe he didn't know that he was indeed among the hundred best at a particular thing, namely imaginative prose, and that there were serious people ready to put him among an even smaller number. Perhaps we should assume that, being human, he knew it sometimes and at other times feared it wasn't true. Either way, the false modesty\u2014asking us to accept the idea that he'd never thought of himself as so good and had proposed the experiment naively\u2014can't help reading as odd. Which may itself be deliberate. Not much happens by accident in Wallace's stuff; his profound obsessive streak precluded it. So could it be there's something multilayered going on with sport as a metaphor for writing\u2014even more layers than we expect? It does seem curious that Wallace chose, of all the players, one named Joyce, whose \"ethnic\" Irishness Wallace goes out of his way to emphasize, thereby alluding to an artist whose own fixation on technical mastery made him a kind of grotesque, dazzling but isolated from healthful, human narrative concerns. Certainly Wallace played textual games on that level.Here's a thing that is hard to imagine: being so inventive a writer that when you die, the language is impoverished. That's what Wallace's suicide did, two and a half years ago. It wasn't just a sad thing, it was a blow.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n It's hard to do the traditional bio-style paragraph about Wallace for readers who, in this oversaturated mediascape, don't know who he was or why he mattered, because you keep flashing on his story \"Death Is Not the End,\" in which he parodies the practice of writing the traditional bio-style paragraph about writers, listing all their honors and whatnot, his list becoming inexplicably ridiculous as he keeps naming the prizes, and you get that he's digging into the frequent self-congratulating silliness of the American literary world, \"a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, [...] a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters...a poet two separate American generations have hailed as the voice of their generation.\" Wallace himself had many of the awards on the list, including \"a 'Genius Grant' from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation.\" Three novels, three story collections, two books of essays, the Roy E. Disney Professorship of Creative Writing at Pomona College...\n\nWhen they say that he was a generational writer, that he \"spoke for a generation,\" there's a sense in which it's almost scientifically true. Everything we know about the way literature gets made suggests there's some connection between the individual talent and the society that produces it, the social organism. Cultures extrude geniuses the way a beehive will make a new queen when its old one dies, and it's possible now to see Wallace as one of those. I remember well enough to know it's not a trick of hindsight, hearing about and reading Infinite Jest for the first time, as a 20-year-old, and the immediate sense of: This is it. One of us is going to try it. The \"it\" being all of it, to capture the sensation of being alive in a fractured superpower at the end of the twentieth century. Someone had come along with an intellect potentially strong enough to mirror the spectacle and a moral seriousness deep enough to want to in the first place. About none of his contemporaries\u2014even those who in terms of ability could compete with him\u2014can one say that they risked as great a failure as Wallace did.\n\n People who've never read a word he wrote know his style, the so-called quirks, a bag of typographical tricks ripped from the eighteenth-century comic novel and recontextualized: the footnotes and skeptical parentheticals, clauses that compulsively double back, feeling for weaknesses in themselves. It's true these match the idiosyncrasies of his manner of speech and thought. (We know this especially well now that all those YouTube videos of him at readings and in interviews have become familiar\u2014oddly so: For someone who clearly squirmed under the eye of scrutiny like a stuck bug, Wallace submitted and subjected himself to so much of it. He had more author photos than any of his peers. He was nothing if not a torn person.)\n\n The point is that his style did more than reflect his habit of mind; it was an expression of an unusually coherent sensibility. Wallace was a relentless reviser and could have streamlined all of those syntactically baroque paragraphs. He didn't think the world worked that way. The truth, or rather truth-seeking, didn't sound like that. It was self-critical\u2014self-interrogating, even\u2014on the catch for its own tricks of self-evasion. It's worth noting, in that regard, that The New Yorker, which published some of his best fiction, never did any of his nonfiction. No shame to Wallace or The New Yorker, it's simply a technically interesting fact: He couldn't have changed his voice to suit the magazine's famous house style. The \"plain style\" is about erasing yourself as a writer and laying claim to a kind of invisible narrative authority, the idea being that the writer's mind and personality are manifest in every