A Short Dicussion on The Pale King

First, an excerpt from The Pale King

“Speaking of which, what do you think of when you masturbate?”

“…”

“…”

“What?”

Neither had said a word for the first half hour.  They were doing the mindless monochrome drive up to Region HQ in Joliet again.  In one of the feet’s Gremlins, seized as part of a jeopardy assessment against an AMC dealership five quarters past.

“Look, I think we can presume you masturbate. Something like 98 percent of all men masturbate.  It’s documented. Most of the other 2 percent are impaired in some way. We can forgo the denials.  I masturbate; you masturbate. It happens. We all do it and we all know we all do it and yet no one ever discusses it. It’s an incredibly boring drive, there’s nothing to do, we’re stuck in this embarrassing car – let’s push the envelope. Let’s discuss it.”

“What envelope.?”

“Just what do you think of? Think about it. It’s a very interior time. It’s one of life’s only occasions of real self-sufficiency. It requires nothing outside you. It’s bringing yourself pleasure with nothing but your own mind’s thoughts. Those thoughts reveal a lot about you: what you dream of when you yourself choose and control what you dream.’

“…”

“…”

“Tits.”

“Tits?’

“You asked me.  I’m telling you.”

“That’s it? Tits?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Just tits? In isolation from anybody? Just abstract tits?”

“All right. Fuck off.”

“You mean just floating there, two tits, in empty space? Or nestled in your hands, or what? Is it always the same tits?”

“This is me learning a lesson. You ask a question like that I go what the hell and I answer it and you run a DIF-3 on the answer.”

“Tits.”

“…”

“….”

“So what do you think about, then, Mr. Envelope Guy?”

That passage from The Pale King, filled with humor and wit and intelligence, is one more example why David Foster Wallace was one of the great writers of the last 20 or so years.  The man was capable of entering our head and writing the kinds of conversations (like the one above) that we think we have or, if we only had more interesting friends, wish we had.  Of course, as it is Wallace, it wasn’t always those kinds of writings that he was interested in writing.  The man had a dictionary in his brain, almost became a philosopher, and spent much of his time teaching the craft of fiction, as opposed to writing it himself, so he wasn’t always interested in writing funny “titty-pincher” (a word Wallace employs in The Pale King) dialogue.  The man was also a brilliant essayist.  And it is those essays, like the one he wrote about the beauty of watching Roger Federer play tennis for the New York Times, or the one he wrote about going on a cruise ship for Esquire, or the one he wrote on attending a adult entertainment expo in Las Vegas, are the things by Wallace I could have kept on reading for as long as he was writing them.  But I don’t think, and this is purely just a hypothesis (one of many on the man), I don’t think Wallace wanted to be thought of as a great essayist.  He wanted to be a great writer of fiction.  And, I think, what we might look back at someday as one of the great books on the process of writing fiction, is what we have here, The Pale King.  I’m not yet sure if it’s a great fiction book in and of itself.  But, as the subtitle of The Pale King itself reads, the novel is unfinished, so who am I to judge?

Fans of Infinite Jest will, I assume, be equally maddened and overjoyed while reading The Pale King.  They will have to wonder whether they have the complete manifestation of what Wallace envisioned. At the same time, they will surely enjoy it as it just feels like a Wallace book and incorporates many of the same themes and structures.   There are characters dotting in and out of the story, there are slips in time, there are changes in point of view.  Though with The Pale King, unlike Infinite Jest, the reader is left to wonder, how much of all this would have been streamlined, again, if Wallace would have been able to finish working on it?  For me, my favorite moments so far (I have not read all of it) are the ones in which Wallace himself interjects. “Author here,” he writes dryly at the beginning of a chapter in the middle of the book.  Then goes on to write, as himself, about his time training be an accountant for the very book the reader is reading.  It reads like one of his great essays.   As well, he writes as himself on what he learned about the IRS tax code and that, to me, is like reading Greek. But, again, that’s the brilliance of Wallace, he was smart enough to understand that kind of minutiae and yet, at same time, could write about such minutiae with sensitivity and charm.  That’s not something that most writers can do. Most writers are lucky, dang lucky, if they can do one or the other.

Like I said, I haven’t read the entire book and perhaps when I am finished it will feel more “whole,” but even it if doesn’t, that’s ok.  It’s still a treasure.

Lastly, in writing this, I looked up the NY Times review of The Pale King and there I found Tom McCarthy’s review. It’s a fine review, gracious to Wallace, yet not effusively gushing just because of the tragedy which surrounds it.  And what I thought was most poignant in the review was a wonderful paragraph at the end.  I would like to post it here as I think it sums up Wallace’s ability to translate, by his life and his work, the difficult path of someone who wants to write for a living.  And also, the beauty of the very book he wrote, in its left behind hard drives, manuscripts, and floppy discs.

“But there’s an older ghost haunting “The Pale King” even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying — or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.’s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America’s greatest writer, the author of “Moby-Dick,” spent his final 19 years as a customs officer — that is, a tax inspector. To research “The Pale King,” Wallace trained in accounting. We’re moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad — and the battle is the right one to engage in.”