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brad_1 's review for:
The Pale King
by David Foster Wallace
I really don't know how to rate this book, since it, by no means, is close to a finished piece of work. Wallace's notes, which are included as an appendix, show that he hadn't even started working on the major narrative of the story. What you have, instead, is a series of fragments; it's impossible to know which ones would have remained, and which would have been edited out. And how are you supposed to rate fragments? Parts of it are four or five stars, but those parts never will amount to anything. It's quite the conundrum.
DFW was a hell of a writer. I've never ventured into The Infinite Jest, but this makes me think that maybe I should. The story--insomuch as there is a story--revolves around a bunch of IRS agents at a specific IRS branch. All of them have quirks, of some sort--like the guy who is given to sweat "attacks," during which he so thoroughly drenches himself that he makes all of his clothes damp--and some of them even have powers, like Shane Drinion, who levitates when he is lost in concentration. We're introduced to most characters through vignettes of varying length, and it is these vignettes which really shine in the novel. It's actually when the novel sustains a narrative for an extended period of time that it slows to a grinding halt, and becomes a real chore to sit through.
Wallace had a gift for language. Here's an example from chapter 35, where the narrator describes his Audit Gruop's Group Manager's child:
"The infant's face, as I experienced it, was mostly eyes and lower lip, its nose a mere pinch, its forehead milky and domed, its whorl of red hair wispy, no eyebrows or lashes or even eyelids that I could see. I never once saw it blink. Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all."
And yet, we'll never return again to this child; he, like all the other brilliant characters in the book, appears all-too-briefly, never to be seen again.
DFW was a hell of a writer. I've never ventured into The Infinite Jest, but this makes me think that maybe I should. The story--insomuch as there is a story--revolves around a bunch of IRS agents at a specific IRS branch. All of them have quirks, of some sort--like the guy who is given to sweat "attacks," during which he so thoroughly drenches himself that he makes all of his clothes damp--and some of them even have powers, like Shane Drinion, who levitates when he is lost in concentration. We're introduced to most characters through vignettes of varying length, and it is these vignettes which really shine in the novel. It's actually when the novel sustains a narrative for an extended period of time that it slows to a grinding halt, and becomes a real chore to sit through.
Wallace had a gift for language. Here's an example from chapter 35, where the narrator describes his Audit Gruop's Group Manager's child:
"The infant's face, as I experienced it, was mostly eyes and lower lip, its nose a mere pinch, its forehead milky and domed, its whorl of red hair wispy, no eyebrows or lashes or even eyelids that I could see. I never once saw it blink. Its features seemed suggestions only. It had roughly as much face as a whale does. I did not like it at all."
And yet, we'll never return again to this child; he, like all the other brilliant characters in the book, appears all-too-briefly, never to be seen again.