line, without the vulgarity of having to tell the reader it's happening. But Wallace's relentlessly first-person strategies didn't proceed from narcissism, far from it\u2014they were signs of philosophical stubbornness. (His father, a professional philosopher, studied with Wittgenstein's last assistant; Wallace himself as an undergraduate made an actual intervening contribution\u2014recently published as Fate, Time, and Language\u2014to the debate over free will.) He looked at the plain style and saw that the impetus of it, in the end, is to sell the reader something. Not in a crass sense, but in a rhetorical sense. The well-tempered magazine feature, for all its pleasures, is a kind of fascist wedge that seeks to make you forget its problems, half-truths, and arbitrary decisions, and swallow its nonexistent imprimatur. Wallace could never empt himself or his reporting from the range of things that would be subject to scrutiny.\n\n The one time I met him, at a reception before a reading, I spoke to him only to mumble stock phrases about \"admire your work,\" etc. But the visual impression has remained strong, because in that cocktail-party atmosphere (Tom Wolfe was ten feet away, in his white suit), Wallace was possibly the most physically uncomfortable-looking person I've ever seen. If you have, at any point in your life, been trapped in a room in a mountain house with a forest animal, a raccoon or a bobcat, that's how Wallace seemed, frozen like that. He had a smile on his face like he was waiting for someone to punch him. Yet was polite and shoulder-shruggy when he spoke to you. Everyone was all dressed up except Wallace, who had on a kind of Russian-peasant's shirt and was in a full-on \"I have long hair like a lady but also a beard\" phase. It gave him a homeless-person vibe, like he'd seen the food table and decided to join the party. Yet when he got up onstage in the end, alongside George Plimpton and Seymour Hersh among others, he not only held his own but held the theater spellbound and more than once had to stop and let laughter pass, enunciating those roundly nasal vowels.\n\n His voice was regional in more than one sense\u2014the fastidiousness about usage, for instance. Only midwesterners will waste time over the grammar of small talk with you; nowhere else, when you ask, \"Can I get an iced tea?,\" does anyone ever say, \"I don't know...can you?\" And Wallace did think of himself as in some ways a regional writer\u2014else he'd never have let the ber-author photographer Marion Ettlinger take the well-known trench-coat-lion shot of him smiling wryly beside a waving cornfield. He knew that he came, as he said in the essay he read that night, from a landscape \"whose emptiness is both physical and spiritual.\" The very \"maximalism\" of his style, which his detractors claimed to find self-indulgent, suggests an environment with space to fill. In one of his earliest essays\u2014about playing junior tennis in tornado alley\u2014he mythologizes his relationship with the plains:\n\nI liked the sharp intercourse of straight lines more than the other kids I grew up with. I think this is because they were natives, whereas I was an infantile transplant from Ithaca, where my dad had Ph.D.'d. So I'd known, even horizontally and semiconsciously as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I'm pretty sure I kept the amorphous mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the [...] children I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw nothing stark or new-worldish in the township's planar layout[....]\n\n New-worldish: It was like Wallace to sound informal when he was abandoning rigor and making claims that weren't quite defensible\u2014a way to get you on his side.\n\nHe's maybe the only notoriously \"difficult\" writer who almost never wrote a page that wasn't enjoyable, or at least diverting, to read. Yet it was the theme of loneliness, a particular kind of postmodern, information-saturated loneliness, that, more than anything, drew crowds to his readings who looked in size and excitement level more like what you'd see at an in-store for a new band. Many of Wallace's readers (this is apparent now that every single one of them has written an appreciation of him somewhere on the Internet) believed that he was speaking to them in his work\u2014that he was one of the few people alive who could help them navigate a new spiritual wilderness, in which every possible source of consolation had been nullified. And Wallace was speaking to them; his native conscientiousness prevented him from shirking the role of sage altogether. It's in this way that we can understand his frequent and uncharacteristically Pollyanna statements about the supposed power of fiction against solipsism, i.e., that only in literature do we know for sure we're having \"a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness.