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nolanh 's review for:
The Pale King
by David Foster Wallace
Mostly I find discussions of what is and is not a novel to be a bit bland and unimportant, but for the purposes of a review I think it is probably important to stress that The Pale King is not what I would call a novel. It is a posthumously compiled Wallacian stream-of-conscious not of a person but of a place and idea, the place being an IRS processing center and the idea being how waves of humanity crash against pure, unadulterated tedium. Stream-of-consciousness is not quite accurate though, implying a type of fluidity that is a bit counter to DFW's whole thing. Woolf writes a stream of ideas flowing into each-other and mixing together in whorls, DFW plays with a bunch of legos and sharp corners. A Koch snowflake is made by recursively altering the line-segments comprising a triangle so that each has a triangle coming out of it, and each of the lines in that triangle has a triangle coming out of it, and so on. The Pale King likewise has a plot within each plot that kind of makes it look like it follows the curve of a story but is not in itself a story.
Anyways, the editor did a stupendous job here. To my mind, persnickety and patient and perhaps a bit inoculated against the excesses of DFW by reading and enjoying his other works, I found (re)reading The Pale King to be a lovely experience.
Anyways, the editor did a stupendous job here. To my mind, persnickety and patient and perhaps a bit inoculated against the excesses of DFW by reading and enjoying his other works, I found (re)reading The Pale King to be a lovely experience.