wholelottaotto 's review for:

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

4.0

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DFW's last, unfinished, novel is still pretty impressive. The "plot" (such as it is) involves a handful of employees at an IRS regional processing center in Middle-of-Nowhere, Illinois, their (mostly sad) back stories and their (somewhat) special abilities. For a book obsessed with the idea of boredom -- what it is, how we deal with it, what it does to your psyche, etc. -- it is incredibly engaging, especially in the long first-person narratives where the employees relate their stories. There are also long passages made up mostly of tax code references and government-speak that (I think) are meant to illustrate the very boredom that is such an important part of the book's subject matter. I'm glad that Wallace's family and his editor were able to compile this incomplete version of the novel, but it makes me incredibly sad that he never lived to finish it, as I think it would have been on par with Infinite Jest.