\"\n\n Wallace knew that this was a bromide. (There can be no better proof than how it was picked up as a thing to say about him, in pieces after his death.) Fiction can only substitute the chaos of text for the chaos of talk. It replaces the mirrors in the hall with other mirrors. He didn't want to be a total bummer, though; plus, it gave him something to say in interviews. In his books, so fluffy an idea would never survive the withering storm of panoptical analysis. It's right there in \"Good Old Neon,\" a story about a golden boy who kills himself, as remembered by his classmate David Wallace, who is \"fully aware that the clich\u00E9 that you can't ever truly know what's going on inside somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere[....]\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n One feels that Wallace himself couldn't pull up from some kind of inbent spiral. We know now\u2014though he tended to keep it private in life\u2014that he had suffered from severe clinical depression and anxiety disorders from his teenage years and had been fighting valiantly against his own brain chemistry the whole time. When he died, we lost a writer who kept the landscape of American literature in a state of energized flux, because he was so clearly playing for keeps and, technically speaking, had proved himself capable of almost anything. The last story collection he published during his life, Oblivion, is correctly considered his blackest and least amusing book, but it contained stories that showed a new mastery and concision, including the one-paragraph masterpiece, \"Incarnations of Burned Children.\" The notion that Wallace didn't have future masterpieces in him seemed crazy, like anticipating a change in the laws of nature.\n\n It helps to know all of that, or to know at any rate that a population of people feels this way, if you want to understand the hubbub around The Pale King, the novel Wallace left unfinished, now being published by Little, Brown. Rumors of posthumous work started almost immediately after his death, and it's safe to say that loyal readers have been clinging to the promise of this new book over the last couple of years, almost as a means of fending off the reality and violence of what happened. Some of the collective grief for the man got sublimated into excitement for the book. I myself was surprised, on finishing the review copy, to have the wind sucked out of me by the thought\u2014long delayed\u2014that there would be no more Wallace books. Not that we won't be treated to a whole half-shelf of volumes: his letters, his uncollected stuff, a best of, a collected works. That's only proper.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n The Pale King is different. He left us this book\u2014the people closest to him agree that he wanted us to see it. This is not, in other words, a classic case of Posthumous Great Novel, where scholars have gone into an estate and unearthed a manuscript the author would probably never want read. Wallace seems to have laid this book before us in an all but do-with-it-what-you-will sort of way. Supposedly one of his last acts on earth was to arrange the most-ready pages and leave them in a place where his wife, the artist Karen Green, could find them. His notebooks led to the identification of partial chapters, which his longtime editor Michael Pietsch has assembled into something like a draft of the novel as it might have looked in Wallace's head\u2014more polished than that, in places, less so in others. Think of a big mural that was half done.\n\n The Pale King (the title of which may or may not refer to a nineteenth-century folk expression, \"the pale king of terrors,\" meaning the melancholy fear of death) is about a group of people, all of whom work at a particular IRS processing station in Illinois. Some of the characters get involved with one another in various, not obviously consequential ways. Two of them are named David Wallace. That's the whole plot. It never progresses.3 It never really seems to begin.\n\n You'd be forgiven for suspecting that a book about random people who work for the government sounds insufferably tedious. The reason it's not has to do with the word about\u2014it's the wrong word, the wrong preposition. Wallace doesn't write about his characters; he hadn't in a long time. He writes into them. That thing he could do on a tennis court or a cruise ship, or at a porn convention, that made him both an inspiration and a maddening, envy-making presence for the scores like me who learned to do \"magazine writing\" in his shadow (he was one of those writers who, even when you weren't sounding like him, made you think about how you weren't sounding like him)\u2014Wallace liked to do that, in his fiction, with his characters' interior lives.\n\n Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It's early morning, and you're the first customer. You stop under the bright fluorescents and let the doors glide closed behind you, look at the employees in their corporate-blue shirts, mouths open, shuffling around sleepily. You take them in as a unified image, with an impenetrable surface of vague boredom and dissatisfaction that you're content to be on the outside of, and you set to your task, to your copying or whatever. That's precisely the moment when Wallace hits pause, that first little turn into inattention, into self-absorption. He reverses back through it, presses play again. Now it's different. You're in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you, is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be. They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a narrative\u2014but what? Wallace needed very badly to know. And he sensed that the modern world was bombarding us with scenarios, like the inside of the copy shop, where it was easy to forget the question altogether. We \"feel lonely in a crowd,\" he writes in one of his stories, but we \"stop not to dwell on what's brought the crowd into being,\" with the result that \"we are, always, faces in a crowd.\"\n\n That's what I love in Wallace, noticed details like that, microdescriptions of feeling states that seem suggestive of whole branching social super-systems, sentences that make me feel like, Anyone who doesn't get that is living in a different world. He was the closest thing we had to a recording angel. There are paragraphs in Infinite Jest where he's able to trap things, fleeting qualities of our \"moment,\" things that you weren't sure others felt but suspected they might. To read these is like watching X-rays of the collective unconscious develop:\n\nActually, something does change. Things get spooky, there are doublings. Ghosts appear. One of the characters, it turns out, is clairvoyant. A note at the end of the book suggests that a team of X-Agents, as it were, all of whom possess different unusual qualities, is being assembled by a small group of supervisors. The whole story is apparently taking place in a world where Bush, and not Reagan, got elected in 1980 (Reagan was his vice president). But these intrusions of mysticism don't otherwise trouble the fabric of the novel's reality.\n\nArm out like a hack's arm, Gately blasts through B.U. country. As in backpack and personal-stereo and designer-fatigues country. Soft-faced boys with backpacks and high hard hair and seamless foreheads. Totally lineless untroubled foreheads like cream cheese or ironed sheets[....] Gately's had lines in his big forehead since he was about twelve[....] Girls who look like they've eaten nothing but dairy products their whole lives. Girls who do step-aerobics. Girls with good combed long clean hair. Nonaddicted girls. The weird &amp;gt; hopelessness at the heart of lust.\n\n The Pale King has much in common with Infinite Jest, which also took a set group of people, unified in a circumstantial way\u2014in that earlier case, the residents of an addiction halfway house, or the student body of a tennis academy\u2014then reeled off into their lives, creating in the end a kind of spoked wheel of interconnected stories. But The Pale King is not really reminiscent of Infinite Jest, doesn't put you in mind of it, that is. To read it is in part to feel how much Wallace had changed as a writer, compressed and deepened himself.\n\nThere are lots of characters, including several of what can be called main characters. Claude Sylvanshine is one. He's a \"fact psychic.\" He knows things about people, but his knowledge comes in tiny bursts of disconnected information, which he can't turn off. (Wallace hands parts of himself to different characters, so that at times the edges blur.) There's Lane Dean Jr., the new guy, onetime high school super-Christian. Also Meredith Rand, office hottie\u2014Wallace's beat-by-beat breakdown of what happens to a table full of ordinary men and women when an extremely physically attractive person sits down (in this case, at the bar where the IRS workers hang out) is both painful and darkly humorous, an example of what I was trying to say about his observational power, and of how discouraging it must have often been to find yourself stuck in Wallace's head, not in the illness of it, but in the clarity of it:\n\nSuffice it that Meredith Rand makes the [...] males self-conscious. They thus tend to become either nervous and uncomfortably quiet, as though they were involved in a game whose stakes have suddenly become terribly high, or else they become more voluble and conversationally dominant and begin to tell a great many jokes, and in general appear deliberately unself-conscious, whereas before Meredith Rand had arrived and pulled up a chair and joined the group there was no real sense of deliberateness or even self-consciousness among them. Female examiners, in turn, react to these changes in a variety of ways, some receding and becoming visually smaller (like Enid Welch and Rachel Robbie Towne), others regarding Meredith Rand's effect on men with a sort of dark amusement, still others becoming narrow-eyed and prone to hostile sighs or even pointed departures. [...] Some of the male examiners are, by the second round of pitchers, performing for Meredith Rand, even if the performance's core consists of making a complex show of the fact that they are not performing for Meredith Rand or even especially aware that she's at the table. Bob McKenzie, in particular, becomes almost manic, addressing nearly every comment or quip to the person on either the right or left side of Meredith Rand[....]\n\n Imagine flat being able to dissect us like that, with that grain of detail\u2014as primates, if you like\u2014and worse, being unable to stop. A person would have to maintain tremendous stores of sympathy to keep the world from turning into a constant onslaught of Swiftian grotesquerie. Wallace didn't seek to escape it, either\u2014he cultivated it, as his art demanded. It ought to remind us of the psychic risk involved in writing at the level he sought. Like all good citizens, I'm with those who wish to resist romanticizing his suicide, but there remains a sense in which artists do expose themselves to the torrents of their time, in a way that can't help but do damage, and there's nothing wrong with calling it noble, if they've done it in the service of something beautiful. Wallace paid a price for traveling so deep into himself, for keeping his eye unaverted as long as it takes to write passages like the one just quoted, for finding other people interesting enough to pay attention to them long enough to write scenes like that. It's the reason most of us can't write great or even good fiction. You have to let a lot of other consciousnesses into your own. That's bad for equilibrium.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Wallace's choice of the IRS as a setting makes sense when you consider that he's doing something theological in this novel, and the \"service,\" as the employees call it, provides him with convenient Jesuitical overtones. He was using the IRS the way Borges used the library and Kafka used the law-courts building: as an analogy for the world. He implies a connection between a subterranean shift in IRS policy that turned the agency from one entrusted with collecting our tas (i.e., enforcing the law) to one charged with maximizing revenue, or as Wallace says in one of the marginal notes he left behind with the manuscript, \"Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one.\" Through various faint hints (the mentioning of obscure lawsuits), Wallace connects the notion of the IRS becoming a corporate agency with the older idea, introduced into American life in the late nineteenth century, that in the eyes of the law, a corporation was the same as an individual, with the same rights. Wallace hadn't worked it all out, but suffice it to say, a finished Pale King might have operated by a symbolic logic in which, if IRS = corporation, and corporation = individual, then IRS = individual. The agency would be a metaphor for America's political soul.\n\n The novel repeats a certain move, zooming into the childhood or youth of a character, whose adult self we encounter elsewhere in the book, in the orbit of the IRS office. It's in juxtaposition with these glimpses of their earlier selves that the characters' inward complexity builds. Wallace is working to prove to us that everyone's complicated, that when people seem simple and dull, it's we who aren't paying attention enough, it's our stubborn inborn tendency to see other people as major or minor characters in our story.\n\n It's easy to make the book sound heavy, but it's often very funny, and not politely funny, either. We meet the excruciatingly upbeat Leonard Stecyk, his \"smile so wide it almost looked like it hurt,\" a version of whom each of us knows or to some extent is. As a child he was such a do-gooder, everyone who met him instantly loathed him. \"A teacher in whose homeroom the boy suggests a charted reorganization of the coat hooks and boot bos lining one wall [...] ends up brandishing blunt scissors and threatening to kill both the boy and then herself.\" (I won't ruin a good scene by telling you what a high school shop teacher thinks of him.)\n\n Unhappily, it's with this aspect of the book\u2014the back-and-forth between recent past (at the IRS center) and deeper past (the characters' formative years)\u2014that we come to know what the publisher means about \"unfinished.\" The patterning isn't right. It's hardly even present. Wallace was struggling to compose the themes of these lives in a symphonic way, but he didn't get there or, it has to be said, anywhere near.\n\n And yet even in its broken state, The Pale King contains what's sure to be some of the finest fiction of the year. It's intimidating to have to describe the excellence of some of these set pieces, among them the chapter (excerpted in The New Yorker) in which Lane Dean Jr. tries to figure out whether or not to say he loves his junior-college girlfriend, Sheri, who's pregnant with their child. If he says he loves her, she'll keep it, and they'll spend their lives together (as happens). Neither of them has the slightest idea what love is or how to read each other's use of the word: They're relying on a bad translation. Yet what they say in the moment will determine their lives. Wallace treats teen romance with such seriousness and fidelity to emotional consciousness that the scene takes on a sort of Bovary-esque grandeur. Throughout are strewn the little descriptive nails that he drove home at will\u2014that, for instance, the stick figures on the airplane's laminated safety-instruction cards are \"crossing their arms funereally,\" or that from the plane's window, traffic seems to crawl \"with a futile pointless pathos you could never sense on the ground.\" These aren't showy passages. Just unusually precise descriptions of things we all do and see. We enter and recognize the modern-day office environment: \"the desk practically an abstraction. The whisper of sourceless ventilation.\" Friends left behind in a small town are imagined \"selling each other insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the formality of their first cardiac.\" Michael Pietsch, the book's editor, pointed me toward a late, surreal chapter in which Lane Dean Jr., an adult now, working for the IRS, has a conversation with one of the dead agents' ghosts who hang around the office. Pietsch called it the novel's \"fullest flowering,\" and \"as densely woven and tight-wound as anything he has written.\" It's a miniature tour de force, not even twenty pages, done all in dialogue, in places reminiscent of the \"Nighttown\" chapter in Ulysses. When I asked Pietsch how he imagined a finished Pale King, he said, \"A book in which even more chapters are as full and tight as this,\" which describes a book devoutly to be missed.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n The most remarkable pages in The Pale King\u2014they steal the novel, in an interesting way\u2014have to do with the girlhood of Toni Ware, a character who barely impinges on the IRS parts of the novel. She's in the periphery; Wallace hadn't got to her yet. But the chapters dealing with her memories of growing up in a gothic trailer park, with a mentally ill mother who brought home abusive boyfriends on a serial basis, are staggering runs of prose. What's more, they don't sound like anything else Wallace wrote. For lack of a better term, they're unselfaware. He's letting himself overwrite in a way that great writers will do, when the story doesn't have time for all of your inner quibbles. If it's true, as has been said, that Wallace was striving with The Pale King to find some other level, to go beyond Infinite Jest, he finds it here if anywhere.\n\nThey drove then once more at night. Below a moon that rose round before them. What was termed the truck's backseat was a narrow shelf on which the girl could sleep if she arranged her legs in the gap behind the real seats whose headrests possessed the dull shine of unwashed hair. The clutter and yeast smell bespoke a truck that was or had been lived in; the truck and its man smelled the same. The girl in cotton bodice and her jeans gone fugitive at the knees. The mother's conception of men was that she used them as a sorceress will dumb animals, as sign and object of her unnatural powers. Her spoken word aloud for these at which the girl gave no reproof, &amp;gt; familiar. Swart and sideburned men who sucked wooden matches and crushed cans with their hands. Whose hats' brims had sweatlines like the rings of trees. Whose eyes crawled over you in the rearview. Men inconceivable as ever themselves being children or looking up naked at someone they trust, with a toy. To whom the mother talked like babies and let them treat her like a headless doll, &amp;gt; manhandle.\n\n At times, even in the midst of their beauty and terror, there's a whiff of parody or pastiche to the Toni Ware sections. Wallace seems to be making fun of bad Cormac McCarthy, the incorrigible McCarthy who, when he wants to write \"toadstools,\" writes \"mushrooms with serrate and membraneous soffits where-under toads are reckoned to siesta.\" Wallace has Toni Ware remember boys who \"wore wide rimpled hats and cravats of thong and some displayed turquoise about their person, and of these one helped her empty the trailer's sanitary tank and then pressed her to fellate him in recompense.\" This strange uncertainty of tone is heightened when Toni's harrowing past recurs later in the book, but in another character's voice, one that starts out, \"Toni's mom was a bit nuts...Blah Blah,\" as if anyone's story were just a matter of technique. And yet this later, at first flippant-sounding chapter also slips back into the same strong third-person style, in fact it leads to the most memorable page in the book, the scene of the death of Toni Ware's mother. It's as if this new voice were something Wallace couldn't resist. Perhaps we can conclude, then, that he was groping for something more satisfyingly conventional, more adult, in his work, and that these chapters are tantalizing flashes of a new, tragically stillborn Wallace...\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Hold on\u2014we're talking about David Foster Wallace. Things could never be that straightforward, much less that sappy. Sure enough, immediately following the last sentence of the Toni Ware chapter, as if to punish us for having loved it better than the rest of the book, Wallace does something that can only be described as delivering a formal chest slap. Having just handed us a serving of the old-fashioned virtues, pages and pages of writing writing, he goes into the most arch-meta, most heavily footnoted, winky-winky, self-conscious-about-its-winky-winkyness, too-clever-by-half, drunk-on-postmodern-hijinks chapter he's ever written. It's perverse. It's as if Wallace can hear us, in his head, writing to him the same letter he wrote to Eggers about A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, that Eggers put on the back cover as a blurb, which said, in part, \"I admired many of the headier, more po-mo comic bits,\" but \"the places where you cut loose and did arias of grief [...] were the book's best art.\" He can hear us saying something like that, after having just had our minds blown by Toni Ware, and he's saying back to us, pretty emphatically, Sorry, but this textual business is part of what it's about. Without this, I'm playing chamber music.\n\n It will be for future critics to debate the aesthetic merits of that decision. Wallace was by no means at peace with it. Often while reading The Pale King I was pulled up by thoughts of the essay he wrote about Dostoevsky:\n\n[This new] bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit. Part of the explanation for our own lit's thematic poverty obviously includes our century and situation.\n\n He might as well be describing The Pale King. It's as if he had inside his head a fully formed hostile critic who despised his own work. All writers have these voices, but Wallace's were practically additional personalities. In the trick chapter we're told that the novel we think we've been reading is actually a \"first-person memoir,\" the true story of a man named David Foster Wallace. And there's another character named David F. Wallace in the book. As well as a character named David Cusk, who shares things, biographically, with the real David Foster Wallace.\n\n It isn't gamesmanship, exactly. Nor is it even a question of what Wallace intended, since we don't know what he intended. Michael Pietsch has done yeoman's work as an editor here\u2014as readers, we're in his debt\u2014but there wasn't enough to edit. It would be dishonest to say otherwise. The story never really attains what Poe called \"unity of impression\" in the way that Infinite Jest, even with all its poly-skeinedness, did, or did at times. Also, there's something about the posthumous thing. It robs you of a certain pleasure that you take in reading, of being in dialogue with the author's decisions, judging them and at the same time having the excitement of witnessing them, which is part of the drama of a book. Here you don't know what they were. Every word you read and don't like, you think, \"Well, he would have changed that.\" Whereas everything that does work, that's the real Wallace. Yet even major choices, such as what to use for the novel's ending, were made, out of necessity, not by Wallace but by Pietsch. \"There was no outline or chapter sequence,\" he told me, \"and no indication of what should be the opening or closing chapter.\" At that point, the whole question of whether we can call this \"a Wallace novel\" becomes unsolvable.\n\nIf we want another ending, we could say this: The Pale King, as we have it, is true to Wallace in a very important respect. He himself was unfinished, unresolved. There's a great Stevie Smith poem called \"Was He Married?\" It's her argument that normal human beings are more heroic than gods. Their difficulties are much greater, she says, \"because they are so mid.\" Wallace was so mid. He was ambivalent and conflicted, about, among other things, the difference between the kinds of writing in this novel. He wasn't sure which he preferred, or how they might go together. And what if the one he wound up valuing most wasn't the one he was best at, by nature?\n\n To give up these contradictions would've been to give up his source of power. They saved him from self-righteousness. He was a writer who in fighting to rise above the noise of his time remained hopelessly of it, susceptible to its voices even while trying to master them. His reality, as he once wrote, had been \"MTV'd.\" This is why, like no one else, he seems to speak from inside the tornado. (A symbol that haunted his work, and that reappears in The Pale King.) It's this quality, of being inwardly divided, that risks getting flattened and written out of Wallace's story by his postmortem idolization, which would make of him a dispenser of wisdom. We should guard against that. We'll lose the most essential Wallace, the one that is forever wincing, reconsidering, wishing he hadn't said whatever he just said. Those were moments when his voice was most authentically of our time, and they are the reason people will one day be able to read him and feel what it was like to be alive now.\n\n Wallace's work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about American novelists, \"I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.\" Wallace failed beautifully. There is no mystery whatsoever about why he found this novel so hard to finish. The glimpse we get of what he wanted it to be\u2014a vast model of something bland and crushing, inside of which a constellation of individual souls would shine in their luminosity, and the connections holding all of us together in this world would light up, too, like filaments\u2014this was to be a novel on the highest order of accomplishment, and we see that the writer at his strongest would have been strong enough. He wasn't always that strong."